Future Changes

“Grow Your Wiki” Grows into Specialist Consultancy

Today, I’m taking the wraps off something I’ve been working on for a long time.

Grow Your Wiki is growing – into a specialist consultancy focused on organizational wiki adoption.

This is as much a launch of something new, as the continuation of something I’ve been doing for a long time. I built my first wiki in 2003, for science curriculum, and building The Science of Spectroscopy showed me the amazing capability of a wiki to bring information to life, and get people more deeply involved in its creation, growth, and use.

Since then, I’ve been working with organizations to introduce wikis for internal collaboration, knowledge sharing, and project management. I’ve done it both as a full-time job, at Emerson College and Brown University, and as a consultant for a number of other organizations.

In late 2006, I joined Atlassian (makers of the Confluence wiki) as their Wiki Evangelist, and have continued to evangelize the benefits of wiki use in an organizational context at conferences, on blogs, and in my latest book Wikipatterns. I’ve also continued to work with a broad range of organizations on their wiki adoption efforts.

In the past several months, I’ve been fielding more and more questions from organizations that want to know how to get wiki adoption going the right way. I believe that to make wiki adoption successful and fully realize its benefits, they really need a good plan for managed growth that takes into account their size, history of enterprise software use (or misuse!), ensures people get the most out of their wiki use, and helps minimize performance and efficiency issues related to too-rapid growth.

So, I’m launching this new venture to focus all my energy on helping organizations get the most out of their investment in wikis as a collaboration, knowledge sharing, project & meeting management, and communication platform.

To that end, I’ll be leaving the full-time employ of Atlassian as of this Friday, August 15th. I’ll continue to work part-time on some special projects for the company until the end of September.

If you’re looking to grow wiki use in your organization, I’d love to help you plan a strategy for managed growth. You can use the contact form to get in touch, and I’ll get back to you within two business days.

17 Comments

  1. Great. All the best for your new business. You might want to list yourself at the WikiMatrix consultant market place: wikimatrix.org/consultants.

  2. Best of luck with your new venture – and I hope you’ll be continuing with this blog! You’re doing a great job for all of us working in the wiki space in raising awareness of how useful the wiki approach can be.

  3. Great! I wish you a lot fun with your new venture.

    -Tim

  4. Great to hear it, Stewart! I enjoy your blog and your guest spots on Wikinomics. Can you steer me to some public communities that focus on wikis and enterprise 2.0 issues so that I can supplement my blog reading? I enjoy reading independent thinkers but I’d really like to see some rapid-fire back and forth in a forum-type environment.

    Thanks!

  5. Best of luck with the new venture. I feel there is a huge amount of educating required in this area as wikis – in my opinion – are still not being given the recognition and investment they deserve.

  6. Congratulations on making the leap! I love that your services include “Advising Hours” – feels so warm and collegiate somehow, that you’re a teacher first and foremost. Wonderful stuff you’re doing here with the blog and guest blogging and it’s just plain inspirational – keep up the good work.

  7. Hey, congratulations!

  8. Dee says:

    Congratulations Stewart! Glad to know you will be keeping up your blog and conference presentations. There really is a lot of hesitation still about adoption… “lead a horse to water” and all that. When the “tipping point” comes it will be due in large part to your efforts.

  9. Anthony Rethans says:

    Stewart,
    Congratulations on taking the plunge!
    There’s a huge need for ongoing education and you’ll do a great job addressing it.

  10. Stewart
    Congrats on the new chapter!!
    All the best with what I know will be a wonderful success!!
    the world needs you!

    Cheers
    Brett

  11. Camille Goksever says:

    Stewart,
    Organizations need you. This is wonderful news! You’ll be doing a great service to many.

    Warm regards,
    Camille

  12. Hi Stewart. I wish you the best for this new step ;-)

  13. Lisa Dyer says:

    Congratulations, Stewart! Great move – hope you generate a lot of happy customers:)

    - lisa

  14. Stewart, we all wish you the best with your business. We’re sorry to see you leave at the same time, but honestly I can’t imagine a better career path. The list of accomplishments in your tenure at Atlassian was impressive and frequently exceeded our (my) expectations. Undoubtedly, your clients will have a similar experience.

  15. All the best wishes from //SEIBERT/MEDIA GmbH (Germany) for you.

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Wikipatterns book: a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization Future Changes is Stewart Mader. He wrote the book on wiki adoption, and he has led or advised enterprise-wide wiki deployments in Fortune 500 companies, universities, nonprofits, small and medium size companies.

Advisory Services include: adoption strategy and timeframe, vendor/product analysis, content structure and templates, roles and permissions, data migration, and workshops. Linda Ziffrin of Valley View Ventures handles bookings. Contact to discuss your needs.
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10 case studies from education show how to collaboratively build curriculum, guide students' teamwork, and manage research projects.
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Your Wiki Isn’t Wikipedia: How to Use It for Technical Communication Your Wiki Isn’t Wikipedia (PDF download)
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Five ways your business can benefit from using a wiki. Published in the August, 2008 issue of Website Magazine.

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