Distributed Authoring Aiding Content Management_Part 1

Organizations and federal governments are grappling with loss of talent and institutional knowledge due to workforce retirement and aging which are inevitable changes.

In mature organizations, more and more experiential and tacit forms of knowledge are held by the very resources that are transient; thus making the capture and retention of that knowledge - critical to the continued success of the firm - difficult if not impossible. Holding this knowledge in traditional forms of content repository was possible if user unfriendly till now, but with the exponential rise in information and siloed ideas, it is increasingly difficult, out-of-place and impossible to keep up.

Add to this the emerging workforce – the Millenials, growing in a wired world and conversant with cutting edge collaborative technologies; find it increasingly frustrating to deal with well intentioned but archaic ways and means of knowledge exchange and transfer.

One of the ways to address this is to refashion the way we look and offer solutions for enterprise knowledge management and learning. As such I propose an Enterprise Distributed Authoring (EDA) as an aid to established knowledge management efforts in firms to enhance authoring, repository, management, retention and ultimately exchange of knowledge in the enterprise.

The success of Wikipedia and its success in evolving from an unreliable source to an academia accepted reference storehouse is a case in point. This readable and writable platform provides the ability to create, change and move documents on a remote server by/to distributed authors and its users.

Practically, technological barriers to the creation of such a platform are very low, but change management issues have to be addressed. Clear and tangible goals as success metrics at the start have to be set. Business-focused metrics, implementation metrics - whether the information is used in practice, how current the information is - and also cultural metrics should be analyzed. The change from static categorization to dynamic categorization is also a significant plus point that can be further explored.

The Ripples in the Pond

All predictions are pointing towards integration, to a point where the line between disparate services and applications might blur so much that integrated offerings employing multiple applications & tools will become seamless.

This is already the case with personalized pages like iGoogle and NetVibes, but new technologies have added a whole new dimension to this concept. Mashup sites like Yahoo Pipes, and radical new versions of search sites like Cuil, Google Base are all stretching the boundaries of the Web.

With ever smarter devices on one side and ever expanding and intricate networks on the other....the stage is being set for a new web, where the twin hurdles of geography and time will somehow be eliminated. If it does, maybe then it'll be time for another version change. Talk is rife of web 3.0, shouldering the great expectations of Symantic web and Linked data. But until this functionality has a viable form and until it delivers...Web 2.0 it is.

The Rock in the Pond

Was the Web a different place before Google? It might just be true. You had search engines and content but somehow you could never get what you were looking for because you couldn't exactly search, or search exactly! Google put an end to that, allowing users to talk to the net, for what they wanted, without the pretense of being all things to everyone.

It was the first and still is the best marriage of form to content, and interestingly, when Google first came online, the interface was a big draw and design enthusiasts as well as professionals commented on its Apple like austerity. The fact was, the makers of Google did not know HTML, and just wanted a quick interface (3).

Nevertheless from that hermetic visage, what has spawned, is a whole new way of experiencing the web. Since it became the de facto Yellow Pages for the web, everyone started setting shop and waited to be found. If Microsoft and IE represented the flag bearer of the Web 1.0 world - Standardized, Static, Desktop bound, Google is the masthead for Web 2.0. And more than that, its presence and story have been inspirational to individuals with nothing to show but ideas.

The effect of all this, has been a phenomenal lowering of the entry barriers to putting your 'stuff' online, and virtually, new technologies being born a minute. The impact has been so ruthless in some areas where middlemen operated that there has been literally a wipeout - ask the Air travel ticketing agents, and the Real estate agents! Additionally, participating in this online world was greatly facilitated by other entrants in the scheme of things. Applications that made the web that let you make the "stuff". Sure, Google provided a mechanism to search, but for the new interactive web, what was needed was a relevant form for the tremendous potential. The Wild Wild Web needed Rails. Enter Ruby on Rails.

It is impossible not to notice Ruby on Rails. It has had a huge effect both in and outside the Ruby community... Rails has become a standard to which even well-established tools are comparing themselves to. rubyonrails.org/ -

“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.”
-Tim O'Reilly, Founder of O'Reilly Media

Ruby's success has been phenomenal along with some scaling problems, but even then its single most persistent achievement has been its adoption and use by some of the best web 2.0 apps online. There is no doubt there will be better ones to follow, but each successor will only add to the demystification of web programming - and that's a big achievement!

The Big Pond

Picture this - the biggest collective memory of ideas, actions, thoughts and feelings. Web 2.0 is soon becoming the best realization of a collective memory of human history and endeavor. Of course, that's overstating it a bit, but let the data speak - a Terabyte used to be big until recently - well, YouTube contains 530 Terabytes of videos as of end 2008. Hold the press! - We have the Peta Byte? That’s the amount of data that is processed by Google servers every 72 minutes! The English Wikipedia is 25 times bigger than the next largest English-language encyclopedia. As the July edition of Wired termed it - “The quest for knowledge used to begin with Grand Theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome, to the Petabyte Age!"

In this age of information overload; the basic flow of information - top-down since time immemorial with gatekeepers managing the flow of information - is changing, and fast! In whichever field you look at - science, art, literature, commerce, and entertainment, the browser has changed the dynamics. Imagine a million minds with a billion ideas able to express, connect, collaborate and then create.

In the book "The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age-John Horgan ", spoke to top living scientists who surmised about their dilemma of grappling with the reality of a slow down in discovery and inventions. So when the fundamental source of empirically derived knowledge looks like drying up, where do you go?

Moore, Metcalfe and Kurzweil

By conventional wisdom, the whole is almost always greater than the sum of its parts. For the Web, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, manifold. Take the main components that make it work - the users, the computational elements at their disposal, and the web.

Gordon Moore famously predicted 40 years back that the number of inexpensive computer transistors on a chip will double every two years. And it has been true ever since. The power held in the palm of one's hand today - in PDAs, Cellphones or Laptops - is so much more than what resided in top secret research facilities, filling a whole room, just a decade ago. And as Moore's law predicts, the pace of related innovations follows through. Adoption, inclusion and to an extent immersion do not remain an issue any more - everyone’s logged in!

Robert M. Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet, and founder of 3Com said

"The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²)". Pointing out the similarity between a human neural network and the Web he further said "Just like a synapse between two neurons; the web spreads ideas from one person to another, connecting one brain to the second".

Over the course of time both these laws have helped shape technologies; physical hardware is constantly getting smaller and cheaper to produce, fueling more uses/users for devices - that’s Moore's Law. On the other hand, software and web aps are becoming increasingly user-driven, user-centric and user-friendly - making it easier for Networks to expand and evolve between these technologies - that's Metcalfe's Law.

Another pioneer, this time in artificial intelligence - Raymond Kurzweil - estimated that the human brain's networked intelligence produces the equivalent of 1016 computations per second. In fact its superiority is pricesely not because of its neural capabilities, but because of its networking capabilities. In other words, the brain is 106x104, or 1010, times smarter than it should be, simply because it is networked.

So, as a sum of its parts, Web 2.0 is a more composite and functionally relevant tool today than ever before. And because this kind of connectivity lets you extend beyond geography and time, the talent pool at its reach is phenomenal, with collaborations and connections that can happen across geography, age, sex or race. In no other era of human civilization has there ever been a platform for ideas to be shared or conversations to be had - with such ease and immediacy - without the other senses getting in the way.

The transition of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is an evolution from micro to macro, from the plurality of siloed desktops to the singularity of networks. If Web 1.0 was the evolution of web capabilities in siloed clusters, Web 2.0 is the actualization of those capabilities in networks.