So, I’m trying to set up a couple of Wikis at work. I guess I have set them up – but that’s about it. Our organization implemented the TWiki pretty recently. I find it a little cumbersome to manage. Most of my folks are not so technically inclined to use all that it has to offer and therefore I think it can be /will be overwhelming. (I use pbwiki for my personal projects and find it very intuitive and easy to use.)
Anyway, I have had two plans for the work Wiki. For the first I created a shell called Training and Collaboration Resources for everyone involved in training across the organization to share ideas, resources, links, etc. It started as a place for me to share highlights from the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering in Boston. After I held my brown bag I put some content up there, as promised. Since then I have added a bunch more ideas, my own Q&A (both asking and answering my own questions), and other resources. However, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who has looked at it. What do I need to do!? I sent everyone the link!
Of course, I haven’t really put any real effort towards the communication, marketing, or education that is needed to get folks involved. And even once I do that, will it really matter to them? Will they actually visit the site and collaborate with me? I wasn’t really thinking about this until I read Tony Karrer’s post Leading a Horse to a Fire Hose. He is talking about a few things here, but what spoke to me about my situation was this:
There is a fire hose full of information available to everyone today and we all think our part of the fire hose is important. So we can lead the horse to the fire hose, but should we expect them to drink it all? And can we really say that the information we are providing is particularly important? And is it important right now? Or should it be available in the minimum about just when they need it as a reference? And how would they find it at that point?
In light of this, I kind of have to question the relevancy of my Training and Collaboration Resources Wiki right now. I’m the only one I know who is involved in training at my organization who is really trying to get connected with the Web 2.0 stuff.
So, this brings me to my second plan:
If I can make the Wiki the only source for employees to find available training information, manuals, references – they will come. They’ll have to! Currently we keep minimal training information on various departmental (sometimes stagnant) websites. There are even links to outdated information sitting on websites so old that everyone who had access to update them has retired.
What if I gather all of this up, update it, and put it on the Wiki? It would be no small feat, but once there it can become a living knowledge base.
Then I can bring my training network group together again and help them bring all of their scattered “training” information and documentation together in one place. They all rely on a webmaster to get their content posted or formatted. If I can show them that they would be in charge of their content on their own time – maybe they will do it.
I have an opportunity coming up to speak to ~200 people in our organization. The Wiki is top on my agenda. I just have to come up with a clear, concise explanation of what a Wiki is, introduce ours, and show them examples of how they can use it in meaningful ways. I think I’ll have about 10 – 15 minutes so that shouldn’t be so hard, right?
Thank goodness for Michele Martin and her Web 2.0 in Nonprofits Wiki that I finally checked out today! Also, I have been following Tracy Hamilton’s experience of setting up a Wiki at work and was inspired to read her wonderful success story.
All of this is hard to do when my job description doesn’t technically include any Web 2.0-related efforts. However, I know that it will ultimately serve our mission so I’m going to keep trying to nudge the Wiki along.
I started responding Angela to your great post, but it just got me writing and writing. So I hope you don’t mind, but here’s my response on my blog.
http://discovery-thru-elearning.blogspot.com/2007/06/generating-excitement-for-using-web-20.html
Thanks for the ideas.
Whoops. I forgot to mention that I found this http://shareideas.org/index.php/Main_Page was a pretty good example of a wiki in progress.
Some of the pages have data, some don’t. There are also some great ideas on the About Us page regarding how to participate, policies, privacy, faq.
It may be a good show piece to show your staff what could be accomplished when they get really into using a wiki.
The key statement here is that you can sell the Wiki as a replacement to relying on the webmaster for updates. And it can often be done incrementally. That’s normally the way I sell Wiki’s initially. I often lock out changes by end-users initially until it gets requested by an end-user.
Trying to sell folks on end-user updates is much more challenging.
I’m not sure I get what you plan to say to the 200 people. It might make sense to draft it and run it by folks via your blog.
I think there is another solution you should consider: a “graphical Wiki” approach, such as Kerika (www.kerika.com). It is a lot easier to get started because you don’t need a server: you just download the client application for your computer (Windows, Mac or Linux), and you are up and running in just a couple of minutes.
More importantly, if you are a creative or visual-oriented person, you will find a graphical Wiki a more compelling and effective way to make sure everyone is on the same page, literally…
With Kerika you can sketch out your project, process, strategy or idea on digital pages, drag and drop your content (files, bookmarks, pictures) onto these pages, and then share them with anyone, anywhere — regardless of what sort of computer they are using, whether they are online or offline, or even whether they are using Kerika. As your team mates change the project or modify any of the content, these changes are automatically replicated for everyone else.
There is a 2-minute demo at http://www.kerika.com/demo_intro.html that I think you will find interesting.
Regards,
Arun
Tracy – As always, thanks so much for your thoughts and ideas. I’m leaving another comment over on your post.
Tony – I’ll be speaking to our whole division at a “Town Hall”. I’ve been given an open agenda, but I’m expected to talk about training and communications. I want to use it as an opportunity to explain key Web 2.0 terms and introduce our training Wiki and the Division’s blog (in draft). We are a pretty old-school organization, relying mostly on email to communicate. I’m hoping to have a good portion of the training Wiki up so people will get to see how to access the information they need (and update it is they are a SME). There are a lot of groups that work on projects here and do not utilize anything but email and a copy machine. I’m hoping to reach some of these people and get them excited about other possibilities.
Arun – That Kerika looks very cool. I wish our organization had some flexibility, but we just don’t. We have an IT department that makes all the decisions about what applications to bring in behind our firewall and that’s that. I’m going to have to live with the (very slow) TWiki for awhile. Thanks for the site info though – I may use it on my own!