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 (From Social Computing - what’s in it for you)

Wikis

Wikis are basically collaboratively written online documents. They make it easy for groups to write, edit, link or delete pages in a way that enables collaborative working as never before.The word isn’t an acronym, as many people assume, but in fact comes from the Hawaiian phrase “wiki wiki” which means quickly. A number of features are common to most wiki tools. It is very easy to write and publish content. The history of each page’s changes are tracked and can be seen by all users. Differences between versions are represented graphically and it is easy to revert to previous versions of each page.

The power of wiki technology is most clearly seen in Wikipedia where users have created and sustained nearly a million pages (that is just in English - Wikipedia also has versions in more than a hundred languages) to create an encyclopedia to rival the Encyclopedia Britannica in depth and accuracy.

The BBC installed a wiki tool around 18 months ago and the take-up has been faster for it than any of the other tools with around 2000 staff currently using it. The use of BBC wikis falls into the following three main categories:

Web Site Creation

Previously establishing a web site was a relatively complex business with most people having to buy the services of a designer and developer to build a static site which took considerable effort to change and keep up to date. With a wiki they are able to start publishing online content immediately and maintaining it is trivially easy.

Research

Being able to set up a blank wiki page and ask users to populate it with their own knowledge and understanding of a subject is a really quick and easy way to get access to their accumulated knowledge.

As an example the BBC's librarians wanted to establish what directories existed out in the business, what they were used for and who owned them. To try to do this through conventional means using IT would have been a challenge and may not have surfaced all of theinformal and unofficial stuff that goes on at the margins. With the wiki, users started populating it with really useful information very quickly. They established a style and format for the data collection and were able to see and potentially change each other's information as they wrote. The result has been the pulling together, possibly for the first time, of a huge amount of complex and valuable information freely offered by users and shared openly in an easy and speedy manner.

Collaborative Document Creation

Many of us have experienced frustration at having to write a document as a group. What normally happens is one person will kick off the document in Word and save it on shared server somewhere. The trouble is others, even if they can remember where the document is and find it again, tend to defer to this original copy and are reticent about changing it and it tends to end up mostly as the original writer intended. With a wiki this changes.There is no clear ownership from the start, anyone can read and change at any time. Changes are tracked and easily visible and version control is in the hands of all users. It is usually possible with wiki software to be alerted to any changes made to the document by writing than is possible using the traditional document metaphor.

As an example we decided that we needed a policy for staff who have their own personal, external weblogs. Having identified our bloggers using Connect a colleague from Editorial Policy created a wiki page, wrote a “straw man” policy and e-mailed the URL of the page to the bloggers. They then piled in changing, editing, improving and discussing their changes until they eventually arrived at a position of consensus and the wiki page stopped changing. At this point the “document” was exported as a PDF and taken to the formal organisation for ratification. The power of this is that those affected by the policy were able to get directly, and very efficiently, involved in its creation and as such are much more likely to support and adhere to its guidelines.

Project Management

Wikis can be used to actually carry out work too. Project plans can be easily created and shared and, through comments threads on the wiki page itself, users can discuss, debate and agree changes and developments. Timelines are easy to create and share and the very open nature of wiki communication means that it easy to keep teams up to date, informed and engaged in projects as they happen.

An example of the potential for this came about through an activity that wasn’t directly work related. In our forums a member of staff expressed frustration that they couldn’t take part in BBC competitions and this prevented him from entering the Digital Britain photography competition. I responded to his plea of “Why can’t we have our own competition” by setting up a blank wiki page called “BBC Staff Photography Competition” and establishing a closed Flickr group for uploading and sharing the photos. That was all I did - no management, no direction no deadlines. Within a couple of days an enthusiastic group had joined in creating the wiki and had produced rules, criteria, tagging guidelines, judges, timetables and even plans for a physical exhibition of the winning photos! The result was around 400 photos entered by 250 or so staff and an undertaking to make it an annual event. Now OK this wasn’t a work related project but imagine this principle applied to “real”work!

RSS, tags and folksonomies.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a method for weblogs, wikis or forumsto publish their content in a way that readers can then subscribe to it. This allows readers to select sites they value, subscribe to their content and be alerted in applications called aggregators when that content has changed. They can then read the various content from these diverse sources in their aggregator removing the need to visit lots of sources and try to keep track of what has changed since the last time they were visited.

RSS is fundamental to building a knowledge sharing environment using these tools and brings about possibly the biggest shift in behaviour. Web content becomes streams and patterns of new and relevant stories rather than static unrelated content. Users who get expert at finding “the good stuff” can share their RSS subscriptions with others and help them piggy back on their experience and valuable sources of news and information.

Tagging is the process of adding metadata to documents, photos or music etc. to make it easier to find in the future. Flickr was one of the web based tools that first made the benefits of tagging apparent. Flickr allows users to upload photos to the web and in doing so tag them with words that describe their content. With thousands of photos being uploaded and tagged every day Flickr takes these tags and makes the patterns in their usage visible in powerful ways.

Del.icio.us came next doing the same thing for URL’s. Instead of saving a bookmark to your bookmark file you save it to Del.icio.us and in doing so tag it with words that help you remember its significance. Again Del.icio.us takes these tags and makes patterns with them.

The word folksonomies has been coined to describe this bottom up process of tagging and categorisation and it is increasingly being seen as and adjunct or possibly even a replacement for conventional top down taxonomies.

Conclusion

In the past written communication in organisations was mostly one way and almost always done by a relatively small group of people. With the advent of social computing it is possible to move from the relatively static and increasingly unused world of documents to a much more conversational style of communication that is available to everyone. The effectiveness and creativity that this unleashes is previously unseen in the business world and its potential is enormous.

Once these tools, and more importantly the behaviours they encourage, become more commonplace in organisations they will start to shift the process of discovery, generation and movement of knowledge. Indeed the ability for staff to find each other and collaborate across organisational and geographical boundaries and the consequences of such activity in terms of power and influence are relatively unknown. The old adage that knowledge meant power usually meant holding onto it and acting as a gatekeeper. In this new networked environment it is more true to say that if you aren’t taking part and being seen to be willing to share what you know then you are less useful to the organisation than those who do - and are seen to be such!

For those of you not attracted to the benefits and opportunities described in this article I would suggest that you don’t have much choice. When the kids texting each other in the playground and instant massaging each other in the evenings start working for you the connectedness that we are only just beginning to understand will be second nature to them. They won’t stand for much less and the ability to connect and communicate with fellow workers will be part of their decision as to where they work. Organisations who embracethis new environment, learn to get the best out of it and adjust to accommodate its potential will gain serious business advantage.

And those who don’t .........?