new mesh wiki
Props to online man-about-town and mesh-mate-to-be David Crow for creating the just-launched and oh-so-slick mesh wiki. What can you use it for? Well, pretty much anything. It’s yours, after all 
One suggestion I would make is that you use it to sign up to do things in the unconference room.
So check it out, and get to wiki-ing. Oh, and if you haven’t registered for mesh yet, I’m thinking that today is the day. Register here.
Here are posts by Mathew. Mike and Rob.
Posted in mesh news
6 Comments
mesh should've used MediaWiki instead. I can guarantee that more people are more familiar with its interface, because Wikipedia uses it, and, well, let's just say a lot of people use it.
I choose SocialText because Sunir Shah is a Toronto-based developer who is working with SocialText. Sunir offered us access to one of the leading enterprise wikis. And Mike McDerment asked me to consider using the SocialText application.
I was also excited to try the SocialText tool. SocialText has been a big supporter of the open-source community. And they have a commercial product built on open-source technologies. Their product is mature and they are successful.
I wonder how others who are not as experienced with wikis will find the SocialText application.
I have used MediaWiki, PBWiki, Kwiki, Confluence, SnipSnap, Stikipad, Wikka, Trac (integrated wiki) and others. They are not perfect, and they work great in different situations. I am particularly familiar with PBWiki (that's where coworking and BarCamp are hosted) and Stikipad (which uses Textile my preferred markup/down). I was looking at Perspective and FlexWiki for a client on a .Net platform. They each have different needs and issues. Check out http://wikimatrix.org/ for information about the different tools.
I think that there is room for improvement in the SocialText user experience, I have sent Sunir my suggestions. I encourage everyone to send Sunir and SocialText their feedback. Help them make their application better.
We offered to help with Mesh because Socialtext helps out with the Greater Web Community; it's part of our culture. We have helped with a number of 'Net conferences, such as the Web 2.0, PC Forum, LinuxWorld, and BarCamp San Francisco (http://barcamp.org/SocialText) to name a few, so I thought we could lend some expertise to Mesh to help get Canada up and going. Getting Canada up and going is a principle project of mine.
I've myself been using wikis for nine years now, and I know there are certainly opportunities to improve. Please tell us! Everything you say does in fact *immediately* go back into our product development prioritization (the "planning game" for those who know what I'm talking about). Customer opinions have *a lot* of weight, more so than our personal musings, so the more feedback the better.
In the meantime, we're going to focus on the people stuff for this conference. Really, wikis succeed if they can get people on board by being socially useful. The real hang up are not experienced users, but rather novices who are not used to the idea. Mesh will be an interesting challenge, since it will be a mix of technical experts and techical novices. We have relevant experience to bring to the table, but it will still be interesting.
The key is to keep focused on the ball: the goal is to make Mesh as good as it can be, and the wiki is just there to help keep things organized so people know where to go and when to have the good conversations, and also so later they will have something to help them reconnect with interesting folks after the event.
this is good. I just learnt about the wiki when I met Dave this PM !!
In fact this was one of the first suggestions that I thought was needed -
and I like Shah's comments "so later they will have something to help them reconnect with interesting folks " -
In word–sweet -
Sunir–thanks for committing your resources to helping mesh. Any wiki is better than no wiki. (Great initiative and connection David!)
Your plan to focus on the social aspect of getting the community to use the wiki is great. When I tried it out yesterday I found a few helpful pages that instructed me on proper use, such as this one: http://www.socialtext.net/mesh/index.cgi?introduce_yourself
Using a wiki is a great idea–next time, you should incorporate it directly into the mesh website as you did this blog.
I just added myself and Malgosia to the People page on the wiki. Why did David choose Socialtext? I've used a lot of wikis before, but this one has perhaps the most dreadful UI I've seen.