Stewart Mader – Presentations

Table of Contents
Topics
Testimonials
History

Wiki evangelist Stewart Mader may love the technology, but what he really loves is the productivity that the technology can bring about when properly implemented.
- Where Wikis Meet Content Is Where The Magic Happens

In addition to presentations for clients, Stewart regularly speaks to audiences that want to understand the cultural and organizational shift brought on by wiki use, how to apply wiki tools and thinking in an organizational context, and how to design systems of knowledge sharing, organization, and reuse that people will actually use.

Topics

ROA: Return on Adoption

Fifteen years ago, email was the newest hottest thing that was going to change our lives. And it has. But as any technology matures (read: becomes less new and cool, and more ever-present and old -faithful) bad usage habits start to creep in.

After that momentous cultural shift from not using technology at all to using email, we face a slightly less daunting, but far more important one today: Together, wikis and email are a powerhouse for productivity and efficiency, but what’s the appropriate use for each?

Designing for Collaboration

How you deploy a wiki or blog platform for a large enterprise is very different from a small business, university, or non-profit. Each has a different structure, projects, and goals. But all share a need to work more efficiently, and reduce the time spent on tedious, uninteresting, and inefficient tasks.

The One Year Club

Five Things Companies Learn After a Year of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
At the outset, organizations are often eager and excited about the benefits they anticipate from cultivating adoption and use of social and collaborative tools. But talk to those same organizations six months or one year after they’ve started, and you’ll hear a different story. Some organizations have experienced measurable success, others are struggling with a range of adoption and use issues, but all will tell you to watch out for several factors they didn’t anticipate. We’ll discuss these factors, and show you how to plan for each as you start, restart, or continue your adoption efforts.


Testimonials

Stewart articulates the benefits of wikis clearly and comprehensively.
He’s the voice of experience.
Audience Member – Stanford Tech Briefing

There’s not many humans on the planet that know more about wikis than Stewart Mader. Wherever folks are talking about wiki technology, you’ll find Mader, explaining how wikis work, how to get folks to use them, how to govern them, and how to use them to solve various real-world challenges.
Scott Abel – Organizer, Web Content and DocTrain Conferences

Clear explanations from an author sympathetic to the confusion and sometimes plain fear that is associated with actively changing any group’s collaborative culture.
Ward Cunningham – from the Foreword to Wikipatterns

History

2008 • 2007 • 2006 • 2005

2009

Jun 18. San Francisco. Sloan-C Sympsium. Panel: “Higher Education Meets the S-Curve”

Jun 15. Chicago. Web Content 2009. Keynote: “Six Degrees of Collaboration”

Mar 20. Palm Springs, CA. DocTrain West. Workshop: “Learn How to Use a Wiki at Work”

Mar 19. Palm Springs, CA. DocTrain West. Keynote: “In With Wiki, Out With Structure”

2008

Oct 29. Boston. DocTrain East 2008: “Should You Call it a Wiki or a Collaborative Work Space?

Sep 8. Porto. WikiSym 2008

Jun 30. Porto. The New Knowledge Forge, University of Porto

Jun 25. Varese, Italy International Forum on Enterprise 2.0

Jun 17. Chicago. Web Content 2008: “How do You Grow Wiki Use?”

May 20. San Francisco. Learn 2.0 SIG Meeting

May 13. IBM Internal Conference

May 6. Vancouver. Doctrain West 2008

Apr 23. San Francisco. Web 2.0 Expo – Wikipatterns.com Theatre

Feb 29. Palo Alto, CA. Stanford Tech Briefing

Feb 22. Vancouver. Northern Voice 2008

Feb 11. New York. O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing

2007

Oct 23. Montreal. WikiSym 2007

Jul 5. Brisbane, Australia. Queensland University of Technology – Wiki Symposium

Jun 30. Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia. AusWeb 2007

Jun 21. Boston. Atlassian User Group

Jun 20. Boston. Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Jun 18. Chicago. Web Content 2007

May 18. Montreal. RoCoCo Camp Montreal

Apr 27. Cambridge, MA MIT5

Feb 23. Vancouver. Northern Voice 2007

Feb 2. Portland, OR. RecentChangesCamp

2006

Dec 12. Providence. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University

Oct 26. Philadelphia. Drexel University

Oct 24. NMC Online Conference on Digital Media

Oct 10-21. NMC Impact of Digital Media Symposium

Oct 10. Dallas. Educause National Meeting

Oct 3. Worcester, MA. Highered Symposium: Creating an Online Campus

Sep 10. San Francisco. American Chemical Society

Jul 31. West Lafayette, IN. Biennial Conference on Chemical Education

Jun 7. Cleveland. New Media Consortium Summer Conference

May. Online. CONFCHEM Spring 2006

May 1. Warwick, RI. Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education conference

Apr 7. Online. Highered BlogCon

Mar 20. Worcester, MA. NERCOMP Annual Conference

2005

Dec 6. Worcester, MA. NERCOMP Special Interest Group

Oct 28. Brooklyn. Teaching with Technology Institute, Long Island University

May 14. Los Angeles. Social Software in the Academy Workshop

Feb 8-11. Online. CONFCHEM

This is one of my talks. Like it? Hire me to speak at your company


BARNRAISING WORKSHOPS
A BarnRaising is a planned event that I use to help teams get started using the wiki. I start by having people look at examples of social software use in organizations to help focus their thinking on how it can help them, then identify specific workflows or business processes they want to improve. During the half-day workshop, the team gets its workspace set-up, structured, and seeded with content directly tied to the uses they've identified, so that when they return to their day-to-day work, the tool is embedded into their day-to-day workflow.


PILOT, POLICY & PATTERNS
I can work with your team to define project scope, assess cultural readiness, create policies and procedures, run a pilot, and manage large-scale deployment. I recommend developing a procedure to handle requests for new workspaces, a scalable naming convention, data retention policy, and careful communication policy. I’ll help you define content and workspace structure, develop templates and procedures for seeding the wiki with content, and migrate information to the wiki from tools that will be deprecated as a result of this project.

Based on our information gathering, we’ll compile a list of people and groups who should be involved in the pilot phase. As their use gets underway, I’ll advise them as needed, assess their progress, and suggest refinements. To prepare for large-scale adoption and use, we’ll analyze usage patterns from pilot groups, identify critical integration and performance issues and recommend solutions. We’ll also capture anecdotes and examples to share with other groups during broader adoption.


RETURN ON ADOPTION (ROA)
I measure success in terms of Return on Adoption (ROA). This means that we take more into account than just the financial investment, and look at metrics that can’t easily be manipulated or give “red herring” results. For example, we'll look at the average number of edits and comments on pages, and based on content types (referential, workflow, project, etc.), and business units, because these directly indicate the level or participation by employees. Trends, or patterns, in these figures over time help to assess the pace of adoption, where usage is most active, and where we need to spend more time guiding people.

PUBLIC SPEAKING
Date Event
March 19 Keynote DocTrain West
March 20 Workshop DocTrain West
June 15 Keynote Web Content 2009
June 18 Panel Sloan-C Symposium
October 14 Keynote Traction User Group
October 19 Featured Speaker WebWorks RoundUp
October 25 WikiFest Session WikiSym 2009
November 2 Invited Speaker Enterprise 2.0 Conf.

CLIENTS
Organizations with whom I've worked:
Adobe
Airbus
AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals
Booz | Allen | Hamilton
Brown University
Drexel University
Fidelity Investments
Johns Hopkins University
MARS Information Services
MBF Group Australia
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Queensland University of Technology
Records Management Association of Australasia
Sacred Heart University
Stanford University
Thales Group
The Seed Company