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!

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!

1. Collaborative intelligence – “for example, in marketing and sales operations, you need to communicate to the field organization about an ever changing product line.” The pattern I’d use here is Magnet to establish a wiki as the “go-to” place for people out in the field.
2. Participatory knowledge base – “99 percent of the pages created [on the wiki] and tagged allow the call center to go from 20 clicks to find information to four, substantially decreasing search costs and decreasing the average call time by 10 to 20 percent.” I’d use the FAQ and Seed it with content patterns here.
3. Flexible client collaboration – “a collaborative workspace between [a firm] and the client.” Agenda is a good pattern for using the wiki to organize meetings with clients, and kickstart client collaboration.
4. Business social networks – “with your business partners or customers, where you’re communicating to them, getting feedback from them, and they’re interacting directly.” I’d use the Corporate Directory and MySpace patterns as the building blocks of a social network.

1. Structure by Topic

The whole point of the wiki is its ability to bring people together and connect dots across organizational silos. That won’t happen if you structure the wiki around those very silos.

Here, he argues the wiki shouldn’t mimic the existing organizational structure because that won’t help break down information silos.

I agree with the principle of using the wiki to encourage new connections across the organization, but it does need to start with some resemblance of the existing organizational structure. That gives people confidence in using it.

Here’s what I advise organizations:

1. Create spaces that reflect existing groups, teams, and departments (Sales, Marketing, Research, Product #1, Product #2, etc.) but keep all those spaces open to everyone in the organization.
2. When you add new content to a space, ask yourself: can this information be accessible to everyone or does it need to be restricted to specific people?
3. This way, you build a wiki that’s mostly open and encourages self-sufficient access to knowledge & cross-collaboration, but also preserves the security and privacy of sensitive information (and makes it easy to ease that privacy when you’re ready to make certain information more public).

2. Lead with what you want

…a page called “Trends in Retail Channel Marketing” is a better wiki page than “2006 Analysis of our Company’s Channel Marketing Spend”. (Of course, the report might be useful as backup–so include it as a link from the main page on trends).

Here, he’s suggesting that it’s not very useful to just use the wiki as a dumping ground for content that’s idle. It’s better to actively develop the information – say, for a research report – right on the wiki, then attached the final report to the wiki page. That way, people get both the content in a reusable form, and the report in an archival form, and both are in context by being presented together.

Also, when people actively create information on the wiki, they’re more likely to reuse that information where appropriate since they

• a) wrote it, so they know what it contains
• b) will likely write future information on the wiki, and will be in the mindset to recognize that they already have relevant content elsewhere on the wiki.

3. Link, Link, Link

Encourage them to “linkify” any term (yes, I mean any term) in their entries that is either proprietary vocabulary, potentially unclear to some readers, or describes a strategic concept where the company might have proprietary insights.

I generally agree with this one, although I think it’s good to exercise judgment about how many terms to link. It’s good to link to definitions of ambiguous terms, but it’s better to replace those terms with clearer ones that require less definition. That way, you can focus on making your core text as readable as possible, and focus your linking on terms you want your readers to focus on.

I have been blogging about my Web 2.0 experiments at work and recommended that we should just do Web 2.0 instead of trying to justify it.

With so many open source solutions available for wikis and blogs, the best way to get traction with Web 2.0 technologies is to casually bring it in house, plant the seeds, and let it grow like weeds.

You can have a large amount of people using these tools quicker then you can try to sell the value to an older generation of decision makers who are not familiar enough with the tools to understand the value.

On building interdisciplinary connections between people who wouldn’t ordinarily interact:

The architect team has found that blogging has created several quality discussions with people who they don’t get a chance to interact with that often.

I have received requests from marketing, sales, and public relations to meet about possibly extending blogs to their departments. In an IT strategy session today, one of the teams working on our “people strategy” recommended more blogs to improve communications.

On reducing email:

We are trying to develop these processes without using any emails. We are only allowed to use face to face discussions and the wiki to come to consensus.

On the impact after just six weeks:

There are still some people who laugh at the notion of blogs and wikis, but in time this will become as normal as email and the telephone. And the beauty of it is that we didn’t pay a penny for any of it and we didn’t have to sell it to anybody. We simply built it and they are coming.

“The biggest reason that we’re switching is that the wiki is easier to use,” says Rosen. “If employees see a better way to organize or present information, they can just go ahead and do it with a wiki.

…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.

The PDF is available for $19, the same price as online access at Wikiineducation.com, and now there’s an all new option:

Paperback
Take it with you, keep it on your desk next to Wikipatterns, or give it to a friend. Whether you’re using a wiki in your teaching, research, committee work, curriculum planning, or writing a grant proposal, Using Wiki in Education offers advice and examples for making the most of your wiki use. The paperback is available for $24.95.

If you’ve already purchased access to Using Wiki in Education, simply log in to Wikiineducation.com to download a free PDF copy of the full book.

More worldwide praise for 21 Days of Wiki Adoption –
this time from Romania, the Netherlands, and the US:

Sara Bocaneanu, who blogs about knowledge management in Romania, writes:

My favorite point so far?

Don’t have a pilot wiki with just early adopters… People remain skeptical even if the early adopters are gushing. If, instead, you use a mixed group with some regular users and some skeptics, people will pay attention to what they’re saying!

Mike Kavis, who is blogging about his organization’s wiki implementation, says:

If you are interesting in launching a wiki in your organization I recommend you read Stewart Mader’s 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

Fred Zelders, who blogs from the Netherlands, created a list of all episodes on his blog using Grazr, a tool that lets you create an automatically updated reading list of items from either a single source or multiple sources.

Put the entire series on your site!

Just copy & paste this code to put a player on your site that updates with the newest episode every day. You can see an example here.
<embed src="http://blip.tv/play/iT0B" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="440" height="255" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" />