At WikiSym 2008 (8-10 September, Porto, Portugal), the first-ever WikiFest symposium will take place. WikiFest is all about wiki adoption in organizations: how to choose the right software, run a successful pilot, grow wiki use, and measure ROI.

I’m pleased to announce the speakers for this inaugural WikiFest. They come from organizations of all sizes around the world, including IBM, Chevron, University of Helsinki, Boeing, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, //Seibert/Media, and wikiwise. The range of industries represented is fantastic: Energy, Media, Technology, Transportation, Aerospace, and Education.

Each will talk about their experiences leading an enterprise wiki initiative, and offer timely advice that can help you guide your organization’s wiki efforts.

Soobaek Jang and Brian D. Goodman – IBM

Soobaek Jang and Brian D. Goodman are responsible for IBM’s internal wiki adoption. Over the past three years, they have supported over community of over 300,000 registered users working with over 20,000 wiki instances containing over 380,000 pages. After sharing high-level background, they will discuss three key lessons in managing wiki deployments and adoption in large-scale enterprises.

Camille Goksever – Chevron

Camille Goksever will present lessons learned deploying the first wiki at Chevron’s Richmond, California refinery. Presentation will focus on how a wiki triggered cultural changes in an organization of non-technical users.

Antero Aunesluoma and Heikki Wilenius – University of Helsinki

The University of Helsinki’s wiki service was opened in august 2007 – equally to staff and students. The adoption strategy has been strongly driven by the needs of users, all the way from selecting the software to formulating the rather liberal policy of use. At the moment there are more than 400 individually administered wiki spaces, supporting online collaboration on studies, research and administration. In this session we will showcase how the University of Helsinki has adopted the wiki. Until this far the story has been a success but there are certain challenges already waiting for a solution.

Sean Munson – University of Michigan, The Boeing Company and Derek Hansen – University of Maryland

We discuss the results from two studies of the wiki deployment and adoption. In the first, we provided three online patient support mailing lists with wikis, help files, and suggestions for use based on study of the CSS-D mailing list and wiki. The second provided a Boeing workgroup with a wiki to document and publicize their past work. In both cases, the social challenges were more difficult than technical challenges. In both instances, users were reluctant to edit others’ content and were unsure of what (and how much detail) to add. Identifying a wiki team or wiki champion, encouraging a small group to initially seed the wiki with content, introducing the wiki concurrently to many potential members, and allowing and encouraging authors to take ownership of content helped to ease adoption issues.

Martin Seibert – //SEIBERT/MEDIA

//SEIBERT/MEDIA is a German web agency with over 60 employees and experience since 1996. We started to use our new wiki in July 2007 and have been experiencing a tremendous usage increase and a lot of successes, that I would like to share. Additionally we have collected a couple of good insights, on how to sell a wiki both from an economical perspective and an internal perspective to clients.

Lex Slaghuis – wikiwise

Lex Slaghuis of wikiwise will discuss bbservations and experiences on wiki concepts within a large local Dutch government agency. An analysis of current collaboration processes is presented with five recurring collaborative patterns. These patterns were identified by clustering the collaborative ‘issues’ of employees. The patterns are of interest as they seem to influence each other as well as they provide quick and easy overview of the organizational collaborative processes. Some of these patterns also appear to relate to typical wiki capabilities, such as RSS-feeds and link indexing.

Holger Junghanns – SAP

Holger will share his experience of implementing a wiki within the Customer Relationship Management organization of SAP AG. The goal of this project was to promote knowledge transfer among the different teams involved in the development process of SAP’s CRM application. Within a six month timeframe, the project team introduced a wiki as a central point of access for internal knowledge transfer and collaboration within the CRM organization.