Well, I guess it had to happen at some point, it was just a matter of time. It was just a matter of time before I started to write an online journal or blog. I did try once before, but it turned into a very long rant about everything I didn’t like about my job at the time. I deleted it and gave up. That was nearly 2 years ago. However, an event i ran last Friday at which Euan Semple spoke got me motivated again.The event was the launch of a pilot that my organisation is running to test whether a wiki would work in bringing a group of interested people to share what they know and help them to do their work more effectively. I work in a safety critical industry, and it is vitally important that people share what they know. Time is a really scarce factor and reinventing the wheel happens far too often.
The event last week was fantastic (he says modestly). 30 or so people from outside my organisation, plus 20 or so from inside it got together to see what this new technology would enable them to do differently. It really is a different way of working. Euan quoted from the cluetrain manifesto and it was sobering to remember that this document was written nearly 7 years ago.
I remember giving slide shows 6 years ago on the ‘new economy’. That all seems a blur now….and effectively the new economy as we called it then is what I and most of you practise everyday. The various sessions at the event all seemed to point to the fact that what we achieve at work now is generally only accomplished by our degree of connectedness with our team members, those we wish to influence and anyone else we need to work with.
The wiki is up and running, people are starting to contribute. Most active are the discussion fora, but new discussion topics only seem to be created by my own colleagues (internally) at the moment. We have no way of monitoring the number of lurkers and general activity on the site which is disappointing.
One issue we have had to face is a general lack of awareness of what you might call ‘wikiquette’. How to behave on the wiki, the usefulness of signing off comments with their name and date (since the wiki will not do this automatically). The product we use is centraldesktop, a great WYSIWYG interface, but does have some fundamental limitations.
For example, you cannot restrict access to any pages or folders at all. I have created a standard terms & conditions page for the site, but I can’t lock it. Anyone can change it, which is not very satisfactory.
Anyway, time to go to bed I think…..
0 Responses to “Hello world!”