Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Wikis at work

David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, offers this remark about how we may be learning from Wikipedia:

What are our students learning from the success of Wikipedia? We hope they’re learning that they can’t be passive recipients of knowledge. But they’re also learning that authority doesn’t come only through chains of credentials; that we can get on the same page about what we know; that knowing involves be willing to back away from your beliefs at times; that knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized; that the willingness to admit fallibility is a greater indicator of truth than speaking in a confident tone of voice; that knowledge lives in conversation, not in the heads of experts; that certain people who do not need to be named are just impossible.

Yes, David’s comment was directly aimed at students, but anyone who has even the most minimal experience using Wikipedia can probably relate to some of the sentiments he relates. Now ask yourself: Could I, or anyone in my company, or my customers, benefit from moving that experience from the personal to the business realm?

You may not think so, but even the most basic office functions could benefit from wikis. Too much dynamic content is locked up in static formats. Even if you only grow by a few heads a year, how much sense does it make to keep a staff phone list in an Excel spreadsheet? And I bet there’s a lot of information floating around your company, and that everyone has some of it, but no one has access to all of it.

Are you using wikis at work? If so, how? The applications are endless, but I’m interested to hear how you may be using them.