To gain a better understanding of how wikis actually work, I spoke with Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity Communications, on Friday. Paul is responsible for infrastructure at Gennova Group, a Boston-based collaborative community of professionals devoted to organizational change, innovation, and other related topics. In this role, and other contexts, he was worked with wikis, Groove, Sharepoint, e-mail gropus, and other collaborative tools.
At Gennova, Paul recently used a wiki to better facilitate the collective capability mapping of Gennova’s diverse membership. This mapping occurred along a series of dimensions that were suggested by the membership during the process so both the content and its organization was in a state of flux. He started with e-mail to solicit contributions but this quickly began to provoke significant administrative burdens as he needed to establish and maintain a common format and taxonomy, as well as keep everyone up on changes. After Paul switched to a wiki, these issues disappeared as everyone was literally “on the same page” and they could make edits fully aware of the context and contributions of others.
Paul also mentioned that when working with groups of professionals with diverse backgrounds and technical experience, a lowest common denominator tool is most effective. Wikis are certainly that. They require little, if any, training or technical help and are almost transparent, providing the illusion of a virtual white board that offers everyone access to the marker and eraser. Other collaborative tools, with more complex features, raise a barrier to participation that, no matter how small, can discourage the participation of busy professionals.
Group document editing is another application where wikis can greatly simplify the process. Here again, Paul said, simplicity has value. Tools with more complex change tracking such as Word bring a complexity cost. If the task is truly collaborative, the need to identity who said what through a layering of change tracking can get in the way of clearly seeing the message.
Blogs provide a personal voice. Many people use their blogs as representations of their personal and/or professional interests and opinions. I recently joined Gennova and was given access to the membership business wiki described above. Without guidance on either tools or content, I was able to quickly place my own professional interests within those of the group, making our relationships clear to me and others. I even added another category to the discussion.
Paul said the wikis have been quickly picked by groups of IT developers as an obvious productivity tool for collaboratively working on uses cases, specifications and other team tasks. Their ease of use and their ability to turn a virtual asynchronous activity into something that feels real time should prompt quick adoption outside the IT community.
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