This is from Ric Roberts of Swirrl, a company that offers a hosted online workspace for sharing knowledge. The Swirrl Blog is a good source of information on business collaboration and knowledge management. – Stewart

Email works great for short messages intended for one person, where you just want to alert the recipient to something, and no further discussion is required. But when you start to include more people, and they all start chipping in with their responses, email starts to break down as an efficient medium.

Say there are five other people in your team, and you want to get their feedback on a report that you intend to send to a client. If you send out an email to all of them, asking for their advice, you might get 3 or 4 responses back: some with revised versions of the report, some with notes at the end and some with comments interspersed within your original text. A couple of people might have ‘CC’d everyone else in your team when they replied, where others might have just replied directly to you.

I’m sure you can see where this is leading. Your team ends up with multiple conflicting versions of the report, some of which aren’t available to everyone involved. Holding a meaningful discussion over the content quickly becomes impossible. [Read more]

This is from Ric Roberts of Swirrl, a company that offers a hosted online workspace for sharing knowledge. The Swirrl Blog is a good source of information on business collaboration and knowledge management. – Stewart

If a question about general knowledge comes up in conversation, it’s easy to immediately look it up on the web on your laptop or phone.  If you’re watching a film and you can’t place where else you’ve seen one of the actors, you can instantly look it up on IMDB.  You can even use services like Shazam to identify songs.  Finding things out at work should also be this easy, but it normally isn’t. Although the information you want probably exists somewhere in your organization, it’s often scattered across multiple systems or you might not have access to the specific shared drive where it lives.

Being able to easily access the current knowledge in your workplace helps you do your job better.  It allows you to spend less time searching for information or tackling issues that others have already solved. [Read more]

Larry Cannell explains the inherent weakness in files as the primary container for information:

I don’t even want files. What I want is the information stored in a file. I have been thinking about files and documents lately and I have come to the conclusion that our reliance on the computer file as the primary structure for storing our digital “stuff” is hurting us in ways we cannot see. This is holding us back from realizing truly breakthrough capabilities.

Files must be pushed out to people, and each person makes changes in isolation from others. The resulting revisions must be combined – and differences resolved – which can lead to disagreements, misunderstandings, and corrections. This can prolong the development of critical products like proposals, reports, technical documentation, and anything else that needs to be produced by many people in a short time period.

A wiki pulls those same people in to work on information in a shared space where one always sees the most up to date version – the product of all previous revisions. This eliminates the reconciliation of competing or conflicting changes, since they’re dealt with during the revision process. That’s the part of collaboration that’s otherwise the least collaborative, least productive, and most damaging to the social fabric of work groups.

More worldwide praise for 21 Days of Wiki Adoption -
this time from Germany, New Zealand, and the US:

Felix Harling from Germany wrote about the series and the Wikipatterns book on his blog EinfachSchnellKlar (Easy-Fast-Clear):

Stewart Mader has written wikipatterns, a book that was very well received by the enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management community. Those who don’t want to buy the book (or don’t have an online access to the book e.g. thanks to the SAP SkillSoft partnership) may have a look at the Wikipatterns website or at Stewart’s blog: he is currently publishing a “21 days of wiki adoption” video serial.

Scott Abel wrote about the series on his blog The Content Wrangler, and specifically discussed Day 18: WikiCharter – community ‘house rules’.

A WikiCharter is a set of guidelines to ensure productive interaction between members of your wiki community. Here are five guidelines from the Sony Ericsson Developer World wiki provided by wiki evangelist, Stewart Mader, author of the book, Wikipatterns: A Practical Guide to Improving Productivity and Collaboration in Your Organization.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about the series on the blog ReadWriteWeb, where he is a Lead Author:

…here is wiki consultant Stewart Mader’s great short video series 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

Mike Riversdale from New Zealand wrote about the series on his blog MiramarMike.co.nz – Generating agile organisations:

Stewart Mader has been running a fascinating (and must see) podcast of how to encourage wiki uptake within your organisation…

Mark Oehlert linked to the series on his blog e-Clippings (Learning as Art).

Thanks Felix, Scott, Marshall, Mike, and Mark!

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]

More worldwide praise for 21 Days of Wiki Adoption -
this time from South Africa and the US:

Patrick Berry and Scott Jungling at CSU Chico wrote about the series on their blog Institutional Knowledge:

Our friend Stewart Mader is putting out 21 Days of Wiki Adoption videos. Even if you are already going with your wiki project, there will be some episodes worth watching.

Matt Herzberger linked to the series from his blog mattherzberger.com.

Anne Gentle wrote about the series on her blog just write click and specifically pointed out Day 12: Documentation:

Each video is short, encapsulated, and easily digested when you need a break. I’m really enjoying them, and the cool US map background behind Stewart.

Note: I’ll be presenting Wiki Roundtripping? Structured Authoring? How Do They Co-Exist? with Anne at DocTrain West 2008 in Vancouver, BC in early May.

Younique, a social media marketing firm in South Africa, wrote about the series on their blog marketing + it, and specifically discussed Day 13: Wiki vs. Content Management System and Day 14: Is Data Safe in a Wiki?.

Thanks Patrick, Scott, Matt, Anne, and Younique!

On Monday, I posted a reader poll asking how you use wikis. As of last night, 127 of you responded, and here’s what you had to say:

There were three respondents who chose “Other”, and here are their specific responses: Managing classroom information, garbage trash, and audits. Now, I can’t really say much about garbage trash, but I can comment on the other two “other” uses:

Managing classroom information is an excellent wiki use. In fact, I got started using wikis doing something very similar – building a wiki-based science curriculum.

Using a wiki for audits is a great use too – besides having all your information easily accessible in one place, the revision history the wiki maintains for every page is very audit-friendly since it shows a complete trail of who contributed information, when they did so, and what was added, changed and removed.

Jeffrey Keefer (Twitter) commented on the post and asked about a poll for education uses. That’s coming next week! He also asked for more information on some of the uses I included in the poll, like project management. Watch for that next week too.

Eighth in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

In order to shift from the culture of individual work to the culture of collaborative work, it is obvious that the issue of trust is crucial: trust is linked not only with the Wiki spirit but it is a very important requirement of creativity and so of the orientation to innovation.

To be considered a credible expert is important such as to be sure to have reliable expert’s opinions; the feeling that you are appreciate inside your team and more in general in your community is an incentive to be active and “creative”.

Related WIOWA Questions:

8.a Time allocation (support to effectiveness)

In your online profile, do you have the possibility to write about your further expertises or personal projects?

8.b Teaming (organizational services)

When there are meetings, have you the same documentation of other participants?

8.c Openness to Ideas (knowledge and collaborative support)

Do you think that your ideas and, in general, your work, get the right acknowledgment from your Organization?

8.d Decision Making Agility (communication and socialization)

Do you consider reliable the insights coming from the whole community?

Seventh in a series by guest author Vincenzo Cammarata.

Strictly linked with transparency concept, openness is at the base of the principle that people work better if they have access to the right information and possibility to assume that all over the organization.

The simple access to other group member data or the possibility to know activities scheduled also in other groups are normal operations in a mature context such as is allowed to look to other team solutions or results in order to decide something for the own team.

Related WIOWA Questions:

7.a Collaboration (support to effectiveness)

Is it possible to access other groups’ contact data?

7.b Openness to ideas (organizational services)

Is it possible to know when other groups meet and, if you want, participate?

7.c Decision Making (knowledge and collaborative support)

In order to take decisions, do you usually look to other groups’ or departments’ work results and choices?

7.d Communication (communication and socialization)

Have you ever participated in other groups’ or departments’ discussions?