Version: 1.3

Sounds familiar ?

- "One day we should write down what we've learned"
- "How are we supposed to know what's going on ?"
- "Do we have a kind of Blog or Wiki where I can put what I've just learned ?"

Knowledge-Sharing within companies, organizations and projects is not working the way it should be. Here's why:

The barrier for sharing knowledge is too high: No time, no idea where to put the content, no idea what format should be used. The consequence: Knowledge gets lost before it is being captured.

Wisdomclouds significantly lowers the barrier for knowledge-sharing. Users just have to answer one question:
What have you learned ?


Knowledge is automatically shared within predefined and closed networks of experts ("wisdomclouds") and stored persistently so it can be easily found lateron.

You and your team can use a wisdomclouds to :

• Communicate within your team in a Twitter-like manner
• Collect and coordinate the status of progress of different team-members being at remote places
• Build team-internal knowledge-databases within topic-clusters such as "Java Programming", "Server-Setup", "Eclipse Tips & Tricks"
• Capture knowledge from parting team-members and providing it to the rest of the team
• Use it as an external team's daily journal to announce new features of your product
• Store relevant team-internal settings such as server-names and passwords which may only be visible within your team
• Create Wiki-like documentation-pages about your team's relevant processes such as bug-tracking, software-testing, deployment and installation
• Share Source-Code snippets in a nice and formatted way to share Best-Practices

A wisdomcloud is a database of knowledge. A wisdomcloud consists of two things:

1) Members
2) Topics

A wisdomcloud can have one or many members. A wisdomcloud can have as many topics as needed. Wisdomclouds typically have a life-span. A new wisdomcloud can be started at any time, populating it with existing members from your project-team or by adding new members. Wisdomclouds can be expired when no longer needed.

Examples of wisdomclouds within an IT-project could be

• "Software-Development"
• "Quality-Assurance"
• "Project-Management"

Those wisdomclouds typically have a life-span of 3-12 months, depending on the duration of the project.

Examples of wisdomclouds with a shorter life-span could be:

• "Rollout Release xy"
  Letting the team share the status, errors and issues during the rollout of a new software during a 24-hour-period
• "Client-Proposal"
  Setting up a cloud to share documents, infos, status-updates during a 5-days proposal phase
• "Shakedown-Test"
  Setting up a cloud for a 2-hours period where all developers are testing their components on an integration-server

Examples of topics within the wisdomcloud "Development" could be :

• "Development >> Processes"
• "Development >> Tools"
• "Development >> Design-Patterns"

Members join a wisdmcloud by invitation and build a closed network of experts. Lessons-learned, bookmarks, images or documents are then shared within this network.


Any project or organization can have as many wisdomclouds as needed.

A wisdomcloud solves the following problem:
In your daily professional life you have to share knowledge with different groups of people about different areas of topics.

Using a wisdomcloud to share knowledge makes this task easier: you share knowledge or get updated within your wisdomcloud. Like this you'll have an easy separation of concerns and no worries such as "to whom shall I send this information". You can be member of as many wisdomclouds as needed. One "global" knowledge-stream across all clouds keeps you informed about new things other people learned and shared.

Philosophers didn't find an easy to digest answer to that question in the last 3000 years. So let's define it pragmatically in the context of what's relevant for a typical IT-project:

- Lessons-Learned

- Questions and Answers (Q/A)

- Screenshots

- Videos

- Project-Documents
- Source-Code-Snippets
- Status updates
- News
- Know-How-Stories
- Bookmarks or links

Wisdomclouds.com lets you share all these types of knowledge for you and your team.

There a three basic elements within the application:

1) Your current wisdomcloud
2) All wisdomclouds you are a member of
3) Your personal "wisdom pool"

Those three elements correspond to the three tab-folder you find on the main screen of the application:
1) Your current wisdomcloud
By clicking on this folder you'll find the overview of your current wisdomcloud. See the screenshot below to get an overview of the different elements.

1. In your current wisdomcloud (your project can have many) search, invite new members or switch to another cloud.

2. Capture your knowledge by answering "what have you learned". If 140 characters are not enough hit details and submit rich-formatted text, source-code, images, links or whatever.

3. The wisdom-stream of the current cloud shows you all knowledge-units by all members in this cloud

4. Topics are the basic structure for a cloud. Move knowledge-units from a topic to any other topic, rename topics, delete them, create new ones ... just as your project's changing.

5. Members are the experts contributing knowledge-units. This is your social network of experts. If members are leaving a project transfer their knowledge-units to any other member.

2) All your wisdomclouds

Let's say you are a member of three wisdomclouds: Project-Management, Programming and Staffing.

This tab-view shows you in one single stream all lessons, bookmarks and other entries from all those three wisdomclouds.

Like this, you'll have one integrated view to see all relevant things in a chronological order.

Furthermore, in the right sidebar of this view, you have an overview of all topics, combined over all wisdomclouds. Use this view to select which topics are relevant for you to follow and which aren't. You can unfollow any topic and therefor filter your stream.

3) Your personal Wisdom Pool

Your "personal wisdom pool" is a kind of "remembering-functionality". In this view use see:

- Every lesson ever submitted by yourself
- Lessons you'll find worth to be remembered and which you can remember by clicking "pool" on a lesson

It is comparable to a "favorite" function.

Wisdomclouds lets you build "closed" networks of experts sharing information, which means that only invited members can join a wisdomcloud.

Members are treated "non-anonymously", meaning their full and real names are being displayed in the wisdomcloud.



Wisdomclouds can be either public or members-only.

Members-only clouds are exclusive for their members:
- Submit: Only members of the cloud can submit. Nobody "outside" the cloud can submit.
- Read: Only members of the cloud can read. Nobody "outside" the cloud can read.

Public clouds are readable for everybody outside knowing the URL of the cloud, such as everybody in your intranet.
- Submit: Only members of the cloud can submit. Nobody "outside" the cloud can submit.
- Read: Members of the cloud can read. Everybody "outside" the cloud knowing the URL can read.

Advice:
- Use members-only clouds if you want to share private information or knowledge, such as configuration-details including passwords or results of a review of another team's documentations.
- Use public clouds for information which are gathered by your team but meant for everybody, such as status updates or daily blogs

In order to ensure quality within a wisdomcloud, there a three different roles: Knowledge-Master, Knowledge-Editor, Submitter. Each member can only have one of those roles at any time.

1. Knowledge-Master

In order to ensure the quality of the content submitted within any wisdomclouds, somebody has to have the responsibility and make sure everything's all right: The Knowledge-Master

The Knowledge-Master:

• Can submit lessons and comments to the cloud
• Can create new topics
• Can invite members to join a wisdomcloud
• Can edit / delete all lessons, including the ones from other members, within a cloud
• Can change to roles of every member
• Can appoint Knowledge-Editors

The duties of the Knowledge-Master include:

• Be a role-model in submitting lessons and infos
• Motivating the group submitting content
• Controlling the lessons submitted by the others and demand actions in order to improve the quality of the submissions
• If necessary, re-structuring of the lessons, e.g. by creating new topics and moving lessons from one topic to another

There can only be ONE Knowledge-Master per wisdomcloud. Members who create a new wisdomcloud are assigned to the role of Knowledge-Master.

Advice: It is reasonable to choose the "best expert" within the given area of topics for this cloud as Knowledge-Master. By submitting valuable lessons she acts not only as an administrator, but also as a role-model for other submitters.

2. Knowledge-Editor

A Knowledge-Master can not do all the work alone by herself. That's what the Knowledge-Editor is for. Knowledge-Editors are helping the Knowledge-Master out in order to keep a wisdomcloud "clean" and in good shape.

There can be MANY Knowledge-Editors supporting the Knowledge-Master. Think of the Knowledge-Master as sheriff and the Knowledge-Editors as Deputies for a cloud. Knowledge-Editors are elected by the Knowledge-Master.

The duties and roles are the same as for the Knowledge-Master.

The one difference compared to the Knowledge-Master:

• A Knowledge-Editor can not appoint somebody to become "Knowledge-Master" or "Knowledge-Editor"

3. Submitter

Submitter submit lessons to the wisdomcloud.

• Can submit lessons and comments to the cloud
• Can create new topics
• Can not invite members to join a wisdomcloud
• Can edit / delete only lessons submitted by herself
• Can not change to roles of every member
• Can not appoint Knowledge-Editors
• Can not create new clouds

Altough the role sounds pretty restrictive, submitter are the "backbone" of a wisdomcloud, not only submitting lessons to the cloud, but also "consuming" the content produced by the others.

If you want to, they are the "interactive audience", consuming content and sometimes producing lessons on their own.

Advice: A role of thumb: A wisdomcloud with a size of 20 members has exactly one Knowledge-Master, should have 2 additional Knowledge-Editors (~10% of members) and 17 submitters.

If you or any of your team-members learn a new lessons, gather some information or want to share an image or a document: do it immediately.

Rule #1 of successful knowledge-transfer: Capture things learned the moment they appear, otherwise they will be lost forever. In order to do so, do not spend more than one minute on capturing knowledge.

Wisdomcloud was designed to allow for the easy and quick capturing of knowledge. There are two relevant input-boxes where you can submit things you learned, bookmarks, post questions, give answers or upload images and documents.

• What have you learned ? (Mandatory)
• Details (Optional)

What have you learned is restricted to 140 characters in order to keep the main message short. Short knowledge-objects allow for a quick capturing and a fast reading for your team-members. "What have you learned" is a mandatory field.

The "Details" field can be used to submit larger pieces of information. Think of it like a blog post. You'll find an easy to use editor offering basic functionality such as "bold", "italics", inserting links, images or documents. Use the preview function to get a view of how your lesson will be looking like before submission. Using details you can submit posts of up to 4000 characters.

Advice: Try to capture the essence of your knowlegde-object in the field "What have you learned. Use "Details" only when running out of space.

To capture and share bookmarks, please follow these steps :

• Copy + Paste from your browser's adress bar into the input-box "What have you learned ?"
• Add whatever text you wish (optional)
• Submit

COPY (from browser's adress bar) :



PASTE (into wisdomclouds) :



The link will appear in your current's wisdomclouds-stream and will be "clickable".



How to capture links and bookmarks: Second option

• Copy link into the field "Link to external page" (click "add details..." first)
• Submit

In your stream the entry will be displayed with a link called "link". Clicking "link" will lead to the external bookmark.

Advice: Use this second option if you have long URL's and don't want to waste the input-field "What have you learned ?"

You use the details-box to include images and documents.

• Click on "details"
• Click on "insert images or documents"

How to position the image or document in your text

In input-box "details" a link to the uploaded file will be autmatically added to the end of your text. The link looks similar to:
You can now copy and paste it to any position within your text, positioning the image or document.

Viewing uploaded images and documents

The images and documents you have uploaded are displayed within the embededded text. They appear as a mixture of written text and images (in the case of images) or as a mixture as written text and links to documents (in the case of uploaded documents).

Nevertheless something else happened in the background in order to announce the uploading and make retrieval of images more easy for other team-members:

• For every uploaded image and document there is a new entry created stating that the image was uploaded. Like this the name of the image or document will be easily searchable (using 'search')

• For images, clicking on the thumbnail opens the original version of the image

• For documents click on "link" to open the document from within the browser (you can use the browsers "Save as.." functionality to save the document)

Searching for uploaded images and documents

You have the following options to search for uploaded documents or images:

• Use "search" to search for the name or parts of the name

In order to insert and share a video, please perform the following steps (in this example, a YouTube video will be used):

• In YouTube click on "share" and then "embed"

• Copy and Paste the marked code inside the details fiels in wisdomclouds
• For other video platforms such as vimeo.com similar concepts exist, please refer to the documentation of those sites

Motivation and examples

Asking questions for your team-members is crucial for your daily work-life. See the following examples:

• Does anyone know where to find the documentation of our last team-meeting ?
• Who is the person resonsible for adminstration of server xy ?
• When is the shipping-date of our product ?
• Who's joining for lunch ;-)

Use questions of you want to "provoke" a reaction.

Step-by-step guide to questions and answers

• Raise a question by using the special-tag #?

• Questions will appear as "question" in the current wisdomcloud's stream.
• Answer a question by clicking "answer"

• Submit your answer just as you would submit any other knowledge-object

• Answers are displayed underneath their question

Marking the best answer in a set of multiple answers

Questions can have multiple answers. Sometimes some of the answers do not solve the problem as posed in the question or the answers are contradictory. In these cases it is very hard for other team-members to figure out which of the answers provides useful information.

For this case, wisdomclouds provides the function of "best answer". The initiator of the question can choose whatever question fits the best. Other team-members reading the question and their answers immediatly know to which answer to pay attention to, finding the relevant one at a glance. Please see the following example:

You can mark an answer as 'best answer' by clicking 'best' underneath the answer. Please note the following:

• Multiple answers can be marked as best answer
• Only the team-member who raised the question can mark an answer as 'best'

One of the biggest problems of every "knowledge-database" is the question is this information still valid or outdated ?

Wisdomclouds offers an easy solution to this problem:

Knowledge-objects expire automatically.

Wisdomclouds lets you:

• Add an expiration-date to any lesson, image, document, status-update or whatever you submit
• Easily find out which knowledge-objects will expire in the next 2 weeks by using the expiration-filter
• Optional: enlongate the expiration-date, "keeping expiring knowledge-objects alive" if needed
• Automatically store expired knowledge-objects in an expired-list. Every wisdomcloud will have such a list, if some of its objects are expired
• "Revoke" expired knowledge-objects if needed. If no longer needed, just delete them from the expired-list

Options of letting knowledge-objects expire

• Enter exp:numberOfDays, e.g. exp:100 meaning this lesson will expire in 100 days

• Enter exp:expirationDate, e.g. exp:31.12.2012 meaning this lesson will expire on new-year's eve 2012 (exp:2012-12-31 for the US)

• To change the expiration-date back to "never", enter exp:never

• Knowledge-objects will show in how many days they will expire in the list

Auto-expiring of "info"-objects

wisdomclouds uses the expiration-mechanism for all automatically generated info-objects ("info" in the stream). After one day, notification expire automatically, therefor keeping your database clean.

Besides the option to expire single lessons, wisdomclouds lets you also expire topics. Expiring a topic does the following:

• Expire all lessons within the topic
• Expire the topic itself
• The expired lessons will appear in the archive of this wisdomcloud

• Expired topics will appear in a list of expired topics

Please perform the following steps to expire a topic:

1. Choose the topic-overview by clicking on "manage" within the topic-box in the sidebar

2. In the topic-overview, choose the topic to be expired by clicking on "expire"

3. (As an alternative, if you are in the list-view of a topic you can also choose "expire topic" from there)

4. Please provide a brief message why this topic is about to expire. Like this your team-members stay informed about what led to this decision

5. Click on "Expire topic" and all lessons and the topic will be moved into the archive

Advice: Please check the next section on how to use topic-expiration to create and track team-tasks that involve multiple smaller steps to be fullfilled.

Wisdomclouds supports the creation and tracking of team-tasks. Now, what is a team-task ? Let's say you are working as a project-manager being responsible for the staffing of your 200-person-project. For your help you are assisted by Sandra from the projects-management-office.

Both of you are working collaborativly onto each of the staffing-tasks. Those tasks include:

1. Checking the CV's of each staffing-candidate (anything missing, first formal check)
2. Inviting candidate for a telephone interview
3. Conducting the phone interview and submitting a wrap-up
4. Invite the candidate for a meeting with the project-manager and the client
5. Send out the formal confirmation of the staffing and all necessary documentation to the candidate

The steps to perform in wisdomclouds would be the following:

1. Create a new wisdomcloud "Staffing" and invite Sandra to join
2. Create a topic for each of the candidates, such as "Johnathan Smith" and "Mike Myers"

3. Now, each of the two team members reports their status within the topic "Johnathan Smith". Please read the stream below from the bottom to the top to get an idea.

4. If the task can be closed use "expire topic"

Like this, the entries will be archived (not deleted) and the task gets "out of the way"


Advice: Within any project, tasks involve many small steps performed by multiple team-members. Use topics to track those team-tasks. Each task will be represented by a topic. Let your team-members comment on the status of each step within the task by a short status-information. If the task can be closed, expire the topic.

People love structure. That's why there are boxes, drawers and folders. Providing a clear and precise structure for your team's knowledge is important for an easy retrieval.

Wisdomclouds offers two basic elements for structuring your team's lessons in a wisdomclouds:

• Topics
• Tags

A clear and meaningful structure guides your team-members through a wisdomcloud and increases the overall acceptance. Nevertheless, one mistake can be found over and over again: most of the time the structure is setup even before the first knowledge-object was submitted.

Advice: Capturing first, structuring second. Apply a structure only if you really know and are sure about which topics or tags you are going to use. Don't spend too much time on creating topics somebody might use later (or not). Watch and study the submitted lessons and decide then on your structure.

Wisdomclouds lets you set up topics at any time. You can easily move lessons from one topic to any other. Renaming, removing or expiring topics is done with one click.

Every wisdomcloud can have different topics. Topics are a way of structuring your lessons, just as using folders to put files into.

In the following examples the wisdomcloud "programming" has 4 topics:

• Processes
• Tools
• Design-Patterns
• Team-internal

Every wisdomcloud has one default topic. The default topic is automatically created the moment somebody starts a new cloud. All lessons that do not belong to a certain topic will be automatically filed under "defaultTopic". Think of the default topic as an inbox for all lessons waiting to be structured.

Advice: Don't spend too much time thinking on how to structure your wisdomclouds using topics. You do not need any topic to capture and share lessons, especially not in the beginning.

New topics can be created at any time, so there is no need to set them up upfront. Topics can also be deleted (with all lessons belonging to that topic being transferred automatically to the default topic). You can rename topics or move lessons easily from one topic to another.

As described in the earlier chapter topics can also be expired and be used as team-tasks.

Please perform the following steps to create a new topic:

• Click on "manage" in the topics-box in the right sidebar

• Click on "create new topic"

• In the dialog enter the new topic name

Advice: After creating a new topic submit a first lesson within this topic stating what this topic is about. Like this you give your team-members a sense of what entries should be submitted and which should better be moved to a different topic.

In order to submit a new lesson for a specific topic you have three options:

1. Choose the topic from the drop-down-box underneath the submission box

2. Choose "new lesson" from within list of all lessons for a specific topic

3. Choose "new lesson" from the "manage topic" page

In order to move a lesson to another topic please perform the following steps:

1. Choose "edit list" in any list of lessons

2. Select the lessons you want to move to a different topic by click the checkbox next to the lesson
3. Choose the new topic from the drop-down-box and click on "move"

Adivce: Don't be afraid of using this feature heavily. Remember: Capture first, structure second. So, it is better to capture a lesson before it gets lost than to wait for the "perfect structure". You can always create new topic lateron and move lessons to the particular topic.