Wiki Project
From MontCo MediaWiki
This project started primarily as a project management experiment.
The advent of Service Oriented Architectures coupled with a desire for highly iterative (Agile) development methodologies has forced the County to look at unconventional project management approaches to achieve excellence and repeatability. While I thought using wikis was a unique and innovative approach, it turns out many organizations, including AOL have adopted this approach and have found it HIGHLY effective and possibly an emerging best practice.
Objectives
The Wiki project is primarily to meet the collaboritive needs of the County. It is especially oriented towards project collaboration, although it will also meet the needs of several specific communities, including:
- LEJIS - A law enforcement information sharing initiative that has world-wide membership and involvement used by LEJIS Management Team and developers
- MIXNET - A collaboration of CIOs/CTOs of major local government organizations, used by MIX members (top 65 local gov CIOs for conference preparation and collaboration
- ITS - Used by the ITS Project Management office to collabarate and coordinate all major IT projects
- ITS Infrastructure - Used by the ITS Infrastructure team to collaborate and coordinate all major Infrastructure projects and tasks
The core objectives are:
- Provide appropriate wiki platforms to enable the use of wikis as a collaborative tool in the development and implementation of technology for the County. The measurement for this success is to have at least 5 wiki communities being used by no less than 5 project teams.
- Develop templates and 'best practice' examples to illustrate and promote the use of Wikis in a collaborative environment. This will be measured by having a [Project Template|Project Management Template] to be used for intra and inter-organizational projects. There will also be a 'Meta' site for best practices and operational requirements for wikis as well as sample home pages for both project and collaborative wikis.
- Promote Utilization of Wikis. This will be measured by the number of project managers that adopt this technology AND by the number of users they get to actively participate in the on-line creation, modification, and discussion of key projects and concepts.
- Return Time to Operations (RTO) - Within 24 hours of failure
- Return Point of Operations (RPO) - Start of Business Day of failure
Users and Roles
There are three classes of users for this technology at MontCo:
- Project Team Collaborators - Projects owned or run by Information Technology Solutions (ITS) will use the Wiki or other private wiki communities to manage the process, primarily using the [Project Template|MontCo Project Template]
- Internal Projects - Infrastructure and internal projects will use the [|infrastructure wiki] to collaborate and track progress
- External Organizations - MontCo provides Wiki services to other organizations to which the County belongs who also wish to use Wiki's for collaboration purposes. Examples of this include LEJIS and MIXNET
Topic Articles
Tasks to be Performed
This is a required section. The person to whom the project is assigned MUST keep this current.
| Description | Next Steps | Next Step Due | Deliverable | Responsible |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Select one or more wiki platforms to meet needs of all 3 user groups | Complete | Complete | Platforms Selected
| Pond, Jack |
| Integrate MontCo federated identity services (FIS) into authentication for MediaWiki platform | FIS used for DSF - Will leverage SDK | FIS Final + 2 Wks | MediWiki Users in FIS | Pond, Jack |
| Implement screwturn platform | 3/21/2007 | Completed |
| Pond, Jack |
| Implement MediaWiki 'Template' | 3/21/2007 |
|
| Pond, Jack |
Project Events and Meetings
This is an area to identify events and meetings that occur in the course of the project to allow project collaborators to have a single point for calendar review.
This area should also include a time and date of outages as well as a link to the uploaded Incident Report.
Project Team Roster
This area identifies project team members. Again the provided mechanism is via an HTML table which may require some hand editing.
| Role | Name | Phone Number | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Leader | Pond, Jack | (610)278-5200 | Pond, Jack |
| Project Manager SME | Lavinsky, Joel | (610)278-5200 | Lavinsky, Joel |
| MontCo Webmaster | Pepe, Tom | (610)278-5200 | Pepe, Tom |
Meeting Notes
This is a test of an uploaded file: Meeting notes None at this time.
Project Documents
Issue Tracking
None at this time.
Change Order Requests
This is a table of requests for modifying MediaWikis at MontCo. They can be to modify an existing wiki, or to change the way all wikis work.
| Rqst # | Status | Description | Priority | Rls Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 000001 | Complete | Modify Discussion Functionality to be more threadlike | 0 | 4/4/2007 |
| 000002 | TBD | Modify File List to only show files in namespaces the user has access to | 10 | TBD |
| 000003 | TBD | Add Spell checker to editor | 0 | TBD |
| 000004 | TBD | Create a template for System information spreadsheet- Wiki-ITS-CAS | 0 | TBD |
| 000005 | TBD | Automatically add every one in a group to a particular page watchlist | 0 | TBD |
| 000006 | TBD | Send Email to everyone in a particular group | 0 | TBD |
| 000007 | TBD | Add 2 px to top of page before login | 0 | TBD |
| 000008 | TBD | Task page template | 0 | TBD |
| 000009 | TBD | Issues List Template | 0 | TBD |
| 000010 | Complete | Indent Discussion Threads | 0 | 4/26/2007 |
Correspondence
None at this time.
System Security Issues
Regardless of the platform, there are and will be, by the very nature of wikis significant security issues - especially related to vandalism and inappropriate postings and/or comments. Additionally, all platforms investigated did not have sufficient protections to absolutely insure privacy and inadvertent leakage of information through inappropriate/unintentional linking.
Therefore, it is essential at this time that wikis should not be used in any security environment that exceeds the normal standard of 'sensitive but unclassified'
The issue of isolating uploaded files is the elephant in the room. Jack will be working with the MediaWiki developers to create an extension/patch that segments uploads by namespace then adds the namespace to the file hash. This way the administratator will be able to limit access using MS access restrictions by directory.
Timeframe for Implementation
The Project manager should maintain key deliverable milestones here
- 3/12/2007 - MontCo Project Wiki implemented with ITS private project site set up (Completed)
- 3/19/2007 - MediaWiki platform implemented with MIXNET as first community (On Schedule)
Operational Technologies (Compatibility with Existing Operating Environments)
A brief description of the technologies required for the operational system and/or the development environments Montgomery County generally uses Microsoft platform products and does not have extensive experience in the maintenance of more open platforms such as Unix or Linux.
With this said, it is the intention to make the wiki platform as close to open source as possible and to maintain platform independence. The ScrewTurn platform is open source, but completely dependent on the Microsoft Platform. The MediaWiki is both open source and platform independent.
Currently, the platform is:
- MediaWiki 1.10.0
- PHP 5.2.1
- MySQL 5.0.27
- MS Server 2003 SP2 (patched today)
Operational Guidebook (Run Book)
In large measure, this site has become the operational run book.
Training/Maintenance
This project assumes the platform itself follow the usability standards of most wikis - to wit, requires no actual user training.
The County will assess this assumption if the adoption rate does not meet expectations.
