Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Introduction

Submission for Groundswell : The Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki

The Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki

For more information, please contact Donna Jensen at donna.jensen@avenuea-razorfish.com

September 11, 2007 Page 1
© 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.


Contents
• The Challenge and the Response
• Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Features
• Appendixes
Technical Implementation
Conceptual Challenges



The Challenge and the Response


CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE

The Challenge
• At Avenue A | Razorfish, three forces combined to create the
momentum for the wiki:
The need to collaborate – quickly – among a rapidly growing global
work force
19 offices and 1,900 employees across the globe (Sept 2007)
Hindrances in current “tools”
Clogged email inboxes
Scattered folders and files
Top-down static corporate intranet
Some isolated attempts scattered across regions and disciplines
A history of creating intranets and dealing with their issues
A culture of experimentation


CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE

The Response
• A grassroots effort to experiment with an open wiki platform.
• Fostering an attitude that the wiki is a place where all employees
can work and play, and new ideas are welcome
• That attitude shows up in the flavorful ways the wiki’s been
described:
“Think Wikipedia meets Facebook meets Flickr”
“It’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet”



Wiki Features


WIKI FEATURES

The Home Page
• Design Goal: User-driven, with fresh content always

The Main Body:
The Left Strip:
News
Utilities
Del.icio.us
Search
Bookmarks
Upload Documents
Flickr Roll
Primary Navigation
Digg Feed
Tag Cloud
Blog Roll
Links to Tools
Recent
Documents
Recent Pages


WIKI FEATURES

Blogs: Open Input, Fully Integrated with the Wiki
• All disciplines and
any interest group
can have its own
blog
• blog integration
with email
• Searchable archive
of blog data
• Travel blog helps
road warriors get
best bets and local
recommendations
• Our CEO uses his
blog to share and
gain employee
opinions
• The Wiki Requests blog facilitates continuous user feedback and
requirements prioritization

WIKI FEATURES

Project Pages
• Project Page Templates
• Project Summary, Key
Contacts, Team
• Project Meeting Notes
• Project Documents
• Team Calendars

• Upcoming features:
Integration with staffing
database
Automatic linking of
people with their
projects


WIKI FEATURES

People Pages
• Automatically created
• Easy-to-use “add picture”
option
• Automatic record of
activity:
Recent blog posts
Recent files uploaded
• Completely customizable
by user


WIKI FEATURES

Wiki Portlets
• The wiki is constantly adding new portlets for users

• Users can place video on
• Any user can add a
• Users can also embed
their pages, using an <embed>
visual navigation
flash animations
tag
feature to his or her page
• The code is simple: • YouTube and Google supply • Again, the code is simple:
<visualnav> the tags for all of their videos – <swf file=
</visualnav> wiki users just copy and paste “bigfive.swf”>
into their page </swf>


WIKI FEATURES

The Ultimate Wiki Portlets: External Feeds
• Wikis can use a variety of plug-ins to allow external content to be
embedded on pages
• Magpie RSS feed
is a core plug-in
• Several of our wiki
pages (e.g., the Home
Page) are mainly
external-content-driven
• Many, many feeds
are available; several
sites list feeds
www.syndic8.com
www.bloglines.com


RESULTS

Results
• The bottom line: We can work faster and more effectively
Technologists – the time spent in looking for sample tech
architectures and third-party tool evaluations has gone from hours
or days (when searching via email or file system) to minutes
A technology consultant in our Ft. Lauderdale office posted a
request for insight into our expertise with our RedDot. Within a few
hours, we were able to aggregate case studies from London,
Frankfurt, and Paris and save that information that we were able to
use on a client project.
A consultant in our New York office posted a wiki topic page on
data caching as part of client work he was doing, and his
colleagues are now using that insight to help a major news media
company improve its website.
New employees can learn about each other’s skills and interests in
minutes.

RESULTS

More Results – Different Groups Benefit in Different Ways
Creative – the interns post screenshots with links to websites by
topic when we get new clients; so it becomes a visual reference
manual
User Experience – the content strategists created a living,
breathing style guide for the wiki; demonstrative + informative
Presentation-Layer – their developers have set up a very large
repository of Flash work to share and learn from
Events – we posted videos from TED Conference pre-release to
public
Community – by seeing who posted what and being able to auto-
link to profiles, we meet colleagues worldwide in an organic
fashion, according to relevance and shared interests


RESULTS

Quantitative Progress
• Basic growth
Key Wiki Metrics Jan ‘06 March ‘06 Sept ‘06 March ‘07 July ‘07

Cumulative page views 5,695 11,623 50,352 111,587 387,723

Cumulative page edits 2,023 3,226 13,511 19,433 25,128

• Other facts
For June 2007 alone:
Total Visits – 3609 .

Unique Visitors – 987
Page Views – 27,708
Unique Page Views – 16,282
Total Visits – 3486
1,430 users have logged in (over 90% of employees)
There are 6,505 total pages
2,925 files have been uploaded
There are 2,021 blog posts and 1,558 comments, in 33 categories


RESULTS

Google Analytics
• We’ve hooked up Google
Analytics for both the Wiki (top)
and the Blogs (bottom)
• The analytics are helping us to
identify hot pages and topics
• They also let us see what people
are searching for so we can
tweak categories, content, and
.

tags
• Page views and time spent on
the wiki are key indicators


RESULTS

Some Best Practices
• Adoption
Keep it light; be patient; let people want to use the wiki
Encourage humor; freewheeling style on the People pages
Appoint Wikivangelists in each office and for each discipline
Have regular training events
Keep them light
Add a brief wiki presentation to new-hire orientations
Governance
Wikivangelists
A “knowledge management” team to read through the wiki.
Expectation of professionalism
• Full content tracking helps



Appendices



Appendix 1
Technical Implementation


TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION

A Bit About Avenue A | Razorfish
• Avenue A | Razorfish is a leading web consulting company
Creative, Strategic, Technical services
Mostly for huge corporate clients
• Technology work
Top-notch consultants
Vast experience in Web products: WebLogic, WebSphere, TIBCO,
Documentum, Interwoven, Microsoft
Plus a history of staying ahead of the curve in new ideas and
technologies



Timeline
• Dec. 2005 - Feb. 2006: v1
Avenue A | Razorfish Tech VP and 1 part-time intern install first version of
wiki
• Feb. – Aug. 2006: v2
The wiki you see today
1 part-time Senior Tech Arch
2 tech summer interns, 1 part-time and 1 full-time
No PM ☺
No CMS ☺
No creative designer ( ), but strong UX designer
Pre-launch, another intern as QA lead
• Today
Feature requests and ongoing maintenance
1 part-time Senior Tech Arch
Planned major upgrade



Implementation Lessons Learned
• Time: approx. 2000 hours for all resources
• What worked:
Informal staffing, but rigorous tech practices
Weigh various approaches to each feature
Agile scheduling: set rolling deadlines per feature
Rigorous code review and release notes practices
Rigorous QA, with newly trained intern as lead
Challenging and stretching interns
Making simplicity a large factor in decision-making
Paradigm-shift thinking on the wiki’s purpose
• What we’d change:
Bring in a creative designer early
Consider using HTML rather than WikiText



A Sidebar on WikiText
Welcome to the '''user experience''' section of the
• Challenges community wiki.
==Disciplines==
WikiText is arcane These pages are general overview pages for each of the
'''disciplines.''' You can access sample [[deliverables]]
Non intuitive and [[activities|activity descriptions]] from here.
*[[Content Strategy]]
• Benefits
Easy to use if you have a do-it-yourself mentality
Syntax can be very lightweight
[[MyPage]] as page link
{{:MyPage}} to include one page in another
[[Category: Strategy]] to assign or create a Category

• Our training approach
Emphasize simplicity
Focus on a very few key formats
Encourage DIY portlet use



Applications and Tools Chosen
• Core technologies were chosen for strength and track records of
dependability
Apache, MediaWiki, MySQL, Linux
• Other technologies evaluated and tested before adoption
Emphasis on modularity, simplicity
• Experiment: All open source
The customization imperative



Key Challenges and Benefits
• Key benefits
It’s always evolving
Once security is enforced, radical freedom
It’s easy to code!
• Key challenges
It’s always evolving
Changing old habits
People are used to passively viewing websites
Corporations are unsure of open source technologies
Corporate IT departments face adjustments in work style



The Corporate IT Department: Who Moved My Cheese?
• No more Mysteriousness: IT
departments are used to working with
proprietary applications whose code is
kept secret. Open source means open
source
• The choking factor: IT departments not
as able to turn to someone else who
must help them
Instead, they are more likely to
solve problems themselves
“Support” contracts vs.
Collaborative networks of helpers
• IT departments that don’t embrace open source will miss out on
innovations
• An emerging trend to help IT: Geek squads / support contractors for open
source



Wiki Implementation Is Easy
• Main features come out of the box
Search, file upload, editable pages, tags, categories
• Language
The coding language of the wiki is PHP
Fast to learn and easy to use by techs with varying backgrounds
No development environment needed
No compilation needed
No rebooting; changes are seen immediately
• Adding components
Wiki portlet features, aka “extensions,” are component-based and modular
Usually single files in one folder, and a single reference in one settings file
Many, many free extensions available – users can discover, request, and
even in some cases implement them themselves
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Extensions
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions



Component-Based
Architecture
• Extensions
Single file
modules
Registered in a
Settings file
Inserted into wiki
pages as tags
• Blog code kept
separate
• Skins (presentation
layer) kept separate



Security Policy: Tight Security, Then Great Freedom
• Security jpeg jpg oog tif
Active Directory gif bmp png psd
VPN access only – Firewalled
eps wmf emf svg
Blocking users, tracking edits
svgz doc dot csv
NO external-server applications
rtf txt xls xlt
• Freedom
ppt pps pot mpp
ALL pages are editable by everyone
(except the home page)
mpt mpd mdb mdw
Uploads
pub pdf indd indt
Large expansion of allowed file types
indl vsd vst vsd
Allowing huge files
Users driving new features xsl xslt xml css
Other than a rule that no client- jar zip mp3 msg
confidential information may be added,
no rules beyond basic professionalism ai avi



Appendix 2
Conceptual Challenges


CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES

Information Architecture: The Next Frontier
• What is order? What is chaos?
• How does order arise?



Adding Context and Navigability
• Attempts to Provide Context and Relations
Visual Navigation
Tags and Categories
Main buckets of Navigation
Breadcrumbs
Tag clouds

• But are they
sufficient to
make data
seem
organized?



Wiki Information Architecture: A Pluralistic Approach
• Search plus navigation plus new relation tools
• Users differ radically in preferred search and navigation
interfaces
• Wiki’s strengths and limitations
All uploaded files can be assigned tags
All articles can be assigned categories
Users can create new tags and categories at will, i.e.,
folksonomy
Search
Articles are searched by Page Title and by article text –
more so than by categories
Files are not full-text searched, but rather searched by their
description



Ways to Address the Issue
• Build superb Search application
• Explore intelligent use of wiki keys: tags, categories, pages

Tags Categories Page Titles

Exploit the database to find patterns and relations
Allow tags to proliferate, with some control
Enforce harmony of tags, categories, and page names
Start with basic navigational buckets, and apply them



Thank You

For more information, please contact Donna Jensen at
donna.jensen@avenuea-razorfish.com
You can also hear us talk about the evolution (and more!)
at http://www.iirusa.com/pcc/eventhome/30755.xml

http://www.theworkplaceblog.com
http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/enterprisesolutions


Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Introduction

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