Wikis for Business

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Three part series, called 'Evolving Collaboration', by C:Net, with interviews of experts of how Wiki's can and are being used in business environments.

URL = http://news.com.com/1200-2-5741150.html



Description

Comments from James Hillard at the Cooperation Commons blog, at [1]


1. Wiki while you work


  • Interviews from: Ross Mayfield - Socialtext
  • John Seely Brown - Author, the only sustainable edge
  • Givanni Rodriguez - Eastwick Communication
  • Tony Obregon - Eastwick Communication


Description of what Wikis are, how the UI look like, how much time it takes everyday to maintain one


2. Getting wiki with the team


  • Interviews from: Ross Mayfield - Socialtext
  • John Seely Brown - Author, the only sustainable edge
  • Givanni Rodriguez - Eastwick Communication
  • Tony Obregon - Eastwick Communication


How to implement a wiki inside your company: educate people, then use on one project. The example given is from Eastwick Communication, and they mention that it took about one week for adoption by co-workers on one project.


3. Is business waking up to wiki?


  • Interviews from: Ross Mayfield - Socialtext
  • John Seely Brown - Author, the only sustainable edge


Where we learn that it is fairly easy to introduce wikis inside a company, because it can just emerge from the bottom up, there is no CIO approval required. The benefits of using wikis, beyond helping with the management of projects, is that it lso helps people build trust, and therefore it helps build better social capital for the company. Wikis started to be used by geeks and hackers, and it allowed Open Source mouvement to emerge. The same is now happening inside organisations. It is spreading through viral marketing. While Wikis are good for light weight, rapid, action oriented collaboration, and are a key technology for distributed teams, the next step is to figure out on how this "social software" (wikis, AIM, etc...) can complement a web services architecture to facilitate operations across the supply chain. This is where the real power is, but it will require a huge mindshift. ([2])