Making Collaboration Work With Weblogs And Wikis

February 9th, 2005

I was going to bookmark this post from Cutting Through and move on, but as I read it a second and then a third time, I realized that it was post-worthy. Tim Duckett comments on an article by Cathy Webber about Making Collaboration Work (which ironically, you have to register to read - Bug Me Not to the rescue again).

Tim’s comments are right on the mark:

“[D]o what you do well, and document what you do. Too often, problems arise because teams become reliant on the expertise of a single individual who then becomes a single point of potential failure. While capturing this information can become onerous, there are ways around this - a wiki, for example, is an incredibly flexible way of capturing and keeping updated vital configuration or process information.”

In the library-world, you would think that everything is well documented and archived. Is that the case in your own building? It was not the case in the public library where I worked and less of an issue at the law firm because there were only 3 of us (the lower the number the workers, the better chance of everyone knowing what is going on). Tim is right in that wikis can help in that everyone can contribute, there is a “paper” trail, and everyone can read what is going on on a project. I’ve been working with a colleague on a wiki and we have one rule: No deleting until the issue is discussed F2F or via IM. Edits (using different fonts and colors) are essential to wiki-work.

Read more of Tim’s post as well as the Webber article (which I just Furled).

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