Wikimenia and Wikis as collaborative tools in entreprise

Wikimenia conference is taking place in Boston this weekend. Rich Hoeg who is a manager at Honeywell is one of the attendees who is blogging from the conference. In his blog he mentions that some of the Honeywell engineers are using wikis for collaboration purposes. Another proof of use wikis in corporate engineering market is Atlassian's customer list. At lof of technology companies in that list. Atlassian was launched by two young Aussies, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.

Rich also asks a question which is close to our heart at Brewster Kahle's presentation on Universal Access to All Knowledge

"I asked about any efforts involving the various engineering and technical societies. As background, companies like Honeywell sumbmit papers to the societies without charge, but then lose the rights to those same papers. Believe it or not, those same engineering societies then turn around and try to sell companies electronic access for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To make a long story short, I sent an email to the folks at Internet Archive this afternoon offering to be a point person for working this issue (i.e. when papers are submitted, rights would also be retained via Creative Commons and the actual papers would be stored on the Internet Archive). We'll see what happens .." link

Here is the notes on Rich's question and Brewster's answer refering to PLoS

Q: Engineering societies submit papers, for free, to IEEE, who turns around to charge us.

A: Public Library of Science. I like the ideas of science but we let a few orgs take control of it. It's very painful. We're having to build whole new systems to replace them; it's terrible to have to repeat ourselves. So let's to it right next time.

Rich, let us know what happens.

As Elsevier if haven't done yet, we should invite Brewster to either Amsterdam and New York and get his perspective on Universal Access to All Knowledge.