Doug Cornelius .com

Continuing my live-blogging from International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference. . .  As Web2.0 tools mature, there is an increased number of adoptions by Fortune 500 companies. We explore and learn if Web 2.0 solutions already being adapted by Fortune 500 companies would be accepted by the lawyers in your firm.

Speaker: Bruce MacEwen of AdamSmithEsq.com

Bruce is cautious optimist about the adoption of the these tools. He sees the most important change from Web 1.,0 when you surfed, to Web 1.5, when you searched, and to Web 2.0 when you share.

He thinks they have a real place as a management tools in professional services firm. They have so many advantages over email [See Luis Suarez's approach on Elsua.net]. Of course there are rules of the road.  He pointed to IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines. He recognizes that HR and PR will be concerned about the loss of control and approval.

An audience member focused on the comment function.  Bruce has seen it. But he thinks it is a defensive position. On his own site, Bruce gets 10 personal emails for every comment. I pointed out that legal blogs are not that interesting and do not get that many comments.

Bruce went through DOs and DON’Ts for blogging. (You can see them in the session materials.) Bruce views blogs as a way to prove expertise. You can say you are an expert. But you need to prove it. He also sees blogs as a great tool for knowledge management.

Bruce also sees a strength for a blog to be in project management. The reverse chronological nature of blog lends itself nicely to project management. You are typically interested in the latest piece of information. A blog displays the most recent post at the top.

Bruce moved on to wikis. A wiki is just a blog with lots of authors.  Wikipedia does not work in theory, it only works in practice. Vandalism fears are unfounded. Are your people going to vandalize your reception area? No, so why would they vandalize a firm wiki.

He cited the case of Dresdner where the introduction of wikis reduced email traffic by 75%.

He cited another case study (You can see them in the session materials.) The company rolled out six internal group blogs with 150 contributors. It worked because it is very intuitive. They are much like the way people think. People do not think in structured information like databases. They think unstructured like wikis and blogs.  You also have the update features, the categorization and easy searches.

Bruce moved on to mashups. He focused first on companies use of Google Maps.He showed an example of locating key clients on a Google Map. So if you are out of the office with some free time, the attorney could quickly see if there are any key clients nearby.

He calls Web 2.0 not “Hi-Tech,” but “Appropriate Tech.” The tools are easy to use tools that allow you to easily share information.

Bruce is more cautious than optimistic on social networks. He thinks they have intriguing opportunities. He thinks MySpace is appalling.  He sees LinkedIn as still being scattered.

He thinks if anything is going to work in the legal field it is Legal OnRamp. He has a concerns that it is getting too big. He cited the natural connection limit of 150 people. It is hard to know more than 150 people. He also did not like the presence feature on  Legal OnRamp. He found it creepy.  

Bruce is still striving to find success stories. He sees much more proven success inside law firms than the deployment outside firms. The McKinsey report on Web 2.0 showed much success in the corporate world.

The power of the tools is to form and strengthen networks.  But it does require the business side to engage with IT on development and for IT to look over the horizon. 

To end, he played this video, Information R/evolution by Michael Wesch:

A great presentation and insight from Bruce.

Download the session materials.

My ILTA Schedule

The folks at Westblog.net did a video interview of me just prior to the start of my Wikis in Law Firms presentation at  International Legal Technology Association’s Annual Conference. You can see it at the Westblog: Using Wikis in Law Firms,

or just watch it here below:

My ILTA Schedule

Wikipedia has over 2,000,000 articles created and edited by users. Can you have a wikipedia for the knowledge inside your law firm? Wikis provide an easy to use platform for capturing content and facilitating collaboration. This session will discuss some of the technical, cultural and procedural issues you need to address in setting up wikis for your law firm.

In the true wiki spirit, the panel has established a wiki in connection with the session. Feel free to logon to the wiki, explore and edit: http://iltawikisinlawfirms.pbwiki.com
The invite key is: ilta08

Speakers:

• Doug Cornelius, Knowledge Management Attorney at Goodwin Procter LLP
• Michael Mills, Director of Professional Services at Davis Polk & Wardwell
• Ayelette Robinson, Practice Resources Attorney at Morrison & Foerster LLP

My Notes:
Since I was one of the speakers, I did not take notes. But I did not have to. Everything the panel spoke about and more is on the wiki site we set up for the panel: http://iltawikisinlawfirms.pbwiki.com.  Feel free to explore the wiki.

Thanks to PBwiki for giving us the wiki upgrade for the panel.

PBwiki is the world’s largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis. We host over 500,000 wikis, serve millions of users per month, and 96% of our business users would recommend PBwiki to a friend.

Leading companies from AT&T to Wal-Mart, including 1/3 of the Fortune 500, choose PBwiki to help them with knowledge management, collaboration, project management, and a host of other business processes and workflows.

My ILTA Schedule

I have expressed my displeasure with the Sharepoint Wikis: Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.  We have been looking at wiki platforms to replace or supplement the Sharepoint wikis. One platform is Atlassian’s Confluence. These are the answer we received for a few of our questions:

Thanks for your interest in our award-winning enterprise wiki, Confluence. Sorry for the delay in responding, but we released Confluence 2.9 today and I wanted to wait and reply after the release because some of the new features may be very appealing to you. Based on your requirements, I think that Confluence could be a very good fit for your law firm.

Email notifications of the changes

Yes, highlighting or only showing the changes to the page itself;
Yes, Confluence allows users to ‘watch’ pages (or entire spaces) and then sends you an e-mail every time they are updated. The e-mails themselves contain the page and a link to the page where you can easily view the most recent changes. The changes are presented in a nice format highlighting both what has been deleted and what has been added.

Here is a quick overview: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/oCAC

Confluence also allows the creation of custom RSS feeds that allow users to subscribe to certain pages, spaces and blogs and lets them check the updates at their discretion without filling up their inboxes. 

Checkout on editing

Confluence has very strong capabilities in this area. If a user clicks to edit a page that is concurrently being edited by another user, they will be notified. Confluence can automatically merge their changes if the two users edit different parts of the page. If there are any conflicts, Confluence will display them for you and give you the option to either ‘Overwrite’ the other user’s changes, ‘Merge your changes’ manually, or ‘Discard’ them.

Our page describing this functionality is here:http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/TzUC

Confluence also has very fine grained permissioning, meaning that you can easily restrict which individuals and groups can view or edit a page. 

Integration with Sharepoint / MOSS 2007.

Microsoft is embracing partners who are leaders in Web 2.0 technologies and so we had SharePoint Connector designed. This plugin allows for integration between Confluence and SharePoint on multiple levels. You can embed SharePoint content on a Confluence page, create links between the different programs, run searches among content on both programs and more.

You can see the homepage for the connector here:http://www.atlassian.com/sharepoint/default.jsp The documentation for the SharePoint Connector offers more comprehensive information on the product: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/9AHrBQ

Today, we also release a free plugin called the Office Connector. This makes it easy to convert MS Word documents into Confluence pages and also to embed Excel and PowerPoint content. I’d highly recommend watching the video on its homepage: http://www.atlassian.com/office/

Has your law firm tried an evaluation of Confluence yet? You can download a free 30-day evaluation and see how it works from: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ConfluenceDownloadCenter.jspa

It sounds like they are addressing the holes we have found in SharePoint wikis.

I had the chance to sit down with Stewart Mader and Matt Moore to talk about Enterprise 2.0 and wikis in particular: Enterprise 2.0 Discussion with Stewart Mader, Matt Moore and Doug Cornelius.   There was also bit of discussion of location based social computing (is it as good as dog urine?) and bit more in a separate podcast on social bonds and salty language.

Stewart just let me know he is branching out in a new venture and sent me this information:

“Grow Your Wiki” Grows into Specialist Consultancy

Today, I’m taking the wraps off something I’ve been working on for a long time.Grow Your Wiki is growing – into a specialist consultancy focused on organizational wiki adoption.

This is as much a launch of something new, as the continuation of something I’ve been doing for a long time. I built my first wiki in 2003, for science curriculum, and building The Science of Spectroscopy showed me the amazing capability of a wiki to bring information to life, and get people more deeply involved in its creation, growth, and use.

Since then, I’ve been working with organizations to introduce wikis for internal collaboration, knowledge sharing, and project management. I’ve done it both as a full-time job, at Emerson College and Brown University, and as a consultant for a number of other organizations. In late 2006,Atlassian (makers of the Confluence wiki) as their Wiki Evangelist, and have continued to evangelize the benefits of wiki use in an organizational context at conferences, on blogs, and in my latest bookWikipatterns. I’ve also continued to work with an even broader range of organizations on their wiki adoption efforts.

In the past several months, I’ve been fielding more and more questions from organizations that want to know how to get wiki adoption going the right way. I believe that to make wiki adoption successful and fully realize its benefits, they really need a good plan for managed growth that takes into account their size, history of enterprise software use (or misuse!), ensures people get the most out of their wiki use, and helps minimize performance and efficiency issues related to too-rapid growth.

So, I’m launching this new venture to focus all my energy on helping organizations get the most out of their investment in wikis as a collaboration, knowledge sharing, project & meeting management, and communication platform.

To that end, I’ll be leaving the full-time employ of Atlassian as of this Friday, August 15th. I’ll continue to work part-time on some special projects for the company until the end of September.

If you’re looking to grow wiki use in your organization, I’d love to help you plan a strategy for managed growth. You can use the contact form to get in touch, and I’ll get back to you within two business days.

–
Stewart Mader
Grow Your Wiki – www.ikiw.org

Stewart also sent along this tidbit on his four steps to successful wiki adoption (.pdf).

On Friday, the Professional Development Consortium invited me to co-lead some table discussions on Web 2.0 for professional development.  The PDC is a group for those “working in-house at law firms, government agencies and corporations who are charged with the responsibility of developing and administering the training and professional development for lawyers.”

Chris Boyd and I led two discussions on  how web 2.0 tools can help with professional development. We started off using Jessica Lipnack’s technique of asking the audience to introduce themselves and why they were here. The topic was only briefly described and very open-ended, so Chris and I were prepared to talk about a wide range of use of Web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 tools. Most of the audience claimed ignorance of web 2.0, but wanted to learn more. Most did not know what a wiki was.

Chris and I started off with a few examples of how wikis can be used:

• Chris and I use an external wiki to help communicate and organize information for ILTA’s Knowledge Management Peer Group’s Steering Committee. 
• I am using a wiki to plan a meeting of Toronto and New York law firm knowledge management leaders.
• I use a wiki to manage one of my client teams.  
• My knowledge management department uses a wiki to manage our projects. 

We gave the audience a handout containing the wikis and happiness picture and my Wiki While You Work article published by ILTA. Most of the discussion focused on using wikis to help manage their own internal projects.  I think the instigation was the wikis and happiness picture showing the differences between using email to collaborate and a wiki to collaborate.

The audience really grabbed onto the concepts. We turned tables of skeptics in tables of bobbing heads by the end.  Chris ran into one of the participants at dinner that night. She had already gone back to her room, built a wiki on PBwiki and announced it to her group.  I think the session was a great success.

Thanks to Bridget Huffstutler and Scott Westfahl for inviting me to the PDC Conference. A big thanks to my co-presenter, Chris Boyd.

In the latest knowledge management white paper from the International Legal Technology Association is an article authored by me: Wiki While You Work [pdf].

There are some other great articles in the white paper. Here is the table of contents:

• Collaboration and Competitiveness: New Tools for Collaborating and Managing Knowledge
  By Guy Wiggins of Keely Dry & Warren LLP
• Wiki While You Work
  by Doug Cornelius
• Show Them the Value! Using KM to Bring More Value to Clients
  by Mary F. Panetta of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, L.L.P.
• Developing Document Assembly Tools: A Tale of Two Applications
  by Eric Little of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, PC
• 2008 ILTA KM Survey Results
  by Catherine Monte of Fox Rothschild LLP and
  Mara Nickerson of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 9
wiki pages: 313, which is a 50% increase over the past month’s 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we deal with some issues. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

We are still suffering from the wiki’s failure to show the changes to the wiki page as part of the notification. [See Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.]

Unfortunately not me, but my pal Luis Suarez. There is a profile of Luis in the New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip.  Luis describes how he started using platform communication tools like blogs and wikis instead of email. He managed to reduce his email traffic by 80% and still effectively communicate with his colleagues.

“Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes.”

For those of you using RSS feeds, you have grown used to seeing the orange icon appear whenever you are on a site with a feed. Now there is a universal edit icon if you are on a page that is publicly editable. (If you use the Firefox brower).

“The Universal Editing Button (UEB) will allow a web surfer to more quickly recognize when a site may be edited. It will be a convenience to web surfers who are already inclined to contribute, and an invitation to those who have yet to discover the thrill of building a common resource. As this kind of public editing becomes more commonplace, the button may become regarded as a badge of honor. It may serve as an incentive to encourage companies and site developers to add publicly-editable components to their sites, in order to have the UEB displayed for their sites.

In these ways, we hope that this button catalyzes the acceleration of the editable web, and helps accelerate society’s trend toward building valued common resources.”

I just downloaded the Firefox extension and it seems to work great. Now I am off to edit.

Thanks to Lily Hill of Digital Advocate for pointing this out (via Twitter: @lilyhill) from Marshall Kilpatrick of Read Write Web: Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button.