UCLA Knowledgebase Presentation at UCCSC 2010

Knowledgebase Features

• Anyone employed by UCLA can edit any article, or add new ones.
• Or you can post questions.
• WYSIWYG editing, easy to learn.
• We keep track of all edits by name, and now you can diff between versions to see what changed.
• Can search, or browse by tags, authors or dates.
• RSS and email notifications.

Vision (pardon the jargon)

• this is an experiment in collaboration – attempt to get our 48 help desks to share information
• crowdsourcing – we have a lot of technical people across campus. We believe there is great value in sharing what we all learn and know.
• Institutional Memory
• opportunity costs – not sharing information costs the next person who has to discover it on their own
• low admin overhead – any employee at UCLA can edit any article, but we keep track
• zero based budget – except for some Nanos we gave away the first year.
• social networking – find experts on campus (if they post)
• folksonomy – of course it has a tagging system, try Browse by Tags https://kb.ucla.edu/tags

Guidelines

• Avoid private info or sensitive information. Anything you post is public. So don’t post if you want it private.
• Any UCLA employee can edit any post. But you can set it to email you on any changes.
• If you absolutely don’t want anyone to change it, put the info on your own site, and link to it from the KB.
• If you see something wrong, fix it. Or contact someone who can.

Stats

• Started April 1, 2006 (No joke)
• As of today, 01/27/2012, 1450 Articles by 240 Bruins
• Article with most edits (44): https://kb.ucla.edu/link/240
• That’s also the article with the most contributors (22)
• Next, with 8 contributors is https://kb.ucla.edu/link/910
• 16 articles have 5 or more contributors.

N cnt url 1 22 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/240 2 8 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/910 3 7 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/220 4 7 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/723 5 7 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/298 6 7 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/443 7 7 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/327 8 6 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/863 9 6 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/834 10 6 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/96 11 5 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/187 12 5 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/532 13 5 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/144 14 5 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/792 15 5 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1048 16 5 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/140

• 30 people have posted 10 or more new articles.
• 49 people have posted 5 or more new articles.
• 51 people have posted 1 new article.
• To get into the Top 10, you now need 26 articles.
• 208 people have contributed to 1 or more articles
• 67 people have contributed to 5 or more articles.
• 45 people have contributed to 10 or more articles.
• 18 people have contributed to 20 or more articles.
• 1571 days since KB went live.
• Which is roughly 1122 working days (not counting vacations or furloughs, so with 1255 articles, we’re doing better than one per working day. But that’s not nearly enough.
• So with 1435 Programmers and Computer Support people on campus, not counting student workers, and only 208 contributors so far, we’re still at the early stages of this experiment.
• The last time we gave away a prize was Oct. 13, 2006 . (iPod Nanos in random drawings.)
• 634 articles since then.
• Little known fact. You can upload files along with an article. 7 articles have file uploads

N cnt url 1 2 https://kb.ucla.edu/articles/locally-installing-cclemoodle 2 2 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1157 3 2 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1260 4 1 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1197 5 1 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1213 6 1 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/298-apache-multiple-virtual-host-configuration-for-moodle 7 1 https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1158

Use Cases

• share writeups or tutorials
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1010
• find out if anyone else is using something
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/532
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1070
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1217
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/528
• short FAQs to help with accuracy and training of student help desk workers
• advertise university resources
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/89
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/581
• document data sources
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1351
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1350
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1353
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/134
• add links to content on your own website
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/499
• share your bookmarks and resources as you learn new technology
• build a custom set of questions for certain groups
  • e.g. new instructors or TAs (including info on VPN access to Library resources, etc.)
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/766
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/67
• compile lists of campus resources
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/327
• get help from colleagues in answering support questions
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/questions
• summarize threads from mailing lists – Harry Mangalam from UCI has been a great source, letting me post these UCCSC listserv posts with his permission.
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/1205
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/999
• experiments
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/240
• after a three hour search through MSDN, save the solution to an obscure problem so you and others can find it easily the next time
• (potentially) daily reports can be made to see what questions are most popular
• answers can be refined by others on campus to elaborate or make them clearer

Biggest Problems

• Participation
• Cleanup of old articles.

Ideas for Future

• have a photo of someone, with a short blurb saying how they use the knowledgebase, and their name and dept on the bottom, with a link to More Info, where they get a paragraph to give more detail. Below this, we could have an Add Yourself link, which lets any UCLA person upload an photo, and give their example. It then waits for an approval before it gets put into the rotation. This would simultaneously highlight techs across campus, and excite interest in who is going to be showing today. The key question is can we get enough people willing to let their photo go up? And do we want to limit this to contributors?
• UC-wide? Would that make sense?
• Managers need to tell their help desk staff to check the KB first. And if the answer isn’t there, add it when you learn it.

Helpdesk Consortium and the UCLA Knowledgebase

UCLA HDC (http://www.hdc.ucla.edu) – PROMOTING IT COLLABORATION at UCLA

• Share expertise, solutions, ideas, and resources to increase efficiency
• Increase responsiveness to end-users and customers
• Encourage professional development for IT Staff

Helpdesks

• Provide orientation and ongoing training for IT staff
  • https://kb.ucla.edu/link/67
• Improve customer experience in a multi-help desks environment
• Off-Hour Support
• Sharing up-to-date IT issues
• Tapping UCLA’s Cognitive Surplus and social media collaboration
  • Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, by Clay Shirky
  • The idea of “how the networked world allows people to form leaderless groups that still do useful work.” http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/clay-shirky-is/
• New Feature in KB 2.0
  • The ability to post questions
  • RSS feed to website or email

Challenges

• Continue to promote usage and adoption
• Unanswered questions
• Accuracy of answers
• Obsolete articles

Thank you to Jackie Reynolds for all the support, and the iPod Nanos. And thank you to everyone who has contributed. And thanks to Timothy Ebertowski and Tom Phelan for letting us work on this.

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