Techsoup is hosting an online event about Nonprofits and Wikis on November 1-3. They have set up a wiki for the event on wikispaces, my favorite hosted wiki application. (I even planned an NTC panel on one)
There are already a few good resources already planted on the wiki, including a Best Practices wiki by my colleague Andy Roberts. (I had a change to play in the sandbox with Andy during the CPsquared conference and I hope he is participating.)
I was at a conference this week at a session on Web2.0 buzzwords and someone asked what the word wiki meant. It means quickly quickly in Hawaiian. (I must be a geek because I was the only one on the room who knew it.)
If you want to read up on wikis before the online event, I suggest you start with the Techsoup article called "Exploring the World of Wikis." My colleague, Vicky Davis, is leading a session at the K-12 Online Conference on wikis in the classroom. The k-12 wiki she set up has some excellent resources in it. I recommend that you watch her intro video for a good overview of the what and whys of wikis. If you want to read the business perspective, I suggest Robin Good's most recent article about wikis.
I've written a lot of about using Web2.0 for knowledge capture before, during, and after conferences and meetings and included some points about wikis. Let me extract those particular examples:
- Global s London Summit - used to capture brainstorm notes before and after session.
- Podcamp - check out how the conference documentation was organized. I watched it as changed and morphed and was pretty amazing.
- Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Bootcamp Wiki and Britt Bravo's post about how it was used.
- Amy Gahran's wiki for blogher posts - to organize them from the huge tag stream that came out of the conference.
- Guide to Using Wikis at Events that my colleague David Wilcox pointed me too.
Vicky Davis also has a great piece in her K-12 wiki called "Components of an effective Web2.0 Classroom." I'd like to see this translated into "Components of an effective Web2.0 Nonprofit." Maybe we should start a wiki?
Ah, but there's the rub. The existence of a wiki doesn't necessarily mean people will use it - either in an organization or for collaboration across organizational boundaries. It requires a culture shift. David Pollard offers some insights why people don't use collaboration tools like wikis. It requires a "porous culture" and what Allison Fine refers to as open thinking versus proprietary thinking.
Other Resources:
Wikis Described In Plain English
Wikis and the Perfect Camping Trip
More tasty wiki links than you'll ever have time to read
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