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Using Wikis for Corporate Collaboration

By Dawn Foster (Intel) (15 posts) on September 25, 2006 at 6:13 pm

Wikiscan be a great collaboration tool for use internally within thecorporate environment or externally for use with customers orclients. I started thinking about this in an earlierentry, but I decided thatnow would be a good time to elaborate. Previously, Isaid that:

"Wikisprovide an easy to use mechanism for knowledge sharing andcollaboration between employees. Intel has an employee-driven wikithat we call Intelpedia designed to provide a complete and accurateIntel encyclopedia with everything from lists of Intel acronyms topresentation skills tips to product information. Individual groupswithin Intel also use wikis for project collaboration."

Theprimary benefit of using a wiki is for collaboration. Since wikis canbe behind a firewall, password protected, or completely open to thepublic, the topics can vary from the creation of an internalencyclopedia to private collaboration with a client on a pressrelease to public collaboration with your customers to share newways of using your product. Wikis also have a number of otherbenefits:

• You are always working with the current version of the content.

• Diverse talent can be leveraged for contribution regardless of the location.

• Changes can be controlled based on user permissions.

• Mistakes (and even vandalism) can easily be reversed by rolling back to a previous version of the content.

• Accessible anywhere via a web browser (for viewing and editing)

• Most wikis do not require knowledge of HTML.

• The page history and recent changes are tracked and most wikis provide a mechanism to send proactive notifications of changes.

• Most wikis have talk, discussion, or comment pages where the debate about tough issues can occur before deciding how to best revise a controversial page.

Lately,I have been making extensive use of wikis for collaboration on a fewof my side projects. I am currently working on a book about the Artof Community for O'Reilly Media jointly with Danese Cooper. Weare writing the book on a wiki allowing us to collaborate together onthe current version without worrying about having an out of date copyof the book. The wiki also provides the editors with an up to theminute status on our completion of deliverables and gives them theopportunity to provide feedback along the way. This book will be abit unique in our use of the wiki because we plan to release thepartially edited copy on the wiki allowing the community to makechanges and provide feedback on the book. As a book about community,we thought that it was only appropriate to have participation fromour community of readers in the creation of the book. The wiki iscurrently password protected, but when we open it to the public, Iwill post a link to the book on this blog or on my OpenCulture blog.

I havealso been participating in conferences that make extensive use ofwikis. FooCamp, for example, is a self-organizing conference where theattendees write the agenda for the event. Prior to the conference,attendees post snippets about their current projects, theirinterests, and anything else that attendees should know about them.People also post ideas for sessions on the wiki and begin tocollaborate on ideas and gauge interest in their topic. Attendeesalso organize ride sharing, make suggestions on what to bring to theevent (it is literally a camp at the O'Reilly headquarters), andpropose fun activities to accompany the technical sessions. Bar Campis a similar event usually organized on the BarCamp wiki.

Hopefully,this blog entry will provide you with a few ideas about how you mightwant to use wikis in your environment. For more information aboutwikis, the Wikipediaentry is a good place to start.

Categories: Open Source

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• bwl zwei null » Intelpedia, Pfizerpedia & Co: Wikis in Unternehmen
  May 2, 2007 4:12 AM PDT

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