Wikimania at eLearnDevCon
My wiki session just ended. I rcv'd lots of possitive feedback. Thanks to all who attended. For those of you that missed it, I will be doing it again tomorrow afternoon. You should also consider attending my Learning2.0 session tomorrow morning.
Some items of interested that were discussed today:
Tiddlywiki
Mediawiki
OpenWiki
The Heavy Metal Umlat video by John Udell
List of opensource wiki engines
Some interesting points for me were that there are some IT departments that DON'T know what wikis are. Other companies have IT departments that are afraid to even implement a wiki on their intranet. The only thing I can think of is that there are other political/power struggles occuring within those companies. Here are the experts talking at Wikimania2006...
this from Andrew McAfee
Ross Mayfield said that in four years of building wikis for corporations Socialtext has seen precisely 0 trolls and 0 instances of vandalism. I was astonished by this and polled the entire room. No one reported even a single instance of counterproductive behavior on the wiki.Check out the following blogs to hear more about the wikimania panel discussion on enterprise wikis:
As I've written before, one of the advantages the Intranet has over the Internet is that people within companies share a culture and norms, and are usually quite reluctant to overturn them. In addition, vandals and trolls can usually be easily identified behind the firewall. So perhaps I shouldn't have been so suprised that employees aren't using corporate wikis to act out.
Josh Bancroft, Ross Mayfield, Andrew McAfee, Ned Gulley, Michael Idinopulos
posted by bschlenker @ 9:34 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
You are correct about "other political/power struggles occuring within those companies".
In late 2005 I helped launch a wiki for a specific business need within in a large fortune 500 firm (sales +14B US). In Mar 2006 I left the company to start a firm focused on innovation (www.innovationcreation.us). After I left I provided some review work for the company on the use of wikis. Here are some quotes from the interviews of the people that participated in the wiki project:
- "At this company, the relationship of the employer to employee is analogous to the relationship of a parent to the child ..." Core to the wiki philosophy is fixing incorrect information, right then and there, when discovered. At this company, the approach to fixing information errors is one of first seeking permission.
- "How can we get people to release ownership of their knowledge and allow others to edit?"
- "This company does not have a rich population of users on the leading edge of internet use."
- "Scientists have a sense of control on idea ownership; The idea is mine and group sharing without attribution is not the norm in research world."
- "If one person can do a bad thing with this tool then that completely invalidates the value it might create for the 99% other people who might get something out of it." over heard during a conversation on regulation, the law, and productivity at this company.
- "the Share Point project will supply similar functionality, why should we use wikis?" (this IT project is a implementation of a heavily customized Share Point system being delivered "real soon now"...)
As you can see there are many things contributing to the slow adoption of wiki technology, use, and behavior. In this particular case, the key to adpotion is having business people and not IT people drive the adoption.
FYI, the wiki technology deployed was MediaWiki. The focus of the wiki was to bring to the company's global employee base a way to learn about and contribute to the terminology, cultural, and innovation stories of the company through the use of wikis.
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