Today I joined the front-line response team at Savoir-faire Linux.
I have the pleasure to work with an extremely skilled group. This
is not a help line where someone will ask if you forgot caps-locks;
if you call us, we log into your server and we fix the problem,
whatever it is.
One thing that strikes me is how inefficient splitting work can be.
One guy hacking on a server can only accomplish so much. If you
give him a helper, no matter how skilled he is, I doubt that you can
increase the output by more than 25%. Why is this so?
A first guess is that voice can only carry so much bandwidth. Given
how sequential a spoken message is, and how long the seek time on a
human is, polling a coworker for more information has a fix cost of
at least 20 man minute. One solution if of course to serialize
knowledge in a common pool and this is where wikis can save an
incredible amount of time, and money. The wiki that we use at the
moment it crap. The markup is heavy and counter intuitive and
search is completely broken. It has a quite fancy access control
system but the whole thing can become annoyingly slow.
My primary target for Gazest is Internet communities but now I see
something that had escaped me: wikis can help you make giant leaps
if what you sell is knowhow. Of course, your needs won't be the
same if you aim internal knowledge bases. Internet communities are
perfectly fine with a simple user rank system like on Wikipedia: you
have a lot users, a few admins, and handful of people who can grant
admin privileges; there are no groups, no per-page rights, and pages
can't be hidden from other users. On the other hand, internal wikis
describe really intimate knowledge of mission critical systems,
including pending security problems. If that kind of information
was to get on the loose, the havoc would be much worst than if you
had a million credit card numbers stolen.
Aside from access control, I see many opportunities to innovate: our
front-line response team could use a non-crap set of macros to input
network diagrams in textual form, a lawer firm could use a set of
macros to refer to laws to numbers and to databases of former
rulings, and it this is only the beginning. A wiki with a flexible
macro language could probably spawn a decent consulting business
since anyone who works primarily with knowledge will save a lot of
money if they can bent theirs tools to make knowledge easier to
input and retrieve: just count how much 20 man-minute costs you. I
don't know where this can lead Gazest of if it's a path where I want
to take it but this is definitely an area worth exploring.
