Article Idea:
Control and Community: a case study of enterprise Wiki use
suggested by Matthew C. Clarke on 2007/09/15
A significant tension in the commercial use of Wikis is the balance between the need for centralised control and the need to encourage an active and creative community.
Our company’s process for collecting technical knowledge internally and making that knowledge accessible to our customers relies heavily on Wikis. I’d like to comment on the control v’s community tension using our experience as a case study.
(Note that this is in no way a sales-pitch for my company. We do not produce Wiki software or anything else that the article would promote.)
Matt.
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
6 people said yes. | 0 people said no.
Ben Tremblay
0 Reputation points
Posted 2007/11/05 @ 20:38PM with
I’m sure there’s a tortoise|hare dichotomy to be found in this somewhere.
What proportion of the wiki-community are active wiki-gnomes? (Note how I resisted the urge to use CamelCase. *oh-woops!*)
Chaotic systems are dynamically stable … so, within limits, they are ready and able to digest entropy i.e. disruptive development. (And even when perturbed beyond those constraints, the system “merely” re-stabilises in a way that, to us, is unpredictable. Which is to say it passes through a phase transition that, to us, seems nothing but noise. Which … oh, what was I talking about? *grin* But is “wiki” in action at all disruptive? I think it’s paradigmatically L7. (That’s “square”, for you yungins.)
Within the context of wiki I suspect we can see manifested lines of control and demarcartions of exchange (C2 goes on in depth about dialog form.) that actually and very really exist elsewhere, if only latent.
—bentrem
Matthew C. Clarke
34 Reputation points
Posted 2007/12/13 @ 18:54PM with
Would the editorial team like to comment on whether they would publish an article on this if I wrote one?
—Matt.
Chris Baum
433 Reputation points
Posted 2007/12/13 @ 20:11PM with
Absolutely! One of the most interesting things going on right now is how collaborative software is finally becoming adopted (effectively) within the enterprise. I will contact you with further information shortly.
-Chris