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.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Contents • The Challenge and the Response • Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Features • Appendixes Technical Implementation Conceptual Challenges September 11, 2007 Page 2 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki The Challenge and the Response September 11, 2007 Page 3 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 4 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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” September 11, 2007 Page 5 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Wiki Features September 11, 2007 Page 6 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 7 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 8 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 9 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 10 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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> September 11, 2007 Page 11 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 12 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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. September 11, 2007 Page 13 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 14 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 15 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 16 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 17 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Appendices September 11, 2007 Page 18 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Appendix 1 Technical Implementation September 11, 2007 Page 19 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 20 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 21 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 22 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 23 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 24 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 25 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 26 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 27 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 28 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION 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 September 11, 2007 Page 29 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki Appendix 2 Conceptual Challenges September 11, 2007 Page 30 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

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Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES Information Architecture: The Next Frontier • What is order? What is chaos? • How does order arise? September 11, 2007 Page 31 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES 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? September 11, 2007 Page 32 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES 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 September 11, 2007 Page 33 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES 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 September 11, 2007 Page 34 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.

Submission for Groundswell : The
Avenue A | Razorfish Wiki 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 September 11, 2007 Page 35 © 2007 Avenue A | Razorfish Inc. All rights reserved. Confidential and proprietary to Avenue A | Razorfish.