How to use wikis to collaborate, brainstorm and share knowledge. #30DSM – Day 7 – 30 Days of Social Media

Have you ever tried to work with others to coordinate a meeting, a project or an event (or even a social night out) and got caught in a horrible email spiral between many people. You don’t know which email to read, they all look the same it gets really confusing!

Collaboration is the backbone of social media. The ability to collaborate online has been made easy with the use of wikis.

But, what is a wiki and why is it a powerful tool for your business?

A wiki is an editable web page that anyone can create, contribute to, edit and save. Wiki’s are an invaluable tool for teams (even if it’s a team of two) to work to coordinate details of projects and events. A wiki is a page or collection of web pages designed to enable anyone to modify them. It’s a basic website where you can create links, embed objects, organise using files and folders and edit it collaboratively.

You may have used wikipedia, the largest wiki on the web. It’s the world’s biggest encyclopaedia and its content is compiled by the online community.

I’ve been using wikis for the last two years to manage projects, coordinate work in progress, and work with remote team to brainstorm.

Here are a couple of examples of how we use wikis at the Australian Businesswomen’s Network:

1. Advisory Board collaboration

The ABN Advisory Board meets once a month in person. In between meetings we use a private wiki to share ideas and news and to collaborate on new initiates and share resources.  (An automatic notification system lets me know when anyone who is a member of the wiki makes a change that I need to look at.)

2. Newsletter coordination

Each month we publish a newsletter that goes to over 11,000 women in business. We manage the status of all aspects of delivering that newsletter (including advertising, editorial, proofing, communication with contributors and design) on a dedicated Newsletter wiki. I can look at the wiki at any time and get a real-time view of the status of all elements of the newsletter.

3. Team Meetings

Each week when we sit down for our team meeting we refer to the team Work in Progress wiki to refer to the status of various projects, the statistics we are tracking and what’s important for us to focus on for the next week.

Wikis come in all levels of complexity from a free wiki like PB Works (which has a free and low-cost version) to a more advance wiki platform like Confluence created by multi-award winning Australian company, Atlassian.  The ABN used Confluence wiki to host the tasks, lessons and interactions of mentorees and mentors in our MentorNet mentoring program (by mashing it up with other technologies).

Wiki’s are ideal if you have:

• A complex project to manage
• A remote team working together
• The need to edit and change documents (without having the headache of tracking multiple versions)
• Various levels of authority/access to information for different team members

Wiki’s can be moderated so that you can approve changes and you can have many levels of activity from administrators, writers, or just basic access allowing them to read. And the system tracks changes for you so you can go back and reverse a change or see what changes were made by whom.

Some of the great ways I’ve heard that companies have used wikis is to:

Manage an FAQ page

• Wikis are handy for adding questions and answers as you get them. You can share the wiki with the public, or keep it private. You can even give your community access to collaborate with you to create a comprehensive FAQ system.

Brainstorming document

• When working on a new project a wiki can be used to brainstorm. You can add images, videos, thoughts, pages, files, comments and folders to manage content. And, you can contribute without having to know HTML.

Manage Events

• When organising an event (whether it’s a product launch or a Christmas BBQ) you can set up pages for different aspects of the event and assign responsibility for updating those pages to different team members.

One great way I’ve seen a wiki used is to collaboratively write a book  (See this post from NPR radio.)

PB Works has a good online tour (and a 30Day risk-free trial) that you may want to check out.

And, from my favourite video-tutorials, here’s a quick look at wikis and how they work.

TODAY’S TASK

Got a new project to start on? Try using a wiki to manage the various people and elements of the project. Let us know what action you take by using #30DSM in your tweet.

Resources:

• Google Sites
• PBWorks
• Wikispaces
• Atlassian
• Confluence