Pushing the Wiki Space

My atten­tion was drawn to a new For­tune Magazine ini­ti­at­ive called the Cor­por­ate Org Chart Wiki. It bills itself as in early beta and clearly exper­i­mental. It claims to seek to ‘tap the col­lect­ive know­ledge’ of the com­munity and to col­lect and share enter­prise organ­iz­a­tional charts. Its col­lab­or­ativ­ity cer­tainly marks it as a wiki. Unfor­tu­nately it seems overly open to the abuse that has been asso­ci­ated with many of the pub­lic wikis exist­ent today. There’s no authen­tic­a­tion, nor any sort of trans­par­ent ver­sion­ing that I can find. Its a nice little flash app and it func­tions effi­ciently. It allows a user to draw rela­tion­ships and add nodes visu­ally and rel­at­ively intu­it­ively. It allows an observer to gain a quick appre­ci­ation of the organ­iz­a­tional struc­ture.
How­ever, I won­der what the object­ive of this exer­cise is? If it is to do what it claims to be attempt­ing, i.e. provide a pub­licly access­ible repos­it­ory of org charts for pub­licly traded com­pan­ies, I won­der if there are not bet­ter means. I am reminded of LinkedIN, which attempts to basic­ally accom­plish a sim­ilar thing, although in a less visual man­ner. LinkedIN how­ever, ensures a sub­stan­tial data integ­rity through some form of authen­tic­a­tion that you are who you say you are. It also lever­ages the fact that every­one is part of some web of inter­ac­tion, whether busi­ness, per­sonal, aca­demic or oth­er­wise. While I applaud for­tune for the graph­ical approach to visu­al­iz­a­tion of the org chart data that they provide, the low level of authen­tic­a­tion seems to be a huge issue. The appar­ent fail­ure of the exper­i­ment seems to be all to evid­ent for all to see. I note on curs­ory exam­in­a­tion that someone has made them­selves CEO of Apple. I won­der if they can trace that self-promotion?
I won­der what the actual object of this exper­i­ment is? Maybe its about some­thing less trans­par­ent that what it appears to be? It is an inter­est­ing foray into visual social net­work ana­lysis, but I won­der whether it would really be rather more effect­ive to screen scrape cor­por­ate sites to cre­ate such charts and per­haps allow modi­fic­a­tion as a means of veri­fic­a­tion. Inter­est­ingly, the visu­als and the prin­ciple itself remind me of GENI which allows for inter­act­ive gene­a­logy and which I blogged on earlier this year.
So I am left won­der­ing why For­tune magazine has got­ten into digital inter­activ­ity research. Don’t mis­un­der­stand me, its rather cool that they have. But I ques­tion what the research ques­tion is here. If it was merely to start to build a repos­it­ory of cor­por­ate org charts, which are super fluid by nature, there is def­in­itely more effect­ive means to accom­plish this and to ensure that these actu­ally have some fac­tual truth.