Of all the great takeaways I left Podcamp Boston (#pcb4) with, none are more surprising than this little treasure: it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a Wiki in action.
I didn’t participate, but I did log on a few times. My interest in Wikis was piqued thanks to this recent blog post on ARS Technica. Besides giving a tidy little history of MS Word, the post’s main premise is that Microsoft’s ubiquitous and way overworked word processing application has finally outlived its usefulness, thanks to the social nature of today’s collaborative Web.
The Wiki, for those of you in the same boat as I, is an editable, sharable, online document. It is the ultimate example of that tired business term “living document.” Any participant in the wiki’s creation can log on and make changes at any time. Once in a wiki document’s “edit” mode, users find all the familiar word processing and formating tools. The document’s change history is kept in a separate module on the page, aside from the main text area. Jump into print mode and you have a .pdf ready document. If you absolutely had to, you could even paste it into Word.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia of all knowledge, is the optimum example of the Wiki in action. Any article can be edited by any reader, for better or worse. Since Wikipedia is open to the public, all matter of knowledge has been pored into it’s coffers. Ask any half-way web-savvy individual where their first stop is on the knowledge train, they will tell you Wikipedia. There is now even debate in academia as to whether Wikipedia articles should be cited as references in term papers.
The implications of the wiki as a mainstream office tool are immense. Instead of e-mailing revisions back and forth, team members collaborating on a document simply log on to the Wiki and check the latest version. Bad syntax on that new paragraph? Make that adjustment yourself, and hit the “save” button. Just look at the change log to find who might need a grammar refresher course. It’s a technology ripe for document-crazy committees, and it beats Word’s complicated “track changes” feature to the ground.
So, now that I have an understanding of this relatively low-tech but useful tool, how do I put it to work?
I work with five other guys, all of them tech-savvy, but mostly in the artistic realms. I set up a Wiki for us to share information as we rarely collaborate on anything.
Did they understand the Wiki?
Well, one guy did. The guy who closes every night and has to put our notes together in a closing report, usually done on a spreadsheet. Often times, compiling this report from various e-mails we’ve sent through the day puts him in overtime status, which doesn’t please the boss.
Closing Guy just made a nice template of the closing report on web-based Wiki software. We’re going to try it out next week. The other guys on the team have yet to even set up an account of the Wiki software. Most of them are generally good with new concepts, so I have a bit of hope for this.
Will it work? Stand by, I’ll let you know in a week.
