Collaboration and Process
Knowledge Management August 27th, 2003
Clay Shirky writes the following in his piece about, “Wikis, Grafitti, and Process:”
“A wiki in the hands of a healthy community works. A wiki in the hands of an indifferent community fails. The software makes no attempt to add ‘process’ in order to keep people from doing stupid things. Instead, it provides more flexibility, a crazy amount of flexibility, and intoxicating amount of flexibility, allowing massive amounts of stupidity and intentional damage to be done, at will, by roving and anonymous posters. And it provides rollback.”
Indeed, a healthy community doesn’t need a formalize process or a highly specialized set of tools to successfully collaborate. Like water or electricity, they will find a way through the muck; it may not be the most efficient or elegant, but it will certainly get from point-to-point.
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Wikis are great, especially for internal documentation. OK, well, that’s what I believe anyhow. Actually convincing line coders to use them for some reason, IMO, is really difficult. Even more difficult to get them to use Good Wiki Style. I know many coders (especially inexperienced ones) hate writing documentation, but aren’t the benefits obvious? I went another round with a few of the developers who work for me in our last staff meeting, where they told me how it’s so “hard” to write in the wiki because it’s not WYSISYG, and that word is much better. Of course when I let them use word, they don’t produce anything useful–but with a lot of font changes. For guys who claim to understand why XML/XSLT is useful, they don’t seem to understand in documentation, the importance of focusing on semantics and not formatting. I threatened to make them write everything in Docbook, but only one of them even knew what I was talking about.
Hmm, sorry for venting. I feel a little better now though :-)
[…] In addition, establishing a collaboration culture is not a technology problem, because as I said a few weeks ago, “…a healthy community doesn’t need a formalize process or a highly s […]
We use a wiki with DocBook export, to get the most bang for the buck. It’s nice. Looking forward to a grown-up FOP!
Using a few well placed open source apps (a wiki, wvWare, html2db, etc. you can make the barrier of entry low enough to provide pretty massive payback re consistency and collaboration. and you can even import Word whackery from the Old Era.
Adding htmlarea or other widgetry in place of the text entry field is one way to try to placate the GUI addicts, but you may also wanna point out that the majority of people who scream for GUI aren’t users, but rather are pesky developers who will, once they go plain wiki markup, often never look back. Tell them they can use their plaintext editors and paste the text, and they often lose their noodles entirely.
For inspiring collaboration within a team, you can combine single sourcing, wiki collaboration and markup, docbook consistency, word import, and image handling, all free, all now. It’s a nice time to be alive.