Thomas Barnett is open to the idea of participating in a Core/Gap wiki.
What I'm getting at is that PowerPoint has a scaling problem If you use too many slides you just getting people whose eyes are rolling into the backs of their heads and have a glazed expression on their faces.Barnett admits this himself when he talks about "accordion-style editing of the slides (add/compress, add/compress, etc.)". You lose information in the compression. If what you had was something that you could pull stuff out of in any order and at any pace, you wouldn't need to lose the information.
I don't think you can use a wiki for a presentation. That's what PowerPoint is for. A wiki is for taking things to the next level. If you want a sys admin force you're going to need literally thousands of articles to work out all the details of such a huge undertaking. A wiki can scale that high (see wikipedia which has many thousands of documents) while PowerPoint shouldn't ever be used for something that big.
If he were to set up a wiki, it would be an extraordinary opportunity to not just broadly describe a sys admin force but deeply describe it too, in a depth of experience-driven detail that would reinforce the idea to the point where it simply cannot be ignored.
Posted by: TM Lutas at May 7, 2004 12:50 PM
The PowerPoint is just the encapsulation of a lot of live Wiki-like workshops with dozens upon dozens of such experts with real-world experiennce. There we use GroupSystems, which is a wireless chat-room laptop system with sophisticated voting capabilities.So I'm saying I agree with your point and have used similar technology in fairly advanced workshop settings. That was how I did all the NewRuleSets.Project stuff. My dept, however, is moving beyond GroupSystems to a new system this summer, but same basic deal/concept.
Done well, it can be very powerful in conjunction with PPT presentation of ideas.
Posted by: Tom Barnett at May 8, 2004 08:16 AM
If given the space and the tools, would you be willing to participate in an internet/http accessible version of such a thing? There are people out there who would be honored to host such an ongoing project.Posted by: TM Lutas at May 9, 2004 10:50 AM
Would consider it. My department is moving in this direction somewhat. Might be able to fashion it as useful experiment.Would have to think on this (rush of events is not slowing for me yet, but will have to this summer for variety of reasons). Thanks for concept.
Posted by: Tom Barnett at May 9, 2004 02:09 PM