Today while walking in the hills, I listened to an mp3 recording of a conference call among a couple of dozen online community pros. Their topic: using wikis to support communities of practice.
The start of the call should be reassuring to anyone who has been embarrassed by dysfunctional technology. The beginning of the session involved lots of beeps and people interrupting to introduce themselves, ask where the concurrent chat room was, or asking who was on the line. Twenty minutes into the call, an inbound call created a squeal that was only hushed by having everyone hang up and call back in. The lesson is that technology fails us all. It’s a law of nature.
The moderator asked people to introduce themselves and say three words about wiki. The positives were terms like exciting, linked, and important. On the downside, people said confusing, disorienting, and weird. Everyone in the group had been on a wiki before, yet a majority still found wikis odd and difficult to navigate.
The co-host offered some interesting observations about wikis in general.
- You can look at wikis from inside, outside, or in private. For instance, a community may collaboratively define its practices inside a wiki. It may decide to share them outside the wiki for publicity. Or the wiki may be part of one’s Personal Knowledge Management scheme. (I have a private wiki where I keep links, reminders, and so forth.)
- Frequently, wikis arrive in conjunction with other forms of technology, for example, wiki+mail list, wiki+face-to-face conversation, or wiki+blogs.
- Wikis change. Some people are comfortable with that; others never will be.
- Wikis are inherently confusing. Their lack of structure is a mixed blessing.
- Wikis have developed in response to the needs of their users. You can still visit the first wiki ever made. Ward Cunningham invented it for geeks: Lisp programmers. It’s taken ten years for it to break free of its heritage.
Rain curtailed my walk. I’ll post more on wiki weirdness after my next hike in the hills.
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“The lesson is that technology fails us all. ItÂ’s a law of nature…”
Another angle is that ‘technology’ is a Rorschach test with chips; people see meaning or purpose in the technology and tend to feel others will naturally find the same meaning and purpose. But technology rarely goes in the direction its inventors or even its early adopters imagined.
“Wikis…aren’t being used within corporations…”
They’ll have to find their place, and not by advocates stressing the “wiki” part (the process, if you will) over the results part (the outcome). “Here’s a way (and maybe an example) that the engineering team, the marketing team, and the invited customers can work together on the alpha version of the new product.”
I think of Wikipedia (the example most available to people) as the USAToday of information-retrieval — something I can skim when I don’t have much time and when I don’t need to rely on quality or accuracy.
Three examples of applying wikis, especially in different but not obscure ways, can go a long way toward equipping someone to imagine a fourth.