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GCN Home > 08/21/06 issue

The amazing Wikis

From the CIO Council to the CIA, the lightweight collaboration platform is taking hold—but it’s not a no-brainer

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

While monthly meetings of the Collaborative Expedition Workshop normally fill a pretty big room at the National Science Foundation’s Ballston, Va., headquarters, July’s attracted nearly double the usual attendance. It turned out folks from a wide swath of intelligence, defense and civilian agencies wanted to know how they could use an emerging form of online collaboration. The topic of the workshop? Wiki software.

The workshops are put on by the General Services Administration and the CIO Council to identify new, effective collaborative technologies. Wikis proved a natural fit. A wiki is a type of Web site that lets users edit content directly in their Web browser. Disarmingly simple, wikis can serve as a hub for groups with dispersed members to share information. They can also serve as an easy way to store information that others in an office can consult and update.

According to Mark Roseman, founder of commercial wiki provider CourseForum Technologies of Guelph, Ontario, “wikis work really well in situations where people are just trying to work together in a fashion that suits them better.”

Online collaboration is nothing new, of course. What makes wiki software so unique is that it does not require specialized software on the users’ part, nor does it require much training.

In late 2002, IT research firm IDC of Framingham, Mass., conducted a study that found e-mail was by far the most popular collaboration tool, used in more than 90 percent of the projects surveyed. People working together on projects simply exchanged notes and sent files as attachments rather than using dedicated collaborative software, such as Microsoft’s Groove or EMC Corp.’s eRoom. E-mail required no special software beyond what most people already had.

While it’s easy to use, the downside to relying on e-mail is that “all the value is kept in people’s private inboxes,” said Ross Mayfield, chief executive officer and founder of commercial wiki provider Socialtext of Palo Alto, Calif.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Management, Web Strategies



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