Making Connections
From RIBApedia
Making Connections is a report by the consultancy Consilian about the development of a wiki by the Research and Development Department at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Executive Summary
Just over a year ago, the RIBA Research & Development Department established a website which can be used by architectural researchers and practitioners to create and share knowledge. A software application called a wiki was selected which allows users to edit the website, and a pilot wiki has been established which is free to download and simple to administer. Before committing further resources, the RIBA applied to The Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD) for funds to test the approach that has been taken and to explore any new opportunities which might exist. This report assesses the results of the RIBA architectural research wiki and places these findings in the context of a study into how recent developments in information and communication technology can support virtual knowledge networks.
The report proposes a strategy for taking the project forward in three phases. Starting with the current baseline, three further scenarios are developed using a set of 17 inter-dependent patterns or archetypes. Each of these patterns deals with an aspect of the project, and each pattern can be combined in various ways to synthesise as many different situations as are required. The resulting ‘pattern language’ allows individual aspects of the project to be analysed whilst retaining the vital connections which exist between its components – showing the parts of the system and the whole at the same time. The one certainty about any IT project is that it will change; thinking in network patterns allows the RIBA to assess how changes to one aspect of the project can cause changes to occur in other parts of the project, and affect the project as a whole.
Three of these patterns, Participatory Web, Peer Production, and Knowledge Networks, sometimes combine to create a remarkable phenomenon: without financial incentives, and with minimal central control, a group of strangers gather together in a virtual way to produce something as a team which surpasses the capability of any individual in the group. But despite conspicuous success stories, such as Wikipedia, a far greater number of public wikis fail to take off. Nobody can satisfactorily explain why some wikis work spectacularly well whilst others crash. Even Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics admits that the techniques needed to build a successful wiki are ultimately more a ‘black art’ than a science.
A measure of the current level of success for the project was obtained by conducting a straw poll of 26 employees (including 13 RIBA members) within a single architectural firm. The results of this poll showed strong support for the aspirations of the project, but feedback suggested that there was only limited evidence that the project had so far achieved its intended goals. A significant finding of the poll was that nobody in the group had previously heard about the RIBA architectural research wiki. Everybody agreed that the current website needed a higher profile in order to be widely adopted by practitioners, specifically that the RIBA as a whole needed to give the initiative greater impetus and publicity.
The report recommends that the criterion for measuring the success of the wiki should be how much content is contributed by users; however, working against this criterion is the pattern Unequal Participation, which holds (as a general rule) that less than 1 per cent of users will contribute original material to a wiki. The viability of the project is therefore dependent upon the ability of the RIBA to attract large numbers of users to the wiki. For this reason, the main concern about the project is its current and historic level of registered users. Statistics for the wiki indicate that there are currently 77 registered users: 12 joined in 2006, 62 joined in 2007, and 3 joined this year. These numbers need to be increased substantially, by at least a factor of 10 but ideally by a factor of 100, in order to guarantee the long-term viability of the project.
The diagram on the opposite page illustrates two methods to increase the number of people using the wiki. One way is to ‘seed’ the wiki by directly publishing material in order to attract more users - represented as a top-down approach; another way is to encourage the development of a larger network of participants which will underpin the wiki - shown as a bottom-up approach. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive; in fact, neither will work entirely on their own, but they could be carried out together or sequentially, and each method complements the other.
A baseline scenario Test Wiki is introduced using the first five patterns: RIBA Mission, Executive Support, Facilitators, The Commons, and Governance. Analysis of this network confirms the findings of the survey – that the wiki is currently driven primarily by the pattern Executive Support, rather than by grass roots participation. It notes that the wiki does not yet have an explicit policy regarding intellectual property rights and a priority at this stage is to put in place a mechanism for licensing IPR to comply with the recommendations of the pattern Governance.
The first scenario Ownership adds four more patterns: Champions, Social Capital, The Academic Community, and Maintainers. The objective of this scenario is to decentralise responsibility for the wiki, transferring the task of adding content to grass roots participants. To realise this objective, it is recommended that the RIBA creates an informal arrangement of online publication, sharing and open peer review of academic research papers – a Commons for Architectural Research - which will complement traditional systems found in academic institutions. Delegating the tasks of minor editing and tidying up the wiki to volunteer Maintainers will avoid overloading the wiki Facilitators.
The second scenario Bedrock adds five further patterns: Knowledge Networks, Engage Practitioners, Peer Production, Unequal Participation and Participatory Web. Whereas the first scenario was designed to connect people with information through online databases and knowledge banks, this scenario takes the next step - connecting people with people by creating an online platform for informal dialogue and the open exchange of information and ideas. The proposed Knowledge Networks are: Communities of Practice; Knowledge Studios; and an Innovation Exchange. It is recommended that a process of commons based Peer Production is established to expand the wiki community and add more content to the wiki.
The third scenario Making Connections completes the series by adding the final three patterns: Knowledge Management, The Wisdom of Crowds, and The Cult of the Amateur. This scenario aims to ensure the long-term viability of the wiki by connecting it to other RIBA projects. The pattern Knowledge Management enables the wiki to close the loop between the patterns Engage Practitioners and Academic Community as in the scenario Ownership, but here the connections are much stronger due to the contributions made by other RIBA initiatives, such as its proposed knowledge communities and the planned redesign and upgrade of RIBAnet. The patterns RIBA Mission, Executive Support, and Facilitators permit an integrated approach, which brings additional resources to the project – avoiding duplication of effort and reinventing the wheel.
A key recommendation of the report is that connections between the academic community and practitioners should match the type of content being transmitted: practitioners tend to use conversations with friends and colleagues to find the information they need to learn and carry out their work; scholars work in a more structured, formal environment, relying on academic peer reviews and published papers. The style of these two types of communication is very different, so that the supporting technology should be differentiated to reflect these distinctions. In the second scenario, it is recommended that the wiki is augmented by a social networking service, similar to Facebook, which would be used to build a series of informal networks. Users would be free to establish new groups and to find and join groups which interest them. In this arrangement, the research wiki is positioned as a public-facing domain of academic quality and the network is designed as a members’ forum for debate and interaction, although users would be able to import their own wikis for specialised purposes into the social networking application.
The report places very approximate numbers on each scenario. It is suggested that the scenario Ownership could consolidate the current number of users, which is around 100, but that an increase to 1,000 or more is possible using the strategy Bedrock. An estimate of the number of users within the scenario Making Connections is 10,000 or more, reinforcing the key recommendation of the report and suggesting that the public – facing wiki should be linked to the main RIBA website, whilst the social network should be integrated with proposals for the new RIBAnet.
Finally, many of the issues surrounding this project are complex. For example: the pattern Participative Web is still emerging; some concepts are slippery and hard to pin down, such as the pattern Knowledge Management; whilst other ideas turn traditional thinking on its head, such as the patterns Peer Production and The Commons. The pattern language is intended to bring some clarity to these ideas, explaining the strengths and limitations of the new technologies. Rather than impose prescriptive solutions, the report uses the pattern language to structure these issues in a flexible way which will allow consensus to be built around shared objectives and enable the debate about the wiki to move forward; the pattern language can be used to develop a range of different scenarios and, in this sense, the patterns are best understood as components of a strategy which is still emerging - the network diagrams provide a means for connecting these components in a way which will realise that strategy.
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