Best of Wiki
Wiki Overview -
Wiki – A term of Hawaiian origin meaning “quick”. A wiki is a simple Web site that enables users to write, edit and link articles together, add commentary, and track changes in documents through detailed version changes. The based idea behind a wiki is that anyone who can view a page can just easily edit and save his or her changes. Enterprise wiki is built on the basic wiki idea by including certain functionality that meets the needs of EPA business needs such as the ability to easily create and manage many individual wiki sites for teams, projects and offices. Enterprise wiki also include strict security to protect confidential information, fine-grained permission so that the person can be given access to appropriate pages and spaces, and can be tied to other enterprise services via LDAP authentication and single sign-on. These feature enabled to wiki to mimic the existing social and organizational structure and departments, team and projects.
What makes a wiki unique from a normal Web site is that it enables multiple users to see and collaboratively edit the same document in the same space. Wiki is a tool for collaborating information and ideas through a web community or even to the public.
Wiki and blogs with RSS Feed provide a social networking knowledge construct. Analogy is the compare to a college interactive forum classroom, where a wiki serves as a blackboard, blog as a teacher to student question and dialog, and RSS as a messenger with categories of interest and internet as the communication medium.
Wiki is different from regular tech hype. Wiki provide a collaborative/social networking approach to access and distribute information from non technical staff/author without an intermediary on the Web, similar to correspondence through a word processor and typewriter, but on the web community. Furthermore Wiki is a tool to provide ability to work as a team through a simple common interface on a single document, or a component within a document, enables teams to assimilate quickly all team member inputs. This real-time collaborative development enables groups to quickly identify and consent on key points in a project, plan, or strategy.
Using wiki demands trust between group members. It also requires some basic policy and guidelines for wiki behavior, covering such thorny issues as deleting or modifying the contributions of others. EPA can readily capitalize on the collaborative functionalities of wiki, but may view with suspicion the ability to change Web content without source and version management. The ability of simply collaboratively edit text on a Web page without much technical and organization intervention or obstacle is new and will be an organization cultural change challenge. The flexibility of a wiki is its greatest strength, because it enables peers to work together to change or update a work without the need to increase e-mail traffic or take up excessive time in meetings and conference calls.
Using a wiki does not mean we have to abandon or trying to replace existing solutions and might lead wiki to its down fall if it’s not the right solution to meet EPA’s needs. It will take time for people to get used to the wiki and find the best use for wiki and ways to blend in with what EPA currently do (e-mail, Notes, portal, ECMS).
Media Wiki – best of the breed and used by the majority of Government Agency
In the 4th Quarter of FY 2007, Studies were made on eight different Wiki software and the author found the following.
Mediawiki is preferred by other agencies with the support by independent studies. Mediawiki was selected among eight Wiki softwares with the following reasons:
• Open source, system scalable, and free under the GNU license.
• Used by a majority of Government Agencies and used in commercial areas.
• Simpler user interface and collaborative environment with the ability to edit pages, upload files and change page look and feel.
• Simpler set of mark-up languages for routine staff/users create, edit and format content and reference pages with other pages.
• Very large community of users (Wikipedia), and Mediawiki extensions (over 700) to extend Wiki’s functions such as template, categories, Google & Yahoo map interfaces.
• User management with LDAP authentication (extension).
• Syndication with RSS Feeds.
ROI
• Low cost of support – no need for continued web master support on edits.
• Easy to use for instant gratification on collaboration and knowledge construction.
• Better approach to capture institutional and community knowledge.
• History shown fast and wide community acceptance.
Obstacles
• Policy and guidelines – governance.
• Ensuring Web Infrastructure Supports on Web 2.0 tools. (implemented)
• Records Management and FOIA Issues.
• Workforce – Social networking evolutionary challenges.
• Information Architecture/CMS Integration with knowledge management.
• Lack of Collaborative/Shared environment and repositories.
Resources
Examples of Federal – provide URLs of federal examples to emulate
Recommendations
• Develop and deploy wikis on the EPA intranet and internet environment.
• Work to minimize the obstacles as discussed in the above with Action Teams.
• Establish administrative and technical coordination steering group to mange enterprise wiki under the EnviroCentral ‘umbrella’ environment
• Fund the support for implementing wikis through pilots to build collaborative working environments
(EnviroCentral) to meet EPA’s mission and business needs.
• Commit to community building with quarterly review of adjustments and commitment.
• Lead by examples with top and bottom-up approaches to build collaboration and encourage networking as a theme between the Office and staffs and projects.
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