Teblog

R. Todd Stephens on Enterprise 2.0

Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by new ways of working. Enterprise 2.0, for example, has crept up on us over the past few years. Those who've tracked it from the start have something of an advantage in that they pretty much know what all the elements and issues are. Anyone coming to it cold might find themselves misled by evangelists or confused by the propellor-heads.

It's not easy to get on top of things and see all the elements in a sensible perspective. Three cheers then for R. Todd Stephens who is Senior Technical Architect of Collaboration and Online Services for the AT&T Corporation. He has been involved in corporate IT for 25 years with a high focus on enterprise information management since 1999. He has produced an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint, a chart which can act as a checklist for all the elements of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint (click chart to get download)

The chart totally avoids product names, with the sole exception of 'Office', but even that is a functional description rather than an explicit plug for Microsoft. The chart is in five columns: Business Drivers (for investing in Web 2.0 technology); Actors (the people involved); Technologies (and related technologies); Methods (how the technologies are used); and Value-Add (to the employee, the department and the business).

The chart is enterprise-centric, in the sense that the final column doesn't mention value to customers. Or, for that matter, suppliers. Mentions of clients and customers are dotted around the chart, so it's not as if they're being ignored. But such an extension to the Value-Add column might help stimulate more consideration of who the business exists to serve.

Clues do exist in the minutiae of the chart. Sub-boxes contain items like Education, Training, Consulting, Self service and so on, but you sense that these are primarily seen as revenue or cost-saving opportunities. A box for 'Customers' has 'Consumers' and 'Producers' as sub-boxes. Quite often customers have their own forums where they help each other out. It costs the enterprise very little but is a tremendous value-add for the customers. But then again, you could argue that this drops the support costs for the company.

Perhaps I need to wake up to the fact that value-add for customers will nearly always brings a reciprocal benefit for the company.

The good thing about this chart is that it is pretty comprehensive in terms of identifying all the Web 2.0 elements and shows how they fit into an organisation's activities. While setting up an 'under the radar' blog, wiki, IM or whatever is a trivial exercise, to derive real business value someone somewhere has to look at the bigger picture and figure out how to turn skunk works initiatives into corporate processes while retaining the spirit that made them attractive in the first place.

I think it was Napoleon or Nelson who used to toss a coin when faced with difficult decisions. If, when the coin landed, he was disappointed with the outcome, he'd go with his instincts. A chart like this is similar. Without it, you'd be trying to make this stuff up. With it, you have a framework and if any of it jars, just alter it or extend it.

IMHO it makes a fine starting point.

Sustainability winner: SOAK

I'm not totally sold on the Microsoft environmental story (hint: lifecycle costs of replacing kit) but you have to take your hat off to the company for selecting the theme 'a world where technology enables a sustainable environment' for its 2008 Imagine Cup for students. The winners were announced this week and one of them, an Australian team from four universities, came up with project SOAK - a way of managing farm water resources using, of course, Microsoft software.

SOAK, by the way, stands for Smart Operational Agriculture toolKit). It contains no particularly original components, but they've all been put together in an innovative way - a mashup of hardware and software to eke out water resources.

When IT, or ICT really, is allowed to be part of 'real life' like this, then all manner of things become possible and I think that many organisations forget this. Many still regard ICT as a bit of a pain rather than a potential partner in solving environmental issues.

Anyway, enough of that, let's get back to SOAK. It amalgamates information from a number of sources such as ground moisture, water supplies, rain, wind, temperature and weather forecasts and uses this to fine tune the crop irrigation. It means that the crops usually get the just the water they need. SMS messages can alert farm managers of problems and the whole farm can be monitored through a good-looking web-based control panel which combines Virtual Earth displays with statistical information. This can be viewed through a PC or a PDA.

With almost drought conditions, Australian farmers suffered a 59 percent drop in yield last summer, despite irrigation taking some 66 percent of the country's water. The SOAK team chose their project well and it's highly likely to move rapidly to commercialisation.

Because the team members (Long Zheng, David Burela, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya) were studying at different universities, they kept in touch largely electronically. Practical as well as green. And, judging from their email addresses, they weren't totally in Microsoft's thrall. If you want to sense the excitement, take a look at David Burela's Twitter page. Or, if you want more project details, try this blog post.

These guys are on a roll. Well done Microsoft for choosing such a great subject. And well done guys for winning the software category.

[BTW: a Singaporean team won top honours for  Embedded Development and Brazil for Game Development.]

Who controls your personal information?

Doc Searls is a long time blogger, a deep thinker, a co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, an open source wizard, and too many other things to mention. He is held in massively high regard by all the social computing pioneers I've met over the past five or so years. He's currently on a mission to invert the relationship between us and the data about ourselves. Instead of repeatedly providing different cuts of information to everyone with an interest in us, we actually hold the information once and let it out according to need. (If you're reading this, Doc, I apologise for the horrible simplification.)

Doc recently found himself in the world of his namesakes - doctors. He'd undergone a medical exploration which resulted in him contracting pancreatitis. This in turn resulted in hospitalisation and a period of considerable discomfort. After watching the progress of his illness, it was good to follow his recovery and eventual discharge on Twitter. (Why do I care? Because I met him a few years ago and thought he was a good egg with some interesting insights.)

Not surprisingly, on his emergence from the 'health care' system, he had a few words to say on the madness of big systems which are not at all patient-centric, despite any assurances to the contrary. You can read his blog post for the specifics of his situation. The key point is that we know a lot more about ourselves than any doctor can hope to absorb from a medical history.

In his blog post, Searls chose to cite Fred Trotter, a US citizen amd open source software advocate, who said "Given current primary care reimbursements, my doctor is incented do everything in his power to spend under 10 minutes talking to me." I don't suppose it's hugely different anywhere else in the world. They just don't have time to unearth the key facts that lie in our medical history and, of course, the stuff that *we* know that lies outside our medical records is totally inaccessible.

In our own family, we make great use of a cranial osteopath. None of the information relating to his work finds its way into our official medical records. I also know that dairy products affect me within a few minutes of consuming them, but I've never bothered to share this information with the doctor. In fact, I rarely go to the doctor. The last time I went, I had a very swollen eyelid which, as well as looking unsightly, was causing double vision. The doctors in the local practice and the the hospital were all baffled. After several weeks of unsuccessful experimental treatments, I ran into a friend in the street and she said "that's an allergic reaction." She was right, we'd bought a goose down duvet just before the eyelid swelled up. I didn't bother to tell the doctor. It's still in the official records as 'lid-lag'.

There is a point to all this, and that is that we should somehow (no-one's figured out the details yet) become the custodians of information about ourselves, letting it out to others under our control. Doc Searls and Adriana Lukas are just two of the people who are investigating slightly different flavours. It's a bit like the early days of social computing, a bit 'wild west', but the fundamental ideas make sense. It's been christened VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which strikes me as a bit restrictive, even if it does resonate with and oppose CRM.

If you're interested in keeping up with, or contributing to, progress then you might like to head over to the ProjectVRM blog.

Will software gallop to our rescue?

My first love, apart from my family and close friends, has always been software. I say 'always' but, in truth, it's only been since November 1965, when I got 100 percent in a programming aptitude test. "Good Lord," I thought in astonishment, "And I can actually get paid for doing this?"

Since then, software has been at the heart of my life. Along the way, other skills have been added to the portfolio, particularly writing and teaching. And these skills have taken me into other areas, such as environmental sustainability. First in 1973 but then in a much more substantial way in 2002 when I became closely involved with an exceedingly large sustainability exemplar project. And now with Freeform Dynamics, where I am the environmental specialist, among other things.

While the economic and environmental bad news whirls around our heads, the one thing I know for sure is that software will be a major contributor to overcoming our ills. Not a panacea, but a fine contributor.

As Nicholas Negroponte has been saying for 15 years, "move bits not atoms". And that is one of the major contributions that software can make. In fact, only software can make it. Whether it's Citrix Online style screen-sharing or remote access or full blown telepresence conference rooms, they not only cut the moving of atoms, they also accelerate business processes and cut travel bills.

The other good thing about software is that it is a product with barely any environmental footprint. It can be delivered as a stream of bits and be paid for with another stream of bits.

For those that don't know, I used to be a software publisher, banging out product in expensive boxes with clunky manuals and floppy disks. But since 2001, this very part-time business has been run wholly electronically from the corner of a server somewhere in America. The programmer and I meet rarely (once a year on average), but we're in intimate, friendly and fairly continuous, contact online. And, of course, all support, 'paperwork' and accounting is done electronically.

Our product was lovingly crafted in C++ (following my initial development using the 8080 assembler) and it is tiny for what it does.

I'm not trying to sell anything here, but I can't help noticing that, by contrast, most of the systems I see today are packed full of bloatware, along with programs and data files which have become moribund. But most users are incapable of dealing with such issues unaided. They need software tools.

If larger programs could be debloated and users helped (in plain English please) with program and file removal, we could stall the madness of buying new equipment just because our old stuff has become clogged up and slow.

As with the organisational benefits of 'atoms to bits', users will benefit from slicker running, gain a financial benefit and reduce their environmental impact all at the same time.

Now, someone tell me these things exist. Please?

Or, if not, why not?

Thank you.

IBM's Bluehouse: a human hub?

Even after 42 years in IT, I still tend to forget that projects are always at their most attractive before they're implemented.

A good idea captivates and it's easy to get carried away with enthusiasm, temporarily forgetting that there's a whole lot of hard work in moving from idea to reality.

In the case of an IT product or service, the hurdles are not just technical. You have inconvenient things like channels to market and user acceptance to consider.

All this flooded into my mind following a visit to Lotusphere Comes To You at the Wembley Stadium the other day. Having visited the main event in Orlando earlier this year and been really fired up by Bluehouse I started to mull the reality behind the idea.

Bluehouse is intended to be a software-as-a-service offering from IBM for companies with 5 to 500 employees. According to IBM/Lotus, it will "provide extranet collaboration services for open social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing." And it is designed to appeal to those with no internal IT.

It still sounds good to me and I am sure that IBM will have no trouble pulling it off technically. But the way ahead is murky. IBM isn't used to dealing with small companies and its channel isn't used to selling subscription services. Nor, in the main, are the users ready for this kind of SaaS.

It would be interesting to think of IBM as a latter-day web business with curvy corners and off-the-page selling. This strikes me as an unlikely route to market. Or it could jump into bed with (or buy) someone with a ready-made channel. But this seems expensive for an idea which might still be ahead of mainstream user thinking.

I suspect that IBM is being driven by wishful thinking and the prospect of all that lovely monthly revenue pouring in from millions of SMBs who are presently beyond reach. Once attached to the IBM mothership, the opportunity exists for lots of additional revenue from an incremental expansion of the services which can be pushed (or is it pulled?) down the pipe.

But then, another scenario occurs to me. What if a company wanted to connect its business partners to its own collaboration services? It might have already bought into the Lotus collaboration story big-time and sees value in extending its reach. This might be possible, right now, using an assortment of publicly available services, but it might not offer the security, accountability or reliability that matches the company's governance and integration requirements.

Auto-makers and insurance companies provide intimate access to their suppliers and agencies for commercial transactions. I wonder if Bluehouse could end up becoming a hub for human transactions?

Vendor Relationship Management UK-style

One of the most challenging, charming, intelligent and irritating people I've ever met is one Adriana Lukas. She was a leading blogger in 2001, long before most people had ever heard of blogging. She understood the ramifications of social software before we knew that there were any ramifications. That would be at the end of 2002. She really was a classic voice in the wilderness and, through speaking engagements, massive amounts of networking and, in my case, arduous discussions, she brought many people to an understanding of the potential of social computing.

Now, she's mounted her charger again and her lance is firmly tilted at people's control of their personal data. In classic Lukas fashion, she's looked askance at the accepted ways of doing things and asked 'why?' Incremental developments creep up on us and we don't realise that the status quo is possibly not where we'd be had we realised the implications of each micro-step.

In this particular case, we're talking about the data that other people hold about us. Banks, social software sites, wine merchants, anyone, in fact, with whom we have dealings. Adriana's view is that we should be in charge of our personal information and reveal appropriate parts when it suits us. Thus, a bank might be given permission to check our address. This would be done through a standard feed mechanism (probably Atom) and the bank would be given an access key. It could poll the address whenever it felt like it. And, if it were a new account, the bank would be given the key and all the relevant pieces of information could be picked up, without the individual having to do yards of typing. At the end of the relationship, the ties can be cut and potentially valuable new personal information put beyond reach.

A wine buff might decide to expose their drinking habits and wine-tasting findings to the local wine merchant. Same thing. Merchant subscribes and, in the gift of the information owner, gets a glimpse into their client's life. Some people might mix their feeds (no pun intended) and others might feel more secure with separate feeds for separate 'friends'. Some might want to encrypt information. Providing the standards chosen are those which are acceptable to the accessing party then this is possible too.

This is an inversion of the relationships we have come to expect. It makes the supplier the supplicant. It puts the buyer in charge. Or, if we're talking government and civil service scenarios, it makes them the servants and the citizens the masters, which is as it should be.

This is all part of the vision of Project VRM. And, yes, this stands for Vendor Relationship Management, a deliberate inversion of the Customer Relationship Management term which, of course, is nothing of the sort. While born from the same roots and overlapping to a large extent, you will notice that Adriana's take on it is totally individual-centric, while the American-led version is more all-embracing. But, in each case, the aim is to restore some balance into the relationships.

In 2001, when Adriana started blogging, people probably thought her mad. In 2002, when she started articulating the value of social networking inside and outside organisations, she was still alone. In 2003, when Google bought blogging service Pyra, she knew she was on to something. And then, in 2005 she was finally vindicated as the mainstream media picked up on social networking.

Right now, I suspect she feels as lonely with respect to VRM as she did when she was blogging in 2001. It will be interesting to see if, once again, she has managed to hit the nail on the head.

ISPs and householders in the front line

Oh dear, oh dear. Seems like our government is continuing its sleepwalk towards another disaster. What do you mean, "which one?" Okay, you have a point. Two things in particular. One is that it has a plan to shrink the police force and get neighbourhood watch members to take over some of its duties. The other, according to the Times newspaper, is to get ISPs to ban users from the internet if they are caught downloading illegal copies of copyright material.

Don't both of these proposals sound a bit daft? In the first place, I thought we paid the government to keep us safe. Although to listen to recent news, it's been failing spectacularly in that particular duty. Members of neighbourhood watch are a) probably scared witless to patrol the streets after dark and b) even if they caught someone, then what? The odds of the fuzz turning up in time to do anything useful is close to zero. There's a disconnect between the government mind and reality.

Now the government is a step closer to asking ISPs to catch people who download stuff they shouldn't, then to act as prosecutor, jury and judge. How convenient. Be seen to suck up to the entertainment moguls without actually having to do anything more than issue yet another set of regulations.

And what's the ISP to do? Inspect every single packet that passes through its hands? Divine what the content is and issue warning emails to infringers? If they infringe again, make sure they're disconnected. And, if they get reconnected and infringe again, ensure they never darken the internet's doorstep again. This, apparently, can be done by notifying other ISPs of the identity of the guilty party.

It's mad. Utterly mad. Bureaucracy gone totally insane.

Listen. With a partner I sell software online. Have done for years. We can be fairly certain that illegal copies have been made (despite our rather clever mechanisms for avoiding it). But whose responsibility is it to deal with the issue? Ours.

We try to be nice to customers so they tell others what jolly decent people we are. We try not to rip people off price-wise, although some would argue that we fail in that respect. But they wouldn't be customers anyway, so what are we losing? Some customers pay us more than once, which suggests our price can't be that wrong.

It's up to us to get the business model right so that the decent majority do the right thing. It's up to us to decide whether to chase commercial-scale infringers through the courts - a horribly expensive process and a distraction to boot.

If the government really does want to prosecute copyright infringers, then it should do it through the normal legal processes. Just as asking householders to catch criminals is mad, so is expecting ISPs to do its dirty work.

Safe corporate social computing?

Look around at social and collaborative computing and what do you see? A complete hotch potch of different systems, some of which run safely behind the firewall, others which sit out there on someone else's servers. You hop from Flickr to Outlook to Skype to Facebook to discussion groups, or whatever. Each has its own approach and, often, integration is only possible through hyperlinks or copy/paste.

Add to this the fact that you're working on different devices, laptop, desktop, internet café terminal, mobile phone, Blackberry and so on and what have you got? A lot of time wasting, a lack of security and data distributed all over the show.

It can't last. To move forward we need to get to a point where all we're concerned about is doing stuff with our information and other people while the systems themselves move towards invisibility.

Of course we're going to have to get from where we are now to where we'd like to be then. One issue is integration. Another is multiplatform. And a third is security. I'm sure there are others, but they'll do for now.

We need common interfaces, the ability to surface our information to whatever device we happen to be using and to do it in a way that doesn't  expose us or our organisation to risk.

Enter stage left an organisation called Outblaze*. I had some minor contact with its CEO, Yat Siu, in 2005 and I'm ashamed to say I totally forgot about his company name. His tale about internet connection speeds in the Far East is what stunned me at the time. He was talking about 100 megs being common, with up to a gig being possible, if you were prepared to pay $215/month at the time. He now has a 1 gig connection to his home.

This means that using the internet is a totally different experience over there. And the software and user interfaces that have evolved are highly visual and engaging - you feel more as if you're in a virtual cartoon world than working a computer.

Outblaze sits quietly in the background providing 'white label' messaging and social computing services to a wide range of clients. Try MSN, AOL and Yahoo! for size. It's big. It has 76 million users tied to 480,000 web domains. Its clients offer Outblaze services as if they were their own. Outblaze picks up a monthly fee per user based on which particular services are picked from the company's long menu. At a broad level, it provides messaging, security, collaboration, community/social networking, digital identity, compliance and gaming facilities. Each heading contains, on average, half a dozen or so sub categories.

If you took the community/social networking stack, for example, it contains: social networking platform, online video editing and sharing, photo sharing, bookmarks sharing, blogs, wiki, chat, forums/message boards and dating/friend matching. It supports devices from mobile phones to desktop PCs and anything that can use the web.

The company is already hugely successful around the world and it is now extending its reach into the enterprise and, at the same time, it wants to increase its European presence, where it (vaguely) claims to have between five and ten million users. It thinks that Europe is more ready for its approach than the USA.

Richard Bye is the company's vp of sales and corporate development for EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa), so he's the guy in the hot seat for this initiative. He believes, and he's probably right, that enterprises want their own social networks but they can't do it in-house and they don't really trust the public services. Nor do they want the capital expenditure or the disruption associated with such an initiative.

It's obvious where this is heading. With a solid base of experience of running enterprise-class hosted and integrated systems, Outblaze's system appears to check all the boxes. No doubt it will try and get its leverage from working through the third parties that already serve these prospects. Potentially, it's a straightforward value-add for them and huge leverage for Outblaze.

It will come into conflict with some presently outsourced services. Messagelabs springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

And, who knows, perhaps we can learn to relax a bit and allow a little of the Far Eastern culture to penetrate our rather stolid computer interfaces. All we need is a bit more bandwidth.

PS The above blog was written just before I left for Lotusphere on 20th Jan. On 21st January, IBM/Lotus announced  the beta of its own social/collaboration hosted service called bluehouse. If IBM can get its rollout and provisioning strategy right, it could put the company centre stage.

*Outblaze's new website should be online by the end of January. Having looked at the old one on Wayback Machine, I can't blame the company for hiding it.

Green thinking

One of my responsibilities at Freeform Dynamics is covering environmental issues in the context of ICT. Of course, like everyone else, I get bombarded from all directions with people with wonderful solutions, most of which require customers to fork out for more kit.

It really is an attractive option too. First of all, most of us are unaware of the environmental harm that new and jettisoned kit does. Second of all, companies generally save enough money as a result of the changes to pay for the equipment in fairly short order.

So why am I bothered? Especially when I agree with the broad thrust of the changes being suggested - consolidation, virtualisation, smart power etcetera. I guess I'm bothered because the approach is too narrowly focused. Going for the low-hanging "save energy" fruit is all well and good but where will the vendors be when the ICT folk start to raise their sights?

Will the vendors willingly identify the environmental impact of creating, using and disposing of each piece of equipment? That will require a deep understanding of the supply chain, right back to the components of the components. And it will involve a lot of cost and maybe stall or slow new machine purchases as the implications sink in among customers.

Is there anyone out there who can come up with realistic numbers for teleworking? We know that it saves commutes but, if you take a holistic view, what's the net gain and where does it accrue? Household heating, energy, space etc have to be offset against the savings at the company. I think we have a gut feel that these things are working out for the best, but not in terms that an accountant or an environmental auditor might understand.

Teleconferencing, when well executed, can be a terrific time, cost and environment saver, although it's bad news for airlines.

A ton of no-cost things can be done, like getting staff to change their habits - switching off desktop PCs, chargers and lights when there's no-one around or redistributing hot and cool equipment in the data centre, for example.

But all this is just lists of actions. Somehow we need to get people to think differently, so that making these decisions becomes second nature. We can force costs into users' consciousnesses by making sure first that IT takes the hit on its energy costs. Then they will be motivated to find ways to devolve these costs to their departmental clients. (I read somewhere that only one percent of IT managers/CIOs in North America have any idea what their energy costs are. And I doubt it's much different elsewhere.)

I think the bottom line is for everyone to start thinking in terms of input-process-output. (Sound familiar?) In a fractally sort of way, this can be applied from macro to micro level. From the company looking at what it's doing right down to an individual, they are all capable of looking at what resources they draw on, how they exploit them and what outputs result, both good and bad. IT can raise its game hugely by supporting the company in new initiatives in all three areas.

But, to radically reduce costs and alter our environmental impact, we don't just need to reprogram our computers. We actually need to reprogram our brains.

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) on successful wikis

Yesterday, Jimmy Wales blew into town to address a huge audience of information professionals at the Online Information conference. Wales, in case you don't know, co-founded Wikipedia which is intended to become "the sum of all human knowledge". Written for the people by the people. And hugely popular, to boot.
As ever with these kind of events, the question and answer session at the end was just as interesting as the prepared presentation. It was a chance for some baffled people to get to grips with some key issues. While these were Wikipedia-focused they do resonate with other wiki activity, including that in your own organisation perhaps.
Freeform Dynamics recently ran a survey asking people how they connect at work or education, as opposed to in their personal life. The 1500 or so responses came from IT professionals and, that subset that liked responding to a survey on this subject. Interestingly, in the work context, wikis were read by more than 55 percent of respondents and contributed to by about 25 percent. This suggests that wikis are certainly on the business communication radar. Wales' thoughts could well help avoid some false starts.
On participation, he talked of applying the 'neutrality principle' to writing style. I think he means avoid opinion and stick to facts. Or, to don the behavioural psychologist's hat, to keep contributions adult rather than parental or childish. A debate is more constructive and likely to lead to a better outcome than a fight.
In a similar vein, Wales urges courtesy and respect for the community. He gives the example of journalists who think its clever to edit a contribution to see how long it takes for anyone to notice. The important takeaway here is that people cannot be expected to just start contributing to Wikipedia without understanding and agreeing to some basic ground rules.
He doesn't regard Wikipedia as the place to publish original research. For a start, no-one would be able to check it. Second of all, it gets away from the principle of the "sum of all human knowledge", in the sense of a summary, understandable to the layman but with sources cited for those who want to drill deeper. In Wikipedia's case, he politely suggests that researchers get their material published elsewhere first and then cite this as a source. The 'summary' idea is a good one. The difficulty in a company wiki is that it's sometimes quicker to write or cut and paste a long discourse than a thought-out summary. But, if no-one reads it, it seems rather counter-productive.
On credibility, it's somewhat easier for humans to assess this than for it to be calculated automatically. Wales would be interested in seeing a background colour wash in Wikipedia according to the credibility of the writer. But, as he points out, a mathematical formula might regard his frequent contributions to the policy part of Wikipedia as 'argumentative' and downgrade him accordingly.
Humans take into account their knowledge of a person, whether their changes and challenges have improved the content, their engagement style generally, their biases, etc. Try working out a reliable algorithm to deal with that lot. Perhaps Wales is right to be experimenting with it but with no firm plans for its introduction.
Another thing to bear in mind is that a wiki isn't like paper. It's theoretically limitless. Wales noted that the English language write up of Pokémon provides details of all the various regions but the German version has not allowed this. People don't have to read this stuff, so does it matter whether it's there or not? Since wikis are largely textual, they demand little in storage resources.
Finally, there's the question of motivation. In Wikipedia's case, Wales believes it boils down to humanitarianisn or fun, where the fun is being part of an enthusiastic and engaged community of common interest. He points out that "doing wikis alone doesn't work". He suggests five or six people - friends, enemies, it doesn't matter - engaging day in and day out is the way to go.
In our coporate wikis, we can probably discard the humanitarian aspects but fun and community building sound like good motivations.