Here are some photos and some captions from AboutUs.org at RCC.

“Open Space facilitator Jeff and John Abbe of Wagon work on preliminary organization for the Camp outside Socialtext HQ.”

“As part of the welcoming ceremonies for RecentChangesCamp 2008, we created a circle reaching from the earliest to most recent times of discovering wiki, our ‘Wiki Birthdays,’ spanning 1999-2008.”

“The other end of the WikiBirthdayCircle, reaching through 2006.”

“A participant, between Eugene Kim of blueoxen associates (the wiki host for the RecentChangesCamp wiki) and Wikimedia developer Brion Vibber tells the story of his wiki birthday.”

“MarkDilley listens while Peteforsyth of Wikipedia and the Our New Mind blog elaborate on the story behind his wiki birthday.”

***

Check out a few photos on RCC by Steven Walling as well.

Here’s a message we got today from Steven.

Just wanted to send out the message that Mark, Kristina, Pete (Forsyth), Dunbar and John (Abee) have arrived in Palo Alto and all is well. We’re thinking we might do a blog post from and/or about RCC sometime in the near future, we already have a few photos as well (including of Facebook HQ, which is just down the block from Socialtext).

SocialText is the sandbox for this year’s RecentChangesCamp. I’ve encouraged them to post, as well as to use the AboutUs.org Twitter account to keep us informed by proxy of what’s happening. Also, check Mark’s, Kristina’s and Pete’s Twitter accounts for possible updates. The photos will eventually show up on the AboutUs.org Flickr page.

Wednesday, Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki and a member of AboutUs.org’s board, gave a presentation on the Future of the Wiki at AboutUs Towers. Sponsored by PDX Web Innovators, was well attended by a host of webby, wiki types. I asked Ward what he talked about and his response was collaborative and adaptive, not suprising considering his background and interests.

Ward gets his wiki on

“Here is how the event worked:

• I passed out printed copies of (notes) to use a an idea stimulator.
• We brainstormed a list of topics
• I chose topics, we discussed them, and then I lined them out

Let’s get physical

Soylent Wiki is people!

“I spent most of my spare brain cycles just trying to stay ahead of the audience enough to make good next selections. I made the wise choice to work from people oriented ideas toward technology oriented ideas. Other than that the whole event is a bit of a blur.

It’s people I tell you!

“Somehow I was able to bring the event to a close without going more than a few minutes over and ending with the convincing conclusion that we were working on a mechanism for world peace.”

Did I mention it was people?

A small cadre of AboutUsites are rocketing southward to Palo Alto, California this weekend, May 9-11, to attend RecentChangesCamp. RCC08 is a big, wacky wiki hoedown that welcomes “participants from all wiki-related disciplines.”

This “big tent” includes poets, painters, novelists, historians, sculptors, scholars, designers, stylists, trade-paper sub-editors, interior decorators, wolves, millionaire patrons of art, sadists, nymphomaniacs, bridge sharks, anarchists, tire formers, educational cranks, economists, hopheads, dipsomaniac playwrights, nudists, restaurant keepers, stockbrokers and dentists and more.

So, if you’re going to be attending RCC, hunt us down, leave a comment here, or contact Mark Dilley or Kristina Weis. If you’re not attending but are part of the wiki universe and would like to get together and chew the fat, give us a holler as well and we’ll see what we can do.

If you’d like to see some photos of the disreputable sorts who populate the RCC, check out the photos from RCC 2006, taken by, among others, our own Beloved Leader, Ray.

AboutUs does not keep its wikiositude (it’s a word - look it up) confined to its website. This collaborative approach “bodies forth” even in the physical shape of AboutUs Towers. At AboutUs, work is done in small groups, which change to reflect the needs of the job in front of us. What better way to allow for the creation of work groups than living the wiki.

Look at the space as a whole. It’s open, with few barriers between individuals. The large rows of industrial windows even effect a connection with the outside world.

Now look at the work stations Each of the tables and chairs in our workspace are equipped with large rubber wheels. When a work group forms, AboutUs-ites can wheel desks and chairs together for the duration of the meeting or project, lock down the wheels, then unlock them when they’re done and wheel them away again.

Finally, the whole place is tied together electronically not by great fat bundles of wires but by a sophisticated wifi system, that allows anyone to work with any computer from anywhere in the office.

For AboutUs, wiki is not just a nice idea or a business sector to exploit, it’s a way of thinking. At AboutUs, we practice what we preach.

Yesterday was May Day, a holiday that celebrates, among other things, the dignity of labor. Unions, labor groups, political parties and movements that emphasize labor are primary celebrants. From early on in the holiday’s history May Day has frequently been punctuated by large gatherings. For instance, yesterday, dock workers all up and down the West Coast stayed at home or marched instead of working the day shift. They both celebrated labor and criticized the Iraq War, including the latter due to a belief that it is a disproportionate burden to working class families.Early in the labor movement the emphasis was on physical labor and the people who did it. But the movement has expanded to include so-called intellectual property workers. The term’s arguably a bit misleading. As someone who has been both a truck driver and a marketing communications director, I can assure you, you can’t do the former without thinking and the latter without physical issues (such as repetitive stress).

One of our own, MarkDilley spent 15 years as a labor organizer before helping to shape AboutUs. The movement from one to the other was more natural than it may seem at first. Wiki’s self-organizing aspects fit well with the initial step in organizing (both labor and information), building lists. As any industry leader knows, having a list of people and businesses you can go to is invaluable, same within organized labor. So, take a minute, honor your own labor and that of others by adding to the list.

This is the first in a short series of occasional posts on how to get yourself up to speed in the use of wikis. No time like the present, no subject as elemental as a “WikiLink” or “WikiWord.” Mark has this to say about the relationship between WikiWords and domain names.

The importance of WikiWords in the wiki is paramount. They let you easily link up ideas and information that relate to each other. The fact that we can do this easily in a wiki is one of the best things about it. Here, in this wiki, I can WikiLink any domain and build a relationship. Be it Google.com or GoogleMaps.com - really any domain now becomes a conversation destination, a place for conversation or thought to travel to.

And here’s an outline of the nature and use of links in AboutUs.

A WikiLink is a clickable hyper-link from one page on a wiki website to another page.

To link pages here at AboutUs, place the title of the page you want to link to in double brackets and save your edit.

For example:

• [[AboutUs.org]] will give you AboutUs.org upon save. (Note: To work properly, link just the domain, “www” or “http” aren’t needed here.)
• [[InterestingHappenings]] produces InterestingHappenings.
• [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent Changes]] shows up as Recent Changes.

To begin [[WikiLinking]] navigate to a page you would like to place a link on (e.g. hit your “back” button or search for a page and hit “Find!”, etc.) and hit the green edit link.

For more details see our instructions or print a cheat sheet of how to make things look better here and polices on what we think is fair link building here. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

So, if you haven’t used this linking function so far on AboutUs, go for it. Experiment with it. One of the things that gives AboutUs, and any wiki, extra value, is the creation of relationships between ideas and pages. Those relationships are established almost solely as the result of your judgment.

The next issue we’ll cover in this series is what is known in wikispeak as a CamelCase word, using something you may be familiar with: Movie Websites. (This is what is known as a FutureLink, so nothing is there, yet.)

On a previous post I wrote regarding AboutUs’s business focus, Martin left a comment regarding navigation. He mentioned that he had tried searching for “DuPont” and wound up with a search results page that was too broad to be useful.

At AboutUs I typed “DuPont” in the search window, expecting to see search results similar to what I might see at Google or Hoovers, but I can make no sense of the search results, few if any even contain the name of “DuPont”. I think to myself, “this has no relevance to me, one trying to gain the mentioned information about a company”.

I thought this point was a valuable one and needed to be addressed. So, here goes.

AboutUs has millions of pages. Wikis in general are self-proliferating, so it’s easier even than a blog to create new pages and establish new linked relationships. Well, we have put a huge amount of effort into making AboutUs even easier to use in terms of creating and adding value to a page than most wikis are. I think it’s safe to say, we’ve accomplished that goal. We could hardly grow at the rate we have if we hadn’t.

Of course, with a site so big, most people, especially those not wiki veterans, are going to want to use a search function to narrow the pages they’ll need to examine to find the information they want.

As with all companies, AboutUs doesn’t have unlimited resources, so we have to prioritize. things get done before other things. But one of the reasons we wanted to bring this blog of ours a little more forward in the mix was precisely so that we could have conversations with you about what you wanted and needed to make AboutUs a more useful tool and resource. Martin’s point, that our search function needs attention and improvement, is well taken. I’ve “escalated” the issue to Mark and here’s what he said.

“Just as Wikipedia took a while to build, so will AboutUs. Now if you type in DuPont, it will get you to a page that also asks if you are interested in the company and links you there through a simple WikiLink.” Incremental change will always make AboutUs better. We are also interested in improving the site on its technical end. We have done that consistently for the last year and a half. As alway, Martin is pushing in the right direction. Look forward to working more with him.”

I think the key is that, sure, AboutUs is going to continue to push the effectiveness of the site and the technologies that power it. But one of the things that makes us different is that instead of being, at best, receptive to input, we are designed to absorb hands-on reader changes. The more you who utilize AboutUs take an active role in shaping the site to reflect your needs, the better the site will be in doing just that.

So, don’t be a passive observer. Jump into the fray influence your brains out.

In addition to using our wikis to communicate, and this blog, we also have a Twitter page and a del.icio.us account.

Follow our updates on Twitter if you’re interested in finding out what’s new with AboutUs and what’s going on in the wiki world. We’ll reciprocate. We’re aggregating information on the company and on the theory and practice of wikis on our del.icio.us social bookmarking account. You can see our last eight saves at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar as well.

Over a year ago, there was some concern expressed that AboutUs was somehow invading privacy by posting information on domain owners. When Ray and others reminded everyone that this information was freely and publicly available elsewhere, and that the goal of AboutUs was to enable the addition of transformative value to it, the objections faded.

Even at that point, however, there were some people who understood why the combination of business information and the wiki form would produce value. Here’s one reader, VC Mike, who posted a comment on a rather critical Tech Crunch post.

(I)f the traffic trends are a harbinger these guys become the de facto wiki people go to for editing or viewing info on companies, this becomes the wiki version of Hoovers, which is something I would invest in.

Now, I mention this, and quote this individual, for a specific reason. As Guest Interloper, I’ve noticed something about these AboutUs types, something no one is going to miss who spends any time at all around them or on their site: This “wiki way of life” they espouse is big picture stuff all the way. They believe in the democracy of information and everything they do furthers that aim.

The problem of course is that they’re running a company, not a philosophy department. Sometimes it’s a little hard to see how this philosophical egalitarianism is going to benefit you, the user. So I wanted to help them articulate the answer to an important question, one that lay in plain site, but had not perhaps been sharpened like it could.

What does AboutUs do as a company? And what good does it do me?

Well, it turns out VC Mike had hit the nail on the head. AboutUs is an exhaustive listing of information about companies. This information includes officers, location, contact, sector and finances. It has in fact grown into a kind of Hoovers on a wiki, a sort of “Wiki & Poors” guide. Hoovers and Standard & Poors, for those who don’t know, are both guides to business information. They are updated, and published, originally in book form, and are used by investors, bankers, journalists, sales people, marketers, vendors and anyone else who needs to keep current on businesses and business sectors.

AboutUs provides you, the user, with immediate, up-to-date information on millions of companies around the world. Whether you’re considering investing, or buying products, or selling products to, a given company; whether you need to keep current on the players in a sector or need a current indication of how the economy is going for businesses in an area, you use AboutUs to find that information.

More than that, however. AboutUs has one important quality that traditional business information resources lack. It’s dynamic. You don’t just passively absorb information, as you might from the traditional business guides. At AboutUs you can discuss a given company or topic with other knowledgeable users. You can add information about a company that you’ve gained without waiting for a publication cycle, and you can read the same kind of information build into each entry by your counterparts.

AboutUs is the largest dynamic repository of business information in the world.

I wanted to make a Hoovers/Hoover joke. Something about a drape attachment. Perhaps next time.