How valuable is information?

There's a lot of discussion about sharing information, and some of it focuses on how to measure the value of the information. This is a vital question, because it costs time and money to improve how we share information. If you can show a value, it can justify the expense.

There are numerous ways you can measure this value, and it actually varies depending on the information being shared and the purpose the users have for it. If the information is seen that may be considered valuable, or if it's downloaded, or if it's actually reused. Likewise the feedback from users - a rating of the value, or even an estimate of the time they saved, can be used to measure value.

My aim was to create a single value indicator, from a combination of factors, with as little extra effort as possible. Display the value to potential future users, to help them decide which information they want to look at. Let them see the details if they want, so that they can determine whether the factors which contributed to this indicator are significant to them.

The result has just been published as a research disclosure - my understanding is that rather than go to the expense of filing for a patent, by filing such a disclosure we protect the ideas that we created. Check it out, ask any question, provide me with feedback.

SUNW = JAVA; What's in a name?

When I first heard this I was shocked and disappointed.

Shocked because, as a Sun employee, I thought we deserved a heads-up before it was public (still waiting for an update on why that did not happen)

Disappointed because I felt it was sending a message to lots of loyal Sun employees that "the hard work you have done to make Sun relevant in the marketplace has not been enough, and we need to change stock symbols so that people can find us"

Having read the earlier comments, I now feel OK - the company is still Sun.

How many people "discovered" Sun because its stock symbol was SunW = 0.

How many MIGHT discover us because of the linkage with JAVA = >0. That's enough for me. Don't get the company's name and reputation mixed up with the stock symbol - that's a mistake I was making, and now I'm over it.

CEpedia OneStop CE 2.0 - what's this all about?

There are @3200 CEpedia users, @2500 OneStop users and many of them (you?) want to know what's happening with those 2 systems and what is CE 2.0.

Right about now most non-Sun employees may have tuned out, but just bear with me for a moment here and it might be worth your while (and if it isn't, what a wonderful opportunity to flame me, or whatever the current term is!)

Basically CEpedia and OneStop are 2 different systems we use at Sun to try and improve the information sharing within our customer-facing technical community. There's alot of information in most of their heads and/or laptops, and we are constantly trying to help them share it with each other so that our customers benefit - better answers to their questions such as "how would I..." or "have you ever...?"

OneStop today is a typical website - a collection of html pages which are editable by their owners. Terrific content because of the passion and knowledge of their owners.author, but sometimes a little out of date because those authors are either busy solving customer challenges or else working on new Sun products/services/solutions.

CEpedia is a wiki we established a year ago to support our Customer Engineers (CEs) - kind of like Wikipedia (do i need a tm here?) for CEs. It has the advantage of wikis - easy to update by anyone who can access, so it can be kept very much up to date.

Now if I haven't lost the non-Sun audience, here's where I think it gets more interesting. Our plan is to:

• merge OneStop and CEpedia into a wiki with access control so that not just anyone can edit everything (after all, you wouldn't want me to be updating anything remotely approaching technical content - trust me on this), but updates are easier and therefore more frequent.
  
• We also want to host this outside of our intranet so that initially our partners can also have access, including update capability where appropriate. Over time we would like to share as much as possible of this information with everyone, but that will take more "cleansing" of what information should be public knowledge and what needs to be restricted
• Additionally, we are introducing various Web 2.0 concepts - tagging, RSS / Atom aggregation, AJAX, voting/comments to drive search results, etc. so that we obtain the benefits of this more participatory technology (aka the Wisdom of Crowds) at the same time as understanding how to leverage this technology better for our customers.

This future vision we are calling CE 2.0 - basically a Web2.0 experience for our CEs, partners, eventually customers, developers and others. Stay tuned.