Blog about Libraries

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Wiki Cheerleading

Man, I have become addicted to wikis. I have several projects going on at work and I spend a lot of time meeting with people, discussing ideas and proposals and incorporating responses and reactions into the work. The problem is that there is never a notetaker at these meetings, and despite my best efforts, it has always been difficult to keep the progress in order. Mainly, my own laziness gets in the way, as notes scribbled onto a legal pad sit in piles on my desk. After a while, the stuff gets all mixed up and I have a very difficult time keeping track of things. And of course, it has always been difficult to share the results with others easily.

Emailing summaries of meetings helped, but then there was nowhere convenient to store the info. That's where the wiki comes in. After I meet with someone, or put together the basic parts of a project, I will email a summary to the people involved. Then, I'll build a couple of wiki pages around parts of the project. The email summaries are just pasted into the pages and become a running summary of where the project stands. Usually, the wiki is divided into a couple of sections, like "meeting summaries", discussions, drafts, etc.

The boost in my own efficiency has been pretty astounding. But the even better part has been that wikis allow me to push ideas out to others in ways that weren't possible before. For instance, I was drafting a customer service statement for the library and soon found out that we needed to do some educating to get people to even understand what the concept was about, much less what the purpose of it would be. So, I did a little research, built a few wiki pages around the concept then started emailing the url to people I needed to work with. Additionally, I started building tagging items in del.icio.us around the topics, which I included on the wiki pages.

The end product was a a set of wiki pages containing meeting summaries, discussions, tags and a draft of the statement we had come up with. The statement ended up getting drafted in 1.5 hours by four public service managers, quite possibly a record in the annals of library science. I give credit to the use of our wiki for helping us get this project done in such short order.

# posted by Steve @ Tuesday, August 01, 2006