This further reinforces my belief that open source collaboration solutions are inherently superior to non-open source alternatives because open source allows for the widespread proliferation of different vertical solutions based on the same platform, by different members of an extended community. Open source provides the framework within which each vertical solution provider can maximize their chances of success by being extremely focused, at the same time benefiting from economies of scale and scope by being part of a larger community.

In open source environments, value is primarily created (and monetized) by “maintainers” of the code who keep each vertical solution up-to-date and relevant to the needs of targeted users, since the “stock value” of the code has been communalized. The cost of maintaining the code is shared, enabling each vertical solution provider to incur far less cost than if they were to develop the solution using a proprietary model. At the same time, their competitive differentiators are not undermined, since code does not stand still – it requires constant maintenance and “flow values” generated by the “maintainers” is what customers will pay for.

As there are countless vertical solutions possible with a platform as comprehensive as TikiWiki, this presents a remarkable opportunity for entrepreneurs and consultants to take on responsibility for maintaining new vertical solutions for markets that they have relationships in, and to monetize it in the way most suitable for each market.

We hope more and more open source entrepreneurs and consultants will join in. There are significant developments at the core of the TikiWiki community to facilitate this, for example, the upcoming Installation Profiles system and TikiWiki “Magic” (codename for the new data driven admin panel) will make it much easier to configure and maintain different vertical solutions.

The Firefox Support Knowledge Base that is implemented using TikiWiki has unique features that encourage contribution and at the same time ensure the quality and accurary of the articles. David Tenser, Firefox Support Manager, said this in a recent interview, “Since the Knowledge Base is a wiki, anyone can sign up and make improvements …… we have a pretty neat review system in place to ensure that the accuracy of the articles are maintained. Although anyone can sign up to the wiki and start editing articles, a reviewer must read the changes made and approve them before they’re visible to our users. If a contributor proves to be a good writer whose edits are mostly approved without comments, he or she can become a reviewer as well.”

The Knowledge Base is also a platform for translation of articles, using features in TikiWiki derived from the Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine project of the National Research Council of Canada. The open nature of the wiki provides a lower barrier of entry to begin translating an article. “If an article is not yet available in your language, it’s easy to just get started and translate it yourself, which immediately helps your fellow local Firefox users,” David Tenser remarks.

The most remarkable thing I realized working with Mozilla is its unequivocal support for open source. They are absolutely committed to making sure that any improvements made to the source code of TikiWiki as a result of the Firefox Support project makes it back to that community. One of my main priorities for the next 6 months is to make this process smoother, by encouraging even closer collaboration between members of both communities.

Kaltura is the world’s first open source collaborative video platform. This is quite awesome stuff. Think of it as a YouTube type system for embedding videos on a webpage with the following important differences:

1. There is an “Add to this video” button.
2. There is an “Edit this video” button.
3. This is open source, creating unparalleled opportunities for further innovation of the technology.

Kaltura allows users to collaboratively add video, audio and images to an existing video. This is similar to the YouTube Remixer, but designed for multi-user collaborative editing, and not just personal video mash-ups.

Kudos to the Wikimedia foundation for helping to make this technology free and open (see press release and beta project landing page).

I am now in the process of developing a TikiWiki extension that will provide integration between TikiWiki and Kaltura. This extension will leverage the comprehensive TikiWiki permissions framework to provide managed collaborative video editing in a variety of settings.

The potential for non-profits and for-profits to use this technology to engage constituents and customers is immense. Keep in mind though, that the project is still young, but with something as game-changing as this, I am sure a rapid community will grow around the project to make it a big success in the months and years to come.

The wealth of new features and enhancements contained in the upcoming Release 1.10 will no doubt maintain Tiki’s position as one of the best digital content and social media platforms.

Read the complete 2007 EContent 100 List.

For more information on how TikiWiki is used for Firefox Support, see Firefox Support Forum Goes Live. Check out Citadel Rock’s website if you are looking for TikiWiki consulting, integration, and customization.

The wiki now has a staging and approval system. Think of it as having pairs of pages that exist in two twinned wikis, a staging wiki where edits can be made by all contributors just like in any regular wiki, and where these changes are committed to the stable wiki (synonymous with approved wiki/definitive wiki) only when someone who is an approver or moderator publishes those changes. This is not a traditional content approval system – the staging wiki is a full wiki in its own right, combining the collaborative authoring benefits a wiki brings with the stability of having reviewed content in the approved wiki.

The overall project is still in early days though, and much more has yet to be done including the implementation of the world’s first(?) really large translation of a knowledge base the wiki way. This is planned to start in January 2008. Yes, I know Wikipedia and other wikis exist in many languages, but this will be different, where the wiki itself is augmented with tools to facilitate the translation process (see wiki-translation.com for more info).

WikiNetNav is a new tool for wiki end-users to explore social networks implied through co-authorship, review changes made by other users, and to personalize and visualize their desired change notifications. This new graph-based tool will allow the monitoring of wiki pages as well as authors.

Users will be able to visualize the social network of contributors so as to more easily identify and select contributors to monitor based on their interests. This also facilitates identification of experts or possessors of relevant tacit knowledge.

In addition, the new tool can present the page linking network of monitored wiki pages, allowing users to more easily select additional pages to monitor.

WikiNetNav currently only works with TikiWiki but my plans are to abstract the core parts of WikiNetNav from the TikiWiki implementation so that it can be used with other wikis as well. I will be setting this up as an open source project, so let me know if you are interested in being a co-founder.

Related: Social Network Analysis of TikiWiki

While we are on the topic of Open Source, check out the Free Software and Open Source Symposium in Toronto to be held on Oct 25-26, at which I will be speaking on “Social Network Visualization of Tikiwiki Open Source Activity.” I will also be doing a demo at WikiSym earlier that week in Montreal.

The system features rooms, analogous to categories (in standard TikiWiki), spaces or folders in other products, and we got quite interesting feedback on our implementation of online knowledge spaces as rooms. At first, a number of users found the rooms terminology somewhat unfamiliar, but as they continued using it, became increasingly comfortable with the idea.

The use of the term rooms instead of folders is deliberate, in order to discourage folder proliferation. The aim is to avoid the situation where there are too many folders making subsequent search for information difficult. The term rooms also predisposes users to use them as containments for projects and user groups such as TIM 5001 class but not types of activities, e.g. Assignments. For smaller containment, users could create multi-page documents, analogous to wikibooks but chained together in a more unified underlying structure.

We found that hierarchical rooms confused users as the concept of a sub-room is difficult to visualize. As users do not use more than three levels of containment anyway, the correct analogy should be rooms for top level containment, folders for second level containment, and multi-page documents for third level containment. The term multi-page document is a mouthful and we are still looking for something more succinct to describe this. I don’t like the term book because that implies a large number of pages, and document by itself to most people refers to something more like a Word document, which tends to be attached to pages in the wiki.

Users who have had experience with online virtual worlds (3D or otherwise) are extremely excited about the term rooms, though others much less so. Nonetheless, the idea of a room does provide context to guide social interaction, providing cues as to what is acceptable behavior. It also provides a natural analogy for access control and ownership. In this sense, the term room may even be better than the rather generic term space. However, it is noted that while space suggests openness, room implies some degree of exclusion. Further research will have to be done on how best to combine elements of both open spaces and closed rooms as top level containment structures in online environments, and the terminology to be used.