21 Days of Wiki Adoption by Stewart Mader

Keep a close watch on Stewart Maders 21 days of Wiki Adoption. This set of 21 short videos will help you to understand the concept of Wiki use in your organisation.

Stewart is the author of 2 books, Wikipatterns and Using Wiki in Education. I have followed his blog on wiki patterns for some time now, and he is great at explaining the wiki concept in "plain english" just like the guys at CommonCraft.

The key thing about this series of videos is the simplicity and clarity of the examples that Stewart delivers. I frequently get asked in my organisation - "What is a wiki?" (this normally comes about 15 mins into my demo of our enterprise wiki!).

But that is ok for me, as if it takes them 15 mins to query the technology, then maybe the underlying benefits of collaboration, knowledge sharing and intuitive information retrieval are more prominent. The best bit is when we get to the cost!

So follow Stewart's videos and learn! As Luis Suarez said:

I bet, I know, I am sure of it, that after watching through the entire show with the different episodes, you would be more than ready to start deploying those wikis within your organisation.

Social Collaboration on the Intranet at BT

Richard Dennison has posted a great case study about Web 2.0 adoption at BT on his blog called Inside Out. It is great to see such transparency and openness in this case, as often this type of information is considered to be the 'competitive advantage' every organisation craves.

However, in the world of social computing, collaboration and knowledge management - things are different! By sharing the experiences of the successes and failures, practitioners can help develop this emerging domain by quickly learning the best practices, do's and don'ts and the challenges they may face.

More and more we are seeing a culture of sharing and transparency amongst those who realise the benefits of the community-culture that social computing can bring to your organisation. Richard notes the challenges and cultural hurdles which understandably face the 'wiki champions' and the 'internal bloggers' when they present their ideas to the security departments and policy makers.

From my own experience, I think that senior management support at an early stage is critical. This was a key element to the success at BT also, as Richard mentions that it was their CEO who publicly announced his support for a more liberal approach.

RSS in plain english

Another great video from CommonCraft, this time explaining RSS. Personally, using an rss reader (Google Reader) has greatly improved my interaction with the web, especially when I am researching. It saves time, and keeps me up to date with sites, or blogs I am interested in.