Extacit Wiki - Managing my KM dissertation

In my recent post, What is Knowledge Management?, I talked about personal KM. As part of my experiment with blogging, I have now created the Extacit wiki on wetpaint.com

My plan is to use this wiki to document many aspects of the dissertation from my initial possible proposal ideas, to co-ordinating and organising my communication with the supervisor assigned to me.

I see the advantages as being:

• Collaborative review - The use if wiki will mean that both my supervisor and I can review, comment, and update any part of the Extacit wiki even if we cannot meet on a particular week.
  
• Consistent Versioning - Hopefully the wiki will greatly reduce the number of email traffic which would normally be associated with organising and managing a dissertation project like this.


• RSS Feeds - The built in rss feed will automatically inform my supervisor (and any other subscribers) that a change to a page has occurred. Meaning I don't have to constantly spent hours emailing my updates to them.


• Anytime, Anywhere editing - When I am at work, I usually have to email any thoughts or research to my personal email and work on it when I get home. Now, I can simply record a note on a to-do list at the wiki and can capture the thought/link immediately.


• Peer exposure - I hope that by publishing my ideas and thoughts through this blog and the Extacit wiki, I can increase the number of readers of my ideas. I welcome any comments on either my blog posts or indeed any aspect of the wiki.

You can see the new Extacit Wiki here.

Case Study: The British Council Using Wikis on the Intranet

Here is an interesting case study by Maish Nichani on the use of wikis in the Singapore branch of the British Council.

The article is called:

Using Wikis on the Intranet: The British Council Case Study.

It shows how a simple implementation of wiki can achieve surprising results. I especially like how the wiki helped to improve their monthly meetings.

In this case the technology was JotSpot by google.

Sony Vaio Support

In a post entitled In praise of Sony Vaio support by David Terrar at Business Two Zero, he airs his frustrations in relation to difficulties he was having with his Sony Vaio SZ laptop, and the subsequent quest for a solution.

David says:

"The battery on my Sony Vaio SZ Laptop failed. It’s out of first year Sony warranty, but still under a John Lewis two year guarantee. John Lewis regard batteries as consumables, and so their guarantee doesn’t apply - doh! Sony’s battery problems are well documented. After a little research I found a forum where people were relating exactly my problem on my model PC, with some who’d got battery replacements from Sony outside of warranty. When I contacted Vaio Laptop Support, explained and pointed them to this forum, they sent me a replacement battery, no questions asked. Excellent. "

This is a great example of how, with a little bit of searching, the web can help facilitate consumer knowledge sharing to the benefit of all.

The forum he was referring to was here. Sony also have an online user community for customers to collaborate as described in my recent case study post here - Sony Vaio Community .

I say well done to David. How many of us would have given up and just bought a new battery in this situation? Maybe the collaborative sharing emerging in blogs etc, will empower the consumer!