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Better Brainstorming

Last Sunday, Mike and I had to prepare a 10 minutes presentation that we wanted to give on Monday to a group of entrepreneurs. The presentation was on the market research that we did for Ajah, our project to help Canadian non-profits to find sources of funding.

For such a short presentation, we did not expect many problems, which is probably why we waited until the last minute to prepare the whole thing. We were sitting at the table with paper pads and printouts of published research, both of us having a pretty good idea on what we wanted to talk about, but we could not quite communicate effectively the outline that we wanted. Indeed, by writing down and striking out items that we wanted in there, we ended-up with messy notebooks in no time but the outline certainly did not standout.

That's when I recalled an interesting approach to brainstorming that Erik Wright from Akoha had told me about: use post-it notes on a large wall. You start by dumping a bunch of ideas, each on their own post it note and you stick them all on the wall in no particular order. Then you try to form groups with what goes together, and finally, in the case of a presentation, you re-order them to represent the chronological order of the talk.

I really like this idea because it gives a visual representation of what the presentation is going to look like and it allows every participant to have his own stack of post-it notes and to contribute new ideas in parallel. We gave the presentation yesterday and we got very good feedback from it so I presume that the post-it brainstorming was useful. Why don't you give it a try and let me know how it goes for you?

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Today I joined the front-line response team at Savoir-faire Linux. I have the pleasure to work with an extremely skilled group. This is not a help line where someone will ask if you forgot caps-locks; if you call us, we log into your server and we fix the problem, whatever it is.

One thing that strikes me is how inefficient splitting work can be. One guy hacking on a server can only accomplish so much. If you give him a helper, no matter how skilled he is, I doubt that you can increase the output by more than 25%. Why is this so?

A first guess is that voice can only carry so much bandwidth. Given how sequential a spoken message is, and how long the seek time on a human is, polling a coworker for more information has a fix cost of at least 20 man minute. One solution if of course to serialize knowledge in a common pool and this is where wikis can save an incredible amount of time, and money. The wiki that we use at the moment it crap. The markup is heavy and counter intuitive and search is completely broken. It has a quite fancy access control system but the whole thing can become annoyingly slow.

My primary target for Gazest is Internet communities but now I see something that had escaped me: wikis can help you make giant leaps if what you sell is knowhow. Of course, your needs won't be the same if you aim internal knowledge bases. Internet communities are perfectly fine with a simple user rank system like on Wikipedia: you have a lot users, a few admins, and handful of people who can grant admin privileges; there are no groups, no per-page rights, and pages can't be hidden from other users. On the other hand, internal wikis describe really intimate knowledge of mission critical systems, including pending security problems. If that kind of information was to get on the loose, the havoc would be much worst than if you had a million credit card numbers stolen.

Aside from access control, I see many opportunities to innovate: our front-line response team could use a non-crap set of macros to input network diagrams in textual form, a lawer firm could use a set of macros to refer to laws to numbers and to databases of former rulings, and it this is only the beginning. A wiki with a flexible macro language could probably spawn a decent consulting business since anyone who works primarily with knowledge will save a lot of money if they can bent theirs tools to make knowledge easier to input and retrieve: just count how much 20 man-minute costs you. I don't know where this can lead Gazest of if it's a path where I want to take it but this is definitely an area worth exploring.

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