Earlier this week, Socialtext hosted Wiki Wednesday at its offices in Palo Alto. The focus of the meeting was on customer-facing communities powered by wikis.
Christian Wagner, Professor of Information Systems at City University in Hong Kong, was the guest speaker. The discussion covered some very public successes (and failures) of wikis, including examples from IBM, LA Times and Novell. From the meeting, there were some valuable lessons to be learned with regard to creating successful, active customer-facing wiki communities. For example, wikis with unclear ownership and a lack of incentives to drive collaboration and active participation tend to fail or lead to unmet expectations. Considerations have to be made when first setting up the wiki as to who will be editing the wiki and what is the expected business benefit and goal of the community.
It is also imperative that in the process of deploying the wiki there is definition around governance for how the wiki can and cannot be used. In short, if you want to tap the power of many without creating chaos and mass confusion, one needs to provide best practice guidelines and usage policies, as well as define a process for actively moderating and gardening the wiki. At the end of the day, in most organizations there is one opportunity to get the wiki right. If the first attempt misses the mark and fails, then re-deploying wikis (and probably other innovative Web 2.0 tools) will be harder the second time around and the projects may get delayed or blocked by management. For this reason, before kickstarting any customer-facing wiki community, it is particularly important to have a ‘triple champion’ to address the content focus, the underlying technology platform, as well as the business ‘big picture’ around the intended wiki community.
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