Shortcuts Podcast – How to Use Wikis at Work (Part Two)

6 thoughts on “Shortcuts Podcast – How to Use Wikis at Work (Part Two)”

  1. Dear Luis, will u marry me? πŸ™‚ Just kidding! I love your blog and am so happy I stumbled upon it. I’m tracking the enterprise 2.0 sector in my personal blog, but am also working with an enterprise 2.0 company, Itensil, which may be the product you will propose to…

    Please check out http://www.itensil.com. I remember from the 90s how advanced IBM was in knowledge management practices.

    I’m also doing an article this month for Computerworld (US). If you have a client who is rolling out or currently employing a leading edge enterprise 2.0 solution, please let me know!

    Thanks Luis! p.s. where is Gran Caria?

  2. Hello Susan ! Thanks ever so much for dropping by and for the kind feedback comments ! Welcome to elsua!

    “[…] will u marry me? πŸ™‚ Just kidding!”

    LOL ! That sounds like very tempting ! πŸ˜‰ heh

    I am really glad we have been able to connect through this particular weblog post because I have been checking out your own weblog, which I discovered myself through your reply, and I am really excited to read about the stuff you are covering in the area of Enterprise 2.0. In fact, we share a good chunk of the blogroll, although I am in the process of updating mine, but I can tell you that we seem to be doing similar reading in this particular space ! Terrific stuff ! I just couldn’t help it, but have subscribed to your weblog already and will be catching up with you and linking in the near future with some of the different weblog posts you have already shared.

    I went ahead and checked out Itensil and watched through the demo and read a couple of the weblog posts and the work you guys are doing sounds really fascinating ! I am not sure what you would think but I am not certain there are many companies attempting to do what you are currently attempting to do at the moment. It sounds like you are taking wiki collaboration into the next level, which, to me, is going to be a key success factor: integrating wikis into the main process and business flows. Fascinating !

    Yes, indeed, IBM was very advanced in KM practices during the 90s, time during which I joined IBM, but I must admit that things are much more exciting at the moment trying to look for a more balanced approach to KM strategies combining both of the traditional KM stuff (That explicit knowledge) with the new and emerging social software technologies (Yes, that tacit knowledge) in order to provide a much more sensible approach towards what KM should all be about. As I said, quite exciting.

    REgarding your article this month at Computerworld I shall have a look with some of my colleagues and see what has been happening over there and if there is any worth while noting I shall let you know offline.

    Thanks again for the feedback and welcome, once again, to elsua!

  3. Pingback: frogpond
  4. “p.s. where is Gran Caria?”

    Whooops, I forgot about that one, Susan. Gran Canaria is one of the 7 islands from the Spanish Canary Islands. You can find more details about it, of course, at the Wikipedia entry for Gran Canaria. Hope that helps.

    Thanks a bunch, frogpond, by the way, for the trackback and the link love. Appreciated, both the link to the first episode and the second one, along with the kind comments. Good stuff!

  5. Hi Luis,

    Those are great tips for building a wiki community. With useful back-channel tools such as Skype, IM or even e-mail, a great way to get into wikis is via a mentor. Nothing like having someone you trust to answer your questions, guide you through confusions and teach you the critical shortcuts.

    One of the fundamental dilemmas about wiki participation is the difficult choice to refractor existing text or append. Things can get ugly quickly (witness some of the wikipedia fracas) when others mess with your text. Always useful to post guidelines or move contested pieces to a parallel discussion (or talk) page.

    In some wiki environments there is no guarantee that your words will stay – rather the promise or hope is someone will come along and work them over thus improve them!

    What I really like about wikis is they are concept centric so it is easy to add, remodel, or sub-divide – you often find individuals taking ownership for topics and doing the gardening.

  6. Hi Denham ! Thanks a lot for the kind feedback comments and for adding further up into the conversation ! Excellent stuff!

    I certainly agree with you that wikis would be very much in need of having additional tools that would help knowledge workers collaborate in a more real-time fashion, synchronous, as opposed to just asynchronous, because that would certainly help enhance the capabilities of the collaborative scenario at hand. For instance, wouldn’t it be great if you would have a couple of folks accessing a wiki page and then find out that they are both active and online in Skype, as an example, and that with a single click of a button they could start chatting / talking away ? That would be just terrific !

    And very appropriate for that role of the mentor you mentioned above. That is exactly the same concept that I was pondering about when referring to having some sort of online technical facilitators that would be able to help out non-tech savvy folks get on board of the wiki site a lot sooner than just having to get them figure it all out by themselves. That is perhaps not very productive, at least, not initially. However, having some one out there that you can go to for some help and for some initial guidance is something that would help in the adoption a great deal. After all, aren’t we talking about social tools? πŸ˜€

    You bring together as well an interesting point with regards to refractoring existing text or append and although I agree with you 100%, the proof is out there, in plenty of examples, I must say that I have always felt that this is also a case of how much you trust the knowledge workers you collaborate with on a regular basis. I bet that the more you get to interact with them the much easier it would be to accept that your content would be updated and improved by others. I must say that many years ago, when I was first exposed to wikis I actually had the same issues with refractoring, but then again in a particular project it suddenly clicked with me because we were all a bunch of folks who trusted each other for doing our jobs and help improve others’ and ever since then, where we got to produce some really impressive results, I have always tried to move forward with this and trust the folks I collaborate with. If we would need to have a separate space to chat let be it, but also if the conversations are going to take place in the wiki, let’s get just things going, trust each other some more and get the job done. Yes, I know it sounds a lot easier said than done, but it is not that difficult to work on some activities, prior to collaborating in a wiki, in order to help people break those barriers and start trusting each other much more. What do you think ?

    “What I really like about wikis is they are concept centric so it is easy to add, remodel, or sub-divide”

    I couldn’t have agreed more with that statement and perhaps one of the main reasons why I would venture to state how much popular wikis are versus weblogs, for instance. I am sure that people like to add content on a particular topic a great deal more than sharing their opinion about it in their weblogs. Well, in my case, I like to do both πŸ˜‰

    Thanks again for the feedback !

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