Rob Castaneda, Founder of CustomWare Asia Pacific, wrote Working the “Wiki” Way for the March 2008 issue of Octane, quarterly magazine of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO).

In the article, he discusses how CustomWare uses a wiki internally to improve information flow between teams working on client projects:

The Pain Point

The biggest snag we experienced was transferring knowledge and context from the sales team to the delivery team. This muddled flow of information threatened our client projects.

Rob and his company decided they needed to improve communication, and decided to use a wiki as their collaboration platform. [Read more]

Sixth in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

A common element between Wiki philosophy and innovation successful case histories, is the partial or total absence of structure or, saying better, of hierarchy. The possibility, in fact, to contribute in the same way, indifferently at which level you are involved in the organization, is one of the first steps towards the reduction of barriers to collaboration, participation and involvement in the organizational life.

Peering is to intend in the two ways of organizational commitment: from both the perspective, the access to common information and the possibility to contribute to corporate knowledge.

Related WIOWA Questions:

6.a Supporting people (support to effectiveness)

Is everybody able to update useful information like telephone numbers or scheduled meetings?

6.b Resource Allocation (organizational services)

Is everybody able to book meeting room or, in general, common resources?

6.c Flexibility on process design (knowledge/collaborative support)

Is everybody able to recombine documents and then publish it?

6.d Communication (communication and socialization)

Is everybody free to publish (in the intranet or wiki) information useful for your colleagues?

Fifth in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

The social networking aspect is the starting point of a company sensible to Enterprise 2.0 – then Wiki – solutions. Introducing this concept in a workplace context is possible to change in a radical and effective way the previous organizational culture.

The first step to stimulate social networking is to allow the creation of personal spaces – if possible with an internal blog – and then to produce a staff list in order to let people know who their colleagues are and which are personal skills that they own. In this way there will be a simpler identification of experts.

Related WIOWA Questions:

5.a Flexibility on process design (support to effectiveness)

Is it easy to identify an expert in the whole community?

5.b Teaming (organizational services)

Are members of teams able to know all the competences and expertises of co-workers?

5.c Decision Making (knowledge and collaborative support)

When the group has to take a decision, it is usual to ask opinion to experts inside the whole community?

5.d Openness to Ideas (communication and socialization)

Are individuals insights visible to the whole community?

Fourth in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

The true collaboration occurs when people have the possibility to co-work on the same sub-task, activating a mechanism of new knowledge creation. Collaboration is not so obvious if is not clearly supported: the risk is to exchange this “together” learning process with a simple cooperation process, producing not new knowledge but only a simple addition of individual regress knowledge.

In this sense, collaboration has to be helped in order to avoid isolation in job and supported with a compatible scheduling of daily activities. Is also important to create “collaboration bridges” across teams and groups, involving people to participate in each other’s activities or involve experts on other areas to collaborate together.

Related WIOWA Questions:

4.a Support to People (support to effectiveness)

Do you know which people are involved in your same projects?

4.b Teaming (organizational services)

In your team, are individuals plans often compatible with the group activity?

4.c Collaboration (knowledge and collaborative support)

Is it usual to participate to other group projects?

4.d Communication (communication and socialization)

Is it usual to discuss with others about their work, solving problems together?

Third in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

Sharing is linked with the concept of a democratic access – and then utilization – to all kinds of resources, from physical tools to data and, even better, to ideas and individuals’ insights.

The possibility of sharing improves an effective distribution of common resources (meeting room, projector, corporate car…). In a more general acceptation of the term, the availability to ideas or previous solutions useful for different use is an advantage that make co-creation of new knowledge and a healthy circulation of knowledge possible.

Related WIOWA Questions:

3.a Resources Allocation (support to effectiveness)

Are the common resources accessible to all and can these be booked in an autonomous way?

3.b Openness to ideas (organizational service)

Is it possible to access or find results and insights inside and outside the community?

3.c Collaboration (knowledge and collaborative support)

Is it usual to implement others’ work or co-create documents?

3.d Communication (communication and socialization)

Is the real time circulation of ideas among the community supported?

Just found this excellent paper by Laurence Parry from the 2006 Wikimania conference. It focuses on starting and building a community wiki, and a lot of his ideas, tips, and advice also apply to wiki use in organizations:

…why would you want to build such a wiki in the first place, and why would such wikis be successful? The answers are simple: the wiki provides (in most cases) a persistent storage for community history, while at the same time the community provides a ready pool of eager, knowledgeable contributors for the wiki.

Like the community Parry talks about, your organization has a pool of knowledgeable contributors whose knowledge should be captured on a wiki, both for their collaborative benefit, and for the greater benefit of capturing your organization’s institutional knowledge. Some people may be more eager than others, so it’s a matter of demonstrating the wiki’s value and encouraging them to participate.

There are rumors flying around of YAWS (Yet Another Wikipedia Scandal). How should it affect peoples’ perception of wiki use in organizations?

Here’s a good perspective on it from a person who commented on a San Francisco Chronicle article this morning:

There is one important fact that should be kept in focus, however. Wikipedia is not some hierarchical top down business where one misbehaving leader can wreck havoc (such as can occur with our government). Rather, it represents a highly democratic and very loosely connected organization that has been mostly built on the dedicated efforts of a few thousand core volunteers. Therefore, regardless of the [alleged] misadventures of Mr. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia will continue to grow and serve.

(If you want all the details of the alleged allegations, the Chronicle article has them. I’m not going to reprint them here in the interest of focusing on the impact of Wikipedia on organizational wiki use.)

This is the kind of news item that prompts people to think all wikis – including those that organizations might use – pose the same risks for inappropriate behavior that happens on Wikipedia. [Read more]

Josh Catone writes on Read Write Web that the Obama campaign is using a wiki to organize precinct captains and volunteers for today’s crucial primary-caucus in Texas:

That the Obama campaign is so tech savvy and so open to using social software is unsurprising. They have run one of the most comprehensive online campaigns in recent memory — perhaps ever — generally outperforming opponents on nearly every social network or social media site, and according to a recent post from Ning’s Marc Andreesen, Obama has long been very interested in social networking and how it can affect politics.

The specific appeal of Central Desktop’s wiki-based approach is that allows volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster. The Texas effort, some of which was cloned over from the previous California site, was literally launched a couple of weeks ago in mid-February.

Clay Shirky’s new book is out today: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations It’s on Amazon, and it looks really good.

If you’re in Cambridge, MA, Clay is speaking about the book at the Berkman Center at Harvard tonight:

“Here Comes Everybody” is about the social changes coming as a result of the internet’s power to support group action. Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action; all of these forms of group effort have been hampered by the myriad real-world difficulties of finding and coordinating with others. Our new group-forming media have removed many of those difficulties, and we are in the middle of a transformation of all kinds of group action.

More info on the Berkman Center Events & Webcasts blog.