Personal Knowledge Management - SIIA 19 April 2006Greg Lloyd – President & Co-Founder

Traction Software Inc.Providence, Rhode Island grl@tractionsoftware.com

Traction Roots

A whirlwind tour

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Memex - As We May Think

Vannevar BushJuly 1945 Atlantic Monthly

A vision of a desktop device containing a microfilm research library and repository for trails of references and notes.

Captures the “momentarily important item” in a form that “will not fade”.

“The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.”

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Early Hypertext Systems

Hypertext Editing SystemBrown Universityvan Dam, Nelson et al 1968

NLS / AugmentStanford Research InstituteEngelbart et al 1968

XanaduNelson et al

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Engelbart added a timeline

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Bring order into the time stream of Augmented Knowledge

workers

The World Wide Web

WWWCERNBerners-Lee et al 1990

Two elements:HTTP transport protocolHTML Markup language

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WWW is simple and scalable

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But easily broken

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1968 NLS (oN Line System). A Hypertext Journal for high performance teams

1992 Towards High Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware

Douglas Engelbart 1992

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Dialog, External Intelligence, Knowledge Product

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Blogs and Wikis create authored trails for any

web content

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Journal + Web = Traction

•Stable content•Paragraph addressable

•Built-in time order•Flexible viewspecs for assembly of content

•Web browser interface

•Web linkable•Easily authored•Each server creates a cluster of secure spaces

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The Bottom Line

• Journals with time order (blog style) and collaboration in place (wiki style) handle working communication more effectively and securely than email

• The Journal + syndication (RSS) model works exceptionally well for situational awareness, including timeline correlation from many sources

• The Journal + syndication model scales like the web to handle the largest enterprises

Capturing the “momentarily important item” in a form that “will not fade”

Traction Now

Skins, Audit trail, relationships

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A Web Site Skin

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Log in and click to post or edit

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Front Page - Ocean skin

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Greg’s Internal Blog

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Lets look at post grl428

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Click to edit

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Edit history

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Compare edits

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A complete audit trail of actions as well as

edits

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Incoming or outgoing links

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Personal Blog Group BlogOne per person One per group

My opinions about everything

Working communication

Everything visible Permissioned spaces

Standalone weblog Many spaces, scalable

Outside firewall Inside / across firewall

Talk to the world! Talk to stakeholders

One author Many authors

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Traction TeamPage Designed for “Groups with a Goal”

Backbone for Enterprise Working Communication– Many spaces with many voices and purposes– Create Private as well as Public spaces– Provide authenticated, encrypted access

based on global identity and local permission

A hypertext work space– Make private comments on public content– Share files as well as articles (WebDAV)– Provides secure RSS and Search engine skins

Organized by Importance, Group and Topic– Traction spaces have permissions– Individuals see union of activity, based on

permissions

Easily organized by Time– A way to come up to speed,

quickly– Context for every interaction – You can correlate many timelines

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Traction Spaces: What’s Different?

• Each space can be open to a group or kept private - handles internal, stakeholder or public audience

• Each post or comment is addressed to a selected audience• Each post in a space can be from a different author - each

space specifies who has what rights (read, write, comment, edit, erase)

• The original author of a post can have special rights• Traction maintains a full edit and action history for

review• Each space becomes its own place, with its own norms and

permissions• Your single sign on identity and permissions give you a

20,000 foot view across all spaces you are interested in and permitted to see, in context.

• Traction calls each space with its own membership, rules, labels and presentation options a Project

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Roots References

• NLS TELECONFERENCING FEATURES: The Journal, and Shared-Screen Telephoning, Douglas C. Engelbart, Compcon 75 Digest, Sep 1975 pp 173-178 (AUGMENT,33076)

• Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware, Douglas C. Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute, June 1992 (AUGMENT,132811)

• Lost In The Archive: Vision, Artefact And Loss In The Evolution Of Hypertext, Belinda Barnet PhD Thesis, University of New South Wales, 2005

• Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative systems, Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish, Proceedings of CSCW '96

• Information Foraging, Peter Pirolli and Stuart K. Card, Psychological Review, 1999

• Social Software and the Politics of Groups, Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com, 3 March 2003

• Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence, Greg Lloyd, First International Conference on Business Technology and Competitive Intelligence, Nihon University, Tokyo. 25 October 2005. Traction ref Marketing6371

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Contact

Greg LloydPresident and Co-Foundergrl@tractionsoftware.com(401)-528-1145

Traction Software, Inc.245 Waterman StreetSuite 309Providence, RI 02906 USA

www.TractionSoftware.com