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Below is a script from the connectipedia launch event on June 10, 2008. While we have made available a video of the entire event, we realize that not every has broadband Internet access, which makes it difficult to view lengthy videos. This script provides the narrative of the event, with links to much shorter video presentations of individual speakers. (The entire video is available here: Part 1 & Part 2)
During our time together here today, I’m going to tell you the story of connectipedia, weaving in the participation of all the key players. Understanding how it came about the way it did and why will help make its intent more clear, I think.
Once upon a time, two to three years ago, the largest private foundation in Oregon had 100% turnover in its full time program officer staff within a year’s time. If anybody ever had a wake up call about capturing and storing institutional memory, it was us. Recognizing that need, building a system to capture and share information became an important element of Meyer Memorial Trust's 2005 Business Plan.
Probably mostly because I was still left and had a reputation for never meeting a technology I wasn’t willing to at least date, I was assigned the task of developing a system that could serve as an archive of knowledge that would remain behind when key staff members left. A way to share what we know and build a kind of collective wisdom. What the field calls a “knowledge management” system.
While it was a fairly new trend in the foundation world, I learned knowledge management had been around in the corporate world for quite some time, so I studied what businesses had done. What had worked, what hadn’t worked. How much it cost. And so forth. I also looked at what other foundations were doing.
I attended the Knowledge Management conference in Boston put on by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and talked to people at other foundations about their experiences. Some of what I heard was pretty scary: hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on a system that no one really used or found useful.
Our knowledge management system had consisted primarily of popping up over the cubicle wall and saying, “Hey, Charline.” (Charline McDonald, who had been a program officer at MMT almost as long as MMT had existed, was known as the “queen of grantmaking” within our ranks until her retirement in 2005.)
So I thought a lot about our knowledge access and storage needs, and realized that what I needed from Charline was not: tell me everything you know about food banks, if perchance, I was investing a proposal from a food bank. First of all, she didn’t have time to sit down and tell me what she knew every time I looked at a new proposal about a new topic. And if she hadn’t reviewed a food bank proposal for several years, her knowledge might very well be out of date.
What I needed from Charline was a connection to people, organizations and resources who knew the food bank scene. Not information exactly, but connections to information resources.
Very often, those connections were with nonprofits doing the real work. And researchers. Community members. People who really cared. And so forth.
So why, I wondered, would a foundation go to the trouble to build such a useful tool for just ourselves, especially since much of the time the resources we need to access live outside our walls? It really made no sense… Why couldn’t we design and build it so anyone and everyone working for the common good could participate, both using and contributing.
After all, that’s one of MMT’s values… reflecting our founder Fred Meyer’s commitment to truly serve the communities that made his success possible, his desire to innovate. Many times working at MMT I wonder, if FM could be here today, what would he think? Would he like what he sees?
Actually, it seems Mr. Meyer foresaw connectipedia…I found this Fred Meyer quote on wikipedia (of course):
"Use your brain for thinking, not as a storehouse. First, write things down so you don't have to remember them.
Second, learn where to find information so you don't have to remember it." - Fred G. Meyer
Another connection Fred Meyer has to connectipedia is that it is a kind of one stop shopping place for people working for the common good, much like Fred Meyer One-Stop Shopping Centers. We hope and think that would make him proud.
If you want to find knowledge, why don’t you just Google it? you might ask. Well, of course we already Googled everything. But Google often gives us too much information. A search of K-12 education Oregon yields 225,000 results, for example. It just takes too long to wade through results like that. And their awesome algorithm sometimes disadvantages more local sources. It would be much more efficient if we had a way to better target the results we got.
And the targeted results system we needed should have a way to include the knowledge of people working for the common good and allow them to input information about themselves and their connections. It needed to be constantly updatable. An always-on tool for mass collaboration.
Clearly we needed to use a new technology tool: a wiki. The best known one is wikipedia. Wiki is a software that enables mass collaboration. Anyone with an Internet connection can create, read, update and delete). It’s agile and fast. Changes constantly. Updates continuously. Continual path of growth and improvement. Never need go out of date.
And Oregon is a hotbed of wiki talent. Did you know that the man who invented wikis lives and works here. And he’s here with us today. Meet Ward Cunningham. He’s going to introduce us to wikis and the wiki way…
Ward Cunningham is the computer programmer who developed the world's first wiki. He now serves as Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and the people they touch. Ward co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the Agile Manifesto. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) conferences which continue to be held all over the world. He has co-authored a book about wikis, titled The Wiki Way, and also invented Framework for Integrated Tests.
Watch Video of Ward Cunningham's presentation.
And yes, it’s true that Ward really did say that WagN is “the first fresh contribution to wiki since he created it 13 years ago.”
But I kept thinking… I see how wikis work, and they are awesome repositories of knowledge that results from mass collaboration. But what about extracting the information in the most useful way? Sometimes what we need to be able to do is combine information and organize it like a database does. Is a wiki enough?
This is a story about connections. My favorite part is the pink hair connection. At meeting I attended of people working on advancing Open Source in Oregon, a young man came over to me afterward and said, “I see you have a pink streak in your hair, and you see I have one in mine, I think we need to talk.” So before long Brandon Sanders became a friend and one of my scouts, one of the incredibly brilliant people I check in with now and then to just see what’s going on in his head and what next new thing I need to know about. So I kept him posted on my thinking about this whole knowledge management thing…
Then he introduced me to two utterly brilliant geeks with Grass Commonshttp://grasscommons.org/, a nonprofit organization in Eugene: Ethan McCutchen and Lewis Hoffman. They were developing something they called WagN, a wiki tool that had hard core tagging capabilities that gave the contents of the wiki the ability to act like a database. Or as they put it: "It's a wiki you query, an on-the-fly community database, a templating system, an application platform, and a playground .... all in one." Eureka!
So we brought them on the team: They’re going to tell us about WagN and how they wrote connectipedia… and what’s different about connectipedia from other wikis…
Ethan McCutchen co-founded Grass Commons to cultivate the Network of Integrated Consumer Knowledge (NICK), a fusion of his interests in sustainability and software. Having majored in music composition, taught English in Russia and Japan, studied cognitive neuroscience in Scotland, researched primates in Thailand, volunteered in several Latin American countries, and backpacked wherever else he could, Ethan now does most of his exploration online. He’s into system architecture, sustainability indicators, human and computer languages, collaboration, community music, voting systems, and incessant bad jokes.
Lewis Hoffman heads all of Grass Commons’ software development. Previously with Two Radical Technologies (1998-2004) he led development on a powerful, modular, integrated suite of web applications called Advocacy Central. During that time he also completed his master’s in Computer Sciences from George Mason University, focusing on artificial intelligence. He’s also received degrees from Davidson College in German and Physics. An avid outdoor enthusiast and student of sustainability thinking, Lewis was drawn to the NICK project by both its technical challenges and its social and environmental importance. His current software interests include information retrieval and extraction, data integration, and the semantic web.
Watch the Video of Ethan and Lew’s presentation.
While connectipedia was being developed, I was warned we would run into resistance… just like all wikis do, from those who are not accustomed to mass collaboration and the new tools that make shared learning possible on a scale never before seen. So I figured we better put some content in there to have something to show people what the potential was.
Enter Amy Sample Ward. We contracted with her to start working on content. In the true spirit of the Internet, she went to Spain to do her work.
When she came back, there was way more than enough work to go around, so we brought her on to devote most of her time to getting connectipedia ready to launch from inside. She has been the key to us being here today. She has the right combination of skills and knowledge, determination and energy, dedication and commitment to bring us to the finish line, which is really the starting line, isn’t it.
So now, without further ado, Amy is going to show you connectipedia…
Watch Amy’s demo of connectipedia.
In the course of this project, I learned there is no “best” way to organize information. I highly recommend that everybody interested in information and knowledge read Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. I was fascinated to learn how other ways of organizing information we all take for granted came about, like alphabetization, the Dewey Decimal System. They all have uses, but they all have limited usefulness.
But we had to start somewhere with connectipedia, so began by using taxonomy of the Foundation Center. As time goes on, we know the system will become more refined, reflecting actual knowledge and use. For example, we have partnered with Northwest Health Foundation on the health section of connectipedia. Its staff immediately recognized it needed to be reorganized to reflect reality and needs of the field, which NWHF staff members have now completed. Next they will will begin populating the health section with content, as they have as good an understanding of that field as anyone.
Thanks NWHF!
I went to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco a few weeks ago and probably the most repeated refrain was: it’s all about data. “The network is the computer and data is the currency.” Often what our foundation needs in its work is data. So we’ve given a fair amount of attention to data in developing connectipedia.
Since we are not in the data business, we asked people whose job it is to know and study data to help us identify the best sources for a variety of information categories. Much thanks to Arlene Wallace and George Hough at Portland State Univrsity’s Population Research Center, Oregon’s State Data Center for providing us with a list of best sources of data for a number of indices.
In addition, we want to rely on primary sources whenever possible, and be careful to use public and non-proprietary data so our users are free to use it for their needs.
First, we learned that there are nearly as many opinions about data as there are sources of data. Arguments can be, and are, made in support of using a number of different sources. We came to the conclusion that determining the very best source each category of data was a fool’s errand, because it usually comes down to individual preference and need. And frankly, the differences in numbers between different sources were almost never great.
Rather, we decided to try to identify sources for data that we could offer up to the community for common use. While individual numbers for a particular index might be debatable, can we agree among ourselves on a common data source for the connectipedia community?
And now for another connection anecdote.
When I was at the Knowledge Management conference, at the first morning networking breakfast, I sat next to the Chief Information Officer for the Council on Foundations and told him about my knowledge management assignment, what I was thinking about doing, and asked him who I most needed to meet and connect with. At that very moment, Troy Anderson walked through the door and he motioned him over. "Here’s your guy," he said. "He’s the technology guru of the foundation world."
Turns out, he’s from Oregon!! But of course! Where else would he be from?? Troy is a member of the Coquille Indian Tribe of southwest Oregon. He developed Knowledgeplex, at that time a knowledge management project of the Fannie Mae Foundation. He was in the midst of developing Dataplace.
It quickly became clear that Dataplace was the missing data link in connectipedia. Dataplace developed an API (automated programming interface) so we could integrate it, so when you look for data here, it comes from there. We have only just begun the full integration, so that will get better and better in the weeks to come.
Troy’s going to show what Dataplace can do…
Troy Anderson has been at the forefront of Web technology innovations and media, and entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship for more than fifteen years. A former management strategy consultant to Fortune 500 companies, Anderson is the current President & CEO of KnowledgePlex, Inc. – a spin-off from the Fannie Mae Foundation – that democratizes information for the affordable housing community on www.knowledgeplex.org and for data on www.dataplace.org.
Previously, Anderson was SVP, Interactive & IT of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com, the leading publication covering Web 1.0 innovations. Prior to The Standard, Anderson was VP Online Products at Red Herring magazine, another leading publication covering state-of-the-art technologies out of Silicon Valley and beyond. Anderson joined Red Herring from StockMaster.com, the pioneer in online stock quotes and charts, where he was the President & COO.
Anderson has consulted to companies like Caterpillar, US&G, and Amoco; helped set up his tribe’s (Coquille Indian Tribe) economic development corporation; worked at Inside Sports magazine; and was a professional Go apprentice at the Japanese Professional Go Organization – the Nihon Ki-In – in Japan and later the author of the Way of Go, published by Simon & Schuster, on how the game of Go can inform strategic thinking.
Anderson holds a bachelor's and a master's degree from the Stanford University, where he wrote a dictionary of the Coquille language Milluk. He also holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University near Chicago.
Watch the Video of Troy Anderson's presentation.
View Troy’s presentation as a Powerpoint file or a PDF file.
Connectipedia has links to other data for special uses as well (like Oregon Benchmarks), but we believe Dataplace offers us the consensus data we can agree on… and please, let us know what you think, what you find useful, what else would be helpful. We don’t include all the data in the world, of course, but started with the data we find ourselves using most often.
We’re going to hear from one more person today. Another of Oregon’s amazing geeky wiki resources is Mark Dilley, who is on a mission to index all the world’s wikis. That means he is in a position to assess WagN and connectipedia, so we can better understand the value of what we are creating here. Mark is going to give us some perspective on wikis and talk about how wikis can help build communities.
Mark Dilley is well known for being a labor relations specialist, community builder, creative problem solver and wiki enthusiast. Now has the job of wiki builder at AboutUs.org, and is creating WikiIndex, a wiki of wikis. Bascially, Mark is out to harness the powers of wiki for good.
Watch the video of Mark Dilley's presentation.
There are a number of things connectipedia will make possible that are now out of our reach that will lead to increasing and improving our knowledge. For example, we will have the ability to track indicators down to census tracks. If we make an affordable housing investment in a location, for example, we can watch what happens to indicators of housing in that locale, including income, education, crime, etc.
We can look at the grants we award and have new ways of measuring whether our resources are being equitably distributed according to demographic, economic, and social indicators.
The tool is ready to be put to work (and for us to learn how we can keep making it better). We’ve created the platform for building something powerful together. Our biggest challenge today is nudging our culture along to catch up with our technology.
The way we think about knowledge is changing. It’s not just a change in technology. It’s a cultural shift. Together we need to create a culture of learning and sharing what we learn. The view that knowledge isn’t owned. That information is not to be hoarded, but shared. To trust one another with knowledge. Believing that together everyone is smarter.
So now you know the connectipedia story. Now it’s in your hands. It’s future depends on all of us together. We can’t wait to see where you take it. So let’s get busy make it happen…
I just have one more thing to say, Is this an exciting time to be alive, or what?
