Is this revolutionary?
We think we are doing something revolutionary here. is this the first open-source, user-contributed business information? Open source and similar concepts are well established in other areas (political transparency, freeware, journalism, encyclopaedia...) but has anyone done this with business information in general or process guidance in particular (small business or otherwise)? Wikipedia has information in it that is useful to a business, but it is not business-focused. It is aimed at the "man-in-the-street" or rather the "person-on-the-browser" (POTB). A small business owner is little removed from a POTB but Wikipedia is too wide-ranging to qualify as "business information". ITIL comes close. It is certainly business process advice (for IT operations). it is open source but it is not user-contributed. They use the Cathedral not the Bazaar. We are heavily involved in the ITIL community and we have learned much from it. But we use the Bazaar model: development is done openly, by the community, on the internet. Actually strictly speaking we do not use a pure bazaar model: almost nobody does. Linux fixes are still accepted by an inner circle. Even wikipedia updates are still reviewed by moderators if they are libelous or subject to heated dispute. We are fairly close to the bazaar model. Any user who identifies themselves can submit. Proposed content is visible to all. Any user can vote or comment. An "inner circle" committee from the IoCP has final say on acceptance but they have strictly defined constitutional criteria for acceptance: the focus is on quality control. |

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Actually there are many sites out there if you dig
the point is most of them are languishing going nowhere. The lesson for us is that marketing and promotion are at least as important as content if we are to succeed.
I surveyed just the ITIL-related sites
Nobody else is getting very far
Not this one http://itil.technorealism.org/ (vid. http://itil.technorealism.org/index.php?page=Contributor_List - I of all people shouldn't laugh really)
or this one http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~InformationTechnologyInfrastructureLibrary ("Updated: 2005.03.18 ")
or this one http://wiki.ittoolbox.com/index.php/Topic:IT_Service_Management_(ITSM) last modified 22:09, 6 Jan 2006 , contributors: 1
or this one http://project.iu.hio.no/wiki/index.php/Chapter:_System_administration_and_business_processes:_ITIL died stillborn 10 Jun 2005
or this one http://www.cmcrossroads.com/cgi-bin/cmwiki/bin/view/ITIL/ConfigurationManagement "We're sorry but the page you requested could not be found"
or this one http://www.wikiprocess.com/wiki/Main_Page which has degenerated to the scatalogical
..and then I got bored.
This one http://www.itlibrary.org/ is one of the most active with a number of pages, recent activity, and 8 contributors. Like all true wikis they have a quality control problem http://www.itlibrary.org/index.php?page=Jose_Samuel. Also note that they seem to have done more to promote themsleves, rather than the "build it and they will come" strategy. Markweting and promotion is #1 priority for CoPr and #1 driver for funding.
Rob England
corepractice.org Webmaster and System Administrator