I wrote a lengthy (2500+ words) article for the latest issue of the New Communications Review based on the reading I have been doing on wikis as we get ready to begin our wiki survey. I have copied the introduction below. For the whole article, visit here. As usual, I am interested in your feedback.
Thinking About Wikis
Many of us who are early adopters of this technology believe that
the wiki is an intriguing collaborative tool that has the potential for
vastly improving knowledge worker productivity. This goal, improving
knowledge worker productivity, is one of the major organizational
challenges of the 21st century, as recently discussed in the Economist
survey of “The New Organization” in its January 21, 2006 issue. While
there are a plethora of collaborative tools and technologies available
today, what makes the wiki so interesting, and such a good candidate
for research studies, is that it is the most radically open of all
tools, enabling anyone to change anyone else's content in mere seconds.
Therefore, it very quickly gets at the heart of the human, social
challenges to managing and creating knowledge.
We at the Society for New Communications Research
are about to embark on a study of wiki use. Our goal in our project is
to study how knowledge workers in creative roles (advertising,
marketing, public relations, design, etc.) are actually using wikis in
the context of their everyday work. This should enable us to make some
judgments about what features are helpful and what features are not. At
that point, we can start making recommendations about best practices
for wiki design.
In preparation for this study, we conducted a review of recent
research and scholarly papers that have been produced on the topic of
wikis.
As we evaluate the potential of wikis in organizations, several
broad topic areas have presented themselves to us as critical to the
success of a wiki. We won't have our results on our study for a few
months, but in the meantime, we thought it would be useful to share
with you these broad topic areas and some of the thinking and research
that has been done to address them.
At the outset of our reading, it became very clear that any
analysis of wiki usage will be multidisciplinary in focus. This, of
course, did not surprise us, as all of these new participatory
communications tools have the same attributes. In order to understand,
design and successfully roll out a wiki, a familiarity with current
knowledge and practices in areas as diverse as small group cooperation,
knowledge management, individual psychology, societal norms and
behaviors, and management skills and technical design. Below, we have
identified some interesting sources of information that link each
discipline with participatory communications. We share some of this
thinking with you below. But first, we'll start off with a summary of
some of the key challenges of collaborative systems that must be kept
in mind when embarking on a wiki adventure.
Continued...
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