Our First Bug!

The first real bug happened when somehow the Create an Article page became altered so that the box where you put the name of the article that you want to create in and the box to click to create the page was removed from the page. Ingenious users then tried all sorts of creating pages, moving them, redirecting them or other operations to actually create a new page. Congratulations to those of you who figured out ways to get done what you wanted to do when the simple way no longer worked! I should have known that your experience with SAS has taught you that there are often many ways to skin the same cat.

Thanks to those of you who notified us when there was a problem - it took less than an hour to get the fix in place once we determined what the problem was.

The Baby is Born

sasCommunity.org has now been officially launched!

We made the first public announcement at the Opening Session of SAS Global Forum last night (I counted 23 hits during the Opening Session so there must have been some Blackberries out in the audience) and today we are manning a booth in the demo area. Folks are beginning to talk about the site and we now will need to see what the user community wants to do with the site. We have created the infrastructure for the site and some suggested ways of organizing the information, but users can start to use their own ideas as to what can be done on the site.

Innovation has been a theme of SAS Global Forum and sasCommunity.org falls right into that theme. As with all innovations, we have probably gotten some things wrong - but the beauty of doing the site based on a Wiki is that things can easily be redone as it is clear when there is a better way.

sasCommunity.org has started to have its presence on the web. It now appears as the first item for a Google search for sasCommunity (Windows Live too). I received my first Google alert for news[1]. You can also see a video of the opening session with the announcement of the site[2].

Gardening in the Spring

Despite some setbacks, I think Spring is finally upon us. While I am not a gardener, my wife[1] lives to go out and play in the dirt and make things just right.

We have been using the metaphor of a gardener for the sasCommunity.org website. The first time that we heard the term was when we were talking to the SocialText[2] folk about the possibility of hosting sasCommunity.org there. Tom Gruber has also used the metaphor, but when we queried him, he took it back to a social scientist Bonnie Nardi in 1992[3] and a journalist Jon Udell who talked about Collaborative Knowledge Gardening in an article in 2004.[4]

Just as in the yard outside of my house, sasCommunity.org is in need of some spring gardening. We need users to visit the articles already created and help to make them more attractive. We have already seen instances of users who corrected spelling or grammar for previously posted articles. Others who have begun to understand how a Wiki works have gone in and fixed the wiki markup language or the application of categories in order to make the article more accessible.

We have even posted a job description (Gardener for sasCommunity.org) for users to take on this responsibility.

Without someone spending time in our yard to weed, water, and help the plants out, our yard would not be near the wonderful environment which it is. sasCommunity.org will only blossom if enough of the users actually spend some time doing some gardening. You are emPOWERed to do the editing - go do it so the experience is more enjoyable for all.

I have started reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.[1] Several other folks who are involved in the rollout of sasCommunity.org have recommended the book and I am looking forward to reading more of it. An incident today, however, pointed out how things have changed in the way we live in the Web 2.0 world.

I had purchased a multipurpose gadget that looks like a pen, but is also a stylus and a laser pointer. Earlier this week the batteries gave out so today while doing errands I stopped by Radio Shack to pick up 4 new batteries. The clerk looked it up in the chart and started to pull cards off of the display. As he did that, I noticed that each battery was $4.95. Since I had paid less than $20 for the stylus/pen, it made no sense to me to pay $20 each time I needed new batteries! I came home, looked on e-bay and ordered a pack of 50 of the correct size batteries for $12.50. This connection to the resource that I needed would not have been possible in our old way of doing business.

User:Donh and I had a great discussion with Aaron today about the look and feel of the main page. In general we decided that we should move all of the top level navigation links over to the left hand side and leave the rest of the area for actual content. We decided on having an area for "What's new on sasCommunity.org" and "Getting Involved in sasCommunity.org" as two major sections. Particularly the what's new section should be updated from time to time.

We also decided to create an area where major links on the page will be listed along with icons to draw attention to them, similar to the "Sister Projects" section on the Wikipedia site [1]. Aaron will consult with some of his resources to see what they can come up with.

User:Wes2008 has the distinction of the first person to intentionally change content that was not intended to be changed, specifically to change the SAS Global Forum heading on the Future Conferences page and replacing it with a link to NESUG! Once we have the production site, this behavior will be prohibited.

The Wiki software easily allows the change to be backed off and the history tab tells who did what which provides a permanent record of such activity.

This points out that we need to have a person who takes care of all of these housekeeping activities - we have been informally calling this role, that of a gardener. The EB needs to spend some time considering how this role is staffed.

We now have email @sasCommunity.org working. Currently the only defined account is webmaster@sasCommunity.org which already has a link on the site. We can now publicize this address as to the place to complain about problems on the site.

The logo has been refined and unless we hear differently, this will be the logo that is used when the site goes into production.

We have requested a higher resolution version of the logo to be used for promo purposes at SAS Global Forum.

Gary McQuown is one of the individuals who we invited to preview the site and potentially add content. He responded and Don and I replied to his email.

Philip,

1) Why replace SAS-L which is currently the "primary site that SAS users will turn to for information from other users"?

sasCommunity.org is not meant to "replace" SAS-L. The thoughts here are a slight elaboration from what Don posted on his blog.

We know for many of the folks on SAS-L it might be surprising to learn that the overwhelming majority of SAS users don't even know it exists.

The idea behind sasCommunity.org is that we hope it can become the single entry point for all SAS users. Whether the functionality of SAS-L gets integrated via FAQ pages, forums, etc. will depend on the community. We expect that some (maybe a lot, maybe a little) of what goes on in SAS-L will evolve to use the web 2.0 concepts in sasCommunity. Regardless, there can be a SAS-L page there that exposes the list and that community to a much larger audience.

In addition, the use of the internet has changed a lot in the years since SAS-L migrated from BITNET which was restricted to academic sites. Many other technologies now exist to allow communications between users. So one idea is that sasCommunity.org is like the meeting place for the users as well as all the various online groups.

2) Why does SI not mine the information provided on SAS-L, SCONSIG, etc. and enhance their existing site?

You will have to ask SAS Institute that question. sasCommunity.org is being created by the SAS Global Users Group, not SAS Institute. We are hoping that users will want to contribute content. If some of the users want to do the mining and putting the data on sasCommunity.org, that would be great. We want this site to be by the users, for the users. We do not want to have the information filtered through SAS Institute. If you want that information, go to http://support.sas.com.

3) Is this an attempt to get users to provide an alternative to the SAS support?

This again seems to assume that this is an initiative of SAS Institute. As users, we do not want SAS Institute. to do less support.

If SI really wants to help the "user community", they should enhance their existing site at their own expense and allow user feedback/input.

My $.02,

Thanks for writing and sharing your perspective.

-Phil & Don

Gary

Making sure information on sasCommunity.org is "correct"

Many of those who have previewed the site have worried about individuals posting "incorrect" information.

Without getting into a long, abstract philosophical discussion about what truth is, the Wikipedia's definition is that it was people agree on as being so. While there are stories of obvious mistakes in Wikipedia, the system has really worked remarkably well.[1]

The model of a Wiki is that if you are reading something that you know is incorrect, you have the ability to correct it on the spot! in sasCommunity.org, we have required that a user login using an account where we have a verified email address. This will reduce anonymous editors, but obviously will allow the determined individual to create a pseudonym for making changes. If we are alerted to anyone doing this in a malicious fashion, we will attempt to ban that user from making changes to sasCommunity.org.

This self-correcting method is the same that has worked well in SAS-L land where someone is likely to followup an incorrect email with a correction. We think that the Wiki will make it even easier to do!

If you have a particular interest in a topic, you can "watch" the page by clicking the watch tab when you are logged in. Depending on your preferences, when a page you are watching is changed you will be notified by being placed on your My Watchlist page and (optionally) by sending you an email.

Active users may want to frequently visit the Recent Changes link and note any changes on pages of interest to them and visit them.

-phil

In an effort to begin to build content, we have opened up the site to a larger group of participants. These include about 15-20 additional individuals who were nominated by the SAS-L folks that we had previously engaged in the process as well as the section chairs for SAS Global Forum 2007.

The content of that email was:

The SAS Global Users Executive Board is developing a new web presence for users of the SAS software, worldwide. It is our intent for this to be the primary site that SAS users will turn to for information from other users. Your name has been suggested as someone who would be willing to preview the site and contribute content to the site prior to it being made publicly available. I am happy you extend this invitation to you. Please do not disclose this information to others until we have made more progress in adding content to the site and have announced it publicly.

You are invited to visit the sasCommunity.org site. Note that this site is being actively utilized for development and thus the system can be brought down or made nonfunctional at any time without warning. This site has been built using open source components by a team from the IT staff at SAS.

To visit the site you should go to http://www.sasCommunity.org and you will be prompted for a userid/password to access the site. Once announced, it will not have this initial access constraint. The userid to use is xxxxx and the password is xxxxxxx

At this point you will be directed to the Main page – note that this is not the layout of the front page that is envisioned, it is just a placeholder where we can collaborate on the content to be included at the time of the kickoff of the site in Orlando.

To be able to contribute content you will need to log into the site. There is a link at the top left of the page which will allow you to create an account. As part of the registration process you will need to confirm your email address.

Please feel free to experiment and to contribute your ideas about the developing site. Leave your comments on the site. Please come back often as we expect the content to be growing rapidly during the next several weeks.

You also are free to create your own home page or blog. You may want to read some of my more recent posts on my blog at http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Special:ListSubBlogs/User:Statprof.

Feel free to email me or don if you have questions. If you know of others who you feel would be willing to work on the site over the next month, please email me their names.

-phil

I looked at a number of FAQs done with Wikis which were available on the web publicly.

Here are some of those that I thought were informative for what we want to do on the SAS FAQ portion of sasCommunity.org. Note that not all of these use the MediaWiki software which is the infrastructure for this site.

A collection of FAQs about everything! Nice layout: http://www.wikifaq.com/Main_Page

cssDiscussList FAQ http://css-discuss.incutio.com/

The one for SAP https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/wiki

LinuxGamerGuide http://linux.strangegamer.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

FreeDeskTop http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FAQ

GnuCash http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ

RPMOrg FAQ http://wiki.rpm.org/Docs/RpmOrgFAQ

Fedora Directory Server http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/FAQ

X.Org FAQ http://wiki.x.org/wiki/FAQ

GPGNU FAQ http://www.gpgpu.org/wiki/FAQ

PCLinuxOSOS New User Guide http://www.pclinuxonline.com/wiki/HomePage

sIFR http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/

Micrformats FAQ http://microformats.org/wiki/faq

Fluent FAQ http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Main_Page

Amarok http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Main_Page

Inkspace FAQ http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ

Word Wind http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/World_Wind_FAQ

Python FAQ http://effbot.org/pyfaq/

Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ

eBay http://www.ebaywiki.com/

Spent some time today trying to provide some structure for the Category:User Groups section of the website. Using information from the http://www.SAS.com website as a template, I set up groups for USA, Canada & Australia/New Zealand and added stub pages for each of the groups I could identify. Hopefully, these will get populated and the stem articles will provide a starting place for each group to provide content about their own site.

Also spent some time on gardener activities, deleting some obsolete pages, adding templates and other weeding activities.

Today is a huge day - the production version of this Wiki has gone live!

The only folks who have been given the access information are members of the SAS Global User Group Executive Board (who are responsible for the site), representatives from the regional users group and selected members of the SAS-L community. If there are others who you think would be willing to spend some time between now and SAS Global Forum in April providing content, please let me know as we want to have as much content available prior to making it public as we can.

An idea that I had was to create a category for SAS Tutorials where material (slides, handouts, cheat sheets, etc) that users have created that they are willing to share. I am impressed by the work of the Internet Epidemiology Supercourse [1] project which has now collected over 3,000 lectures slide sets which have been contributed by experts throughout the world.

Please leave suggestions for the site here until we have a better place to put it all.

Thanks to Joe & Tom and all who have made this day possible.

-phil

Ron Fehnd from the CDC was kind enough to send an email pointing out a recent paper that discusses the use of a Wiki as the ultimate documentation method for TeX [1]. Depending on your perspective, TeX is either more or less complex than SAS :-) It is really a nice discussion and raises many of the points those of us who have been working on sasCommunity.org have been saying.

I should add, in case you have not noted this yet, that you can use a subset of TeX for editing contributions in MediaWiki (the software used for this site). See [2]

The issue has come up about the priority in implementing the feature of having private (restricted access) areas of the Wiki that the leadership of user groups can use for conducting the business of running the user group.

We can discuss this on our leadership call next Tuesday, but here is my take on it.

The private areas are not essential with respect to the public unveiling of the site at the time of Orlando.

However, the private area is an important issue in order to get buy in by the leaderships of the various user groups. We will need to have a time line for this feature to announce at the RUG meeting on Sunday in Orlando. We will also need to have settled on a position about whether we are going to host separate websites (e.g. www.mwsug.org) and whether we are going to support traditional mailing lists by the time of that meeting.

The organizational committee had a call today. We decided: 1) sent out info about access to site to organizational committee + Bob Hamer and Rich LaValley - that includes all of those on either the infrasctructure or taxonomy committees 2) will send out invites later to regional reps; sas-l inner group; deployment committee 3) Sally will get list of regional reps from Greg 4) Sally will request Greg produce a list of the registration information which we want to collect so we will have requirements when Joe has time to get to it.

--Statprof 17:53, 26 February 2007 (EST)

This is a good test of a new blog