Wikiality

Moderated by Ross Mayfield

Wiki subjects needs a goal

BarCamp is a wiki style event!

People Process Projects Practices

People

Q: What is it? A: Alternative for email for groups.

Prevents occupational spam (i.e. prevents bcc: to all)

Email volume drops by ~1/3 when wiki is adopted

Move from PUSH model to PULL model of information management.

Most powerful feature of RSS: unsubscribe.

Key: to get people to communicate about other things.

Shift in market ~mid 2006 from tech users to average users at companies

Next shift: shift from corporate use to public groups

Process

First steps to adoption: create a "glossary" page for your organizational language.

Create "How To" pages for the organization.

Don't filter the subjects! Just add to it and grow it all organically.

Measure adoption by rate of average users to advanced users.

Projects

Setup wiki as a way of doing project communication and lightweight communication at the BEGINNING of the project.

Amount of training given to users up front directly results in adoption by users.

Practices

Refactoring or Gardening used to clean the content and update the pages.

Delegate specific sections to knowledge owners.

Anecdotes are a way to build the wiki project's proposition.

Pitfalls

Can have too much structure by having too many wiki plug-ins.

Liability for bad information in wiki? It's a gray area. You usually know who added the bad info.

Pluses

Audit trails are inherit in the wiki.

Search is part of the wiki.

Use Cases

Call center example: First step: use the call center search system to find customer solution, if not found then Second Step: start with documenting problems on wiki, letting users add solutions.

Wiki Next Steps:

Integration with document management systems.