My 2nd Wiki Was Wonderful (and successful)

So 8 short days ago I set up my second attempt at a wiki. This one was created to survey our management team instead of the traditional surveymonkey or zoomerang ones that we more often used.

This time we wanted to capture from our team those behaviours that we premote and those we permit in relation to the values of the organization. We also had a third question regarding examples of the consequences of either action. I would guess that out of 100+ management staff, only 2 had ever heard of a wiki.

To my great delight the team ate it up. Good thing is used the pbwiki. (get it, ate it up , pb- peanut butter - okay it's been a long day and I want to go home).

I started it simple with only one page. An intro at the top explaining what the wiki was for:

We wanted to try a new format (this is a wiki) to get the collective wisdom of the Management Team regarding "What are we Permitting, thus Promoting". The point of doing it this way is to add and build upon each other's ideas and reduce unnecessary duplication! A wiki is a wonderful way for us to work transparently together and embrace each other's thoughts and opinions openly. This wiki will also to help us embrace new communication tools.
Please add your comments/thoughts/edits to the questions below. There can be as many to each list as the team wishes. We have kept it all on one page for ease of use and ease of collation.

I made sure we highlighted that this was to be a collaborative effort, that we needed more transparency between one another (lots of silos here), and that this was NEW (the excitement factor).

I added 6 small instructions on how open, edit, save a page. Then at the bottom of the page were the 3 questions we wanted members to expand on.

Turned out that we had 36 unique entries for behaviours we promoting (good). 71 bullet points for behaviours we were permitting (bad). 34 examples of consequences.

We now have more detail from this wiki regarding the topic then if we ever did it with a survey. If we had sent this out in survey form and only 16 people looked at it, we would have had 16 individual responses. This method allowed members to brainstorm a little more, build on other ideas and come up with much more detail information that we can then take and use to better our whole organization.

The last step I took in introducing our members to the world of wiki was as the one page got really full (you had to scroll to see it all) I took each question/bullet points and put them on their own page. I didn't want to scare everyone off right from the beginning with 4 pages (insert scream here).

My lessons learner....look for new ways to get your teams to collaborate. Sometimes a new method is enough to generate excitement to participate. Second, KISS (keep it simple sxxxxx), my first wiki may have failed because I had so many pages set up for input on. I thought I was getting things ready for the users, but I more likely overwhelmed them.

I'll end this with some feedback I received:

"So, i think i fall under the category of unhealthy behaviours that we permit,
as i just accessed the wiki page now (better late than never?!). It is
amazing!!! Absolutely love this format and hope to see it again. It provides
great insight into what others are thinking. "

Another Wiki and this one's working!!!

So my first attempt at a wiki hasn't gone so well. It's up, beautiful, and user friendly. But hasn't had one letter added to it. Not even an comma.

So I took another crack at one today, but for a different purpose. We have a management retreat coming up shortly and there were 3 pre-retreat questions we wanted to survey our team with. I told my boss, instead of using an online survey tool (the monkey was giving me grief today) let's start up a wiki. Turn the questions into bullet point lists and see if the team will embrace the tool.

Hallelujah they did. Within 2 minutes one of our VP's had begun adding information to the site.

I've given them until June 19th to add all their ideas/edits, so I'll post an update then to let you know if it was successful or was this just one keener.

My Wiki as of Today

Well so far about 12 of 50 invited people have signed up for my first wiki, however no one has added and new information to the site. I set up lots of templates, suggestion pages, and ideas of where to begin, but nothing.

I can't actually add any content myself as I am unfamiliar with the subject. I just made the site look pretty.

I've decided to ask the staff liasons for these new hires if they understood the purpose of the wiki or how to edit/access it. Perhaps I need to do a face-to-face small presentation on the site. I was hoping I had presented enough detail on the opening page of what was expected.

I shall continue with updates on what happens next, however any ideas are welcome.

My first wiki is created

One of the ideas I had after going to the eLearning Guild conference this year was to create a wiki. This wiki would be for new nursing staff hires at our hospital and would be a common place where they could comment on what it's like to be a new nurse. They could write about their first day, what it is like to work on a particular unit, and tips for studying (as many are grad students).

Well the good news is I successfully created my first wiki yesterday using PBwiki (thanks for the suggestion to use it for wikis Brent). Interesting though I started with wikispaces instead. I needed a wiki that was really easy to use as I am unsure of the familiarity of the users I am inviting to post to the wiki. Both were quite easy to utilize and format into my desired look. Also, I wanted a space where I could open it only to certain people to edit and both offered this.

So why the change from the wikispaces to PBwiki. Well the reasons were the same ones that came up over and over at the conference...

• what if someone posts something negative
• can people outside the organization see what is posted

I had to explain that the general thinking with wikis is that you trust that the providers of content that truly wish to grow and develop the wiki will police themselves and others within the group. If something derogatory is posted, someone else will surely edit it and remove the negative comments. At the conference an interesting video was shared showing the progression of a wiki from conception to a very robust document. The video was created by Jon Udell titled "Heavy metal umlaut: the movie". One very interesting point in the movie shows a period of time where vandalism takes place and there are some nasty postings that a placed on the wiki, then taken off, posted on again - but larger, taken off, on, off, on and finally off. In real time, when this occurred, it took place over the course of 4 minutes. The question then was..."is this the same author posting, editing, reposting. The answer was no. Within that time frame 4 or 5 different individuals removed the offending comments to keep the wiki information true and factual.

Straight from THE wiki (Wikipedia):

"Open-source wikis (such as Wikipedia) have been criticized for their reliability: certain individuals may maliciously introduce false or misleading content.[4] Proponents rely on their community of users who can catch malicious content and correct it. Wikis in general make a basic assumption of the goodness of people.[4]"

Secondly, the concern was brought to me...we don't want anyone outside the hospital to see the wiki. There was the concern of privacy here and again if something was said such as "I had a hard time finding parking" and someone read this, it may discourage them from applying for a position here.

That all being said, Wikispaces allowed for members only posting, but was visible to everyone. This can however, be altered for a very small fee. PBwiki allowed for a private wiki that only members could view. I also found that the wiki once set up has far little or no advertising on it as the wikispaces did. I found that I could manipulate the look and feel of it quite a bit better as well. One option that it doesn't allow, except if you pay a small fee, was for 1 administrator. Every participant has the same access/edit rights to the site. But here again is where you have to trust in the "goodness" of the participants posting to the wiki.

I'm now extremely excited to see if/how the content will develop. I have already had several of the invited members login and sign up for the wiki. I'm just now waiting and watching for the contribution to begin.

Another suggestion that was brought up at the conference was to utilize the wiki, once the content appears to be at its maximum, to create an online course from the material.

Hopefully by next year's conference I will have a year's worth of postings to this blog, more then one wiki, and several new online courses.

Weird what I get excited about now a days.