When I was putting together PBwiki’s Terms of Service a few years ago, I spent extra time with our lawyers to make sure that it was as pro-user as possible. The first few versions I got back weren’t good enough and I pressed them to make it shorter, simpler, and to put more rights in the hands of users. I eventually ended up with something I felt good about. Something that made it clear that we weren’t going try and take ownership of user’s content and that we took their privacy seriously.

That hard work has been paying off, with many enterprise customers praising our confidentiality clause for private wikis and our lack of authoritarian clauses. Today, Joshua Greenbaum at ZDNet published an article called Making Web 2.0 Safe for the Enterprise: TOS à la PBwiki that did a great job showing how important terms are for an enterprise service. So hurrah! We’ve got your back.

David E. Weekly
Founder & CEO

Seth Godin had a recent post about how organizations tend to go from crisp to soggy over time.

While I agree with his points, I think that there’s a better analogy to explain why companies need processes as they grow.  I call it the principle of the elephant and the ant.

Hollywood horror movies nonwithstanding, you can’t scale up an ant to the size of an elephant.  The mechanisms that work so well for a one-gram ant don’t work for a 10-ton elephant.

The ant is like a startup: It’s small, nimble, and surprisingly strong for its size.  When you’re that small, you don’t need a lot of internal structural elements–a thin exoskeleton more than suffices.  It doesn’t even need lungs to breathe, relying instead on its surface area to allow oxygen back and forth.

Similarly, startups don’t need a lot of internal processes or documentation.  When your entire company consists of three people in a single office, everyone and everything in your company is in touch with the outside world.  If something comes up, you just poke your head over your laptop and fix it.  An “all-hands” meeting consists of nudging the co-founders to your left and your right.

But as your company grows (which is almost always necessary if you build a successful business), that approach doesn’t scale.  You don’t see 1,000 person companies being run like a 3-person startup for the same reason you don’t see ants the size of Volkswagens.

(Be glad that we don’t!)

Instead, your company begins to resemble the mighty elephant.  The lightweight exoskeleton is replaced by a thick endoskeleton.  All sorts of internal structures like lungs are required to support life.  And you can bet that an elephant can’t scurry at a rate of 5 times its body length per second, or lift 50 times its own weight.

Big companies need endoskeletons to function.  Yes, these processes impair flexibility, and force you to trade in the elegantly slender legs of the common ant for the stubby tree-trunks of the ponderous pachyderm, but the alternative isn’t pretty.  A 10-ton ant would instantly collapse and die under its own weight, unless beaten to the punch by asphyxiation.

And there are benefits to being big.  You may not be able to run as fast or lift as much on a relative basis, but an elephant can definitely cover longer distances than an ant, and no ant in the world can lift an entire tree with its trunk.

Both elephants and ants have their place in this world, just as crisp and soggy do.  The trick is making sure that your approach is appropriate to your situation.  There’s a reason why invertebrates are smaller than vertebrates, but mice are smaller and faster than lobsters–only you can decide what the right answer is for your company.

P.S. One final alternative to keep in mind: While a single ant can’t move a rubber tree, an army of them certainly can (or at least decimate the village where the tree is planted).  To what extent can your company act like a swarm of startups, rather than as single elephant?

Last night, Nathan (the CTO) and I were talking with our roommate Ben, who at 22 is working on his first startup and naturally has a lot of questions about the process. We were all somewhat surprised by how much wisdom we could communicate to Ben in about half an hour of discussion, but then it became clear to me: education is the compression of others’ experiences into rapidly transferable knowledge.

Were it faster to just have the experience, education would be meaningless. A well-taught math course can generally teach a student several centuries of discovery per year.  Reading the journals of the best minds in a field is much less efficient (and, for most, less effective) than reading a well-written summary of their work.

Wikis let people collect and compress knowledge continuously, making it discoverable and usable. Wikis mirror the very processes by which education operates. It’s no wonder that hundreds of thousands of educators found us before we found them. It’s good that your customers can help slap some sense into you and give you a clue.

-David Weekly, Founder & CEO of PBwiki

Our very own Nathan!

Nathan is the CTO of Pbwiki.com, a Palo Alto-based startup that is now the world’s largest hoster of wikis.

Nathan will be speaking about “how to keep a popular web service from melting when it becomes popular - Debian, PHP, Apache, Lighttpd, Squid, Memcache, MogileFS and MySQL.”

Nathan was a President Scholar and received a BS in Computer Systems Engineering at Stanford University.

More information from the Stanford Linux Users and Open Source Group.

I spoke to a room of educators last week in Detroit at the MACUL conference.

At first, I was nervous because I didn’t know how many people would attend the talk! But in the end, it turned out to be a lot of fun — and by the end, we had a standing-room-only event! I spoke for about 45 minutes, then answered questions and gave away a few PBwiki t-shirts. We need to get more of those shirts out through our Presenter Packs! (If you’re an educator giving a talk about wikis anywhere in the country, check out the details.)

Kevin Clark, who attended the talk, wrote up a great description of the talk called Behind the Scenes with PBwiki.

So…I think it’s really cool that Ramit Sethi, the VP of Marketing for PBwiki, has come all the way here to give us the latest on what PBwiki is all about. I think it demonstrates some commitment from them that they want to reach out to educators.

[…]

They took the suggestions of educators and listened. Teachers hate ads, so they removed them on educational blogs. They want students to be engaged, so they continue to add features. They also want it to be easy, so they made a new WYSIWYG editor. They’re trying to listen to their hundreds of users and incorporating their suggestions.

[…]

For those of you who use PBwiki (or just wikis in general!) and tell others in workshops, PBwiki offers Presenter Packs which include

• a PDF handout with general PBwiki information
• a T-shirt of your choice
• a PowerPoint presentation to use in your workshop/session
• and three PBwiki upgrades (worth $750)

[…]

Again, I’m really impressed by the approachability of Ramit, and through him, PBwiki. These guys (actually five guys and a gal) are really trying to get it right and to create a useful tool for educators as well as the web community in general. Keep in mind…Ramit wasn’t down in the vendor area and wasn’t pushing his product (you get the Presenter Pack no matter what type of wiki you’re focusing on), but instead is extending a hand to teachers to help create meaningful online content and collaborative activities.

In his full post, Kevin also writes about what’s coming next for PBwiki, as well as some common concerns about using wikis that we’ve heard from educators. Check out the full post: Behind the Scenes with PBwiki.