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Volume XX |
In this issue....
STC Announces Fellows, Associate Fellows for 2007
"From Writer to Communicator":
A Must-Read
Adobe Courts
Technical Communicators
Sponsorship Opportunities
for Communities
at Annual Conference
PR in the Lone Star:
Some Tips and Advice
for Fellow Leaders
The Wiki Dialogues, Or How the Tide of E-mail Became the Fountain of Collaboration
By Karen Mardahl, Comanager, AccessAbility Special Interest Group
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Collaborating Virtual Style: Hints from STC’s SIG Leaders For each issue of Tieline, a representative of the twenty STC Special Interest Groups (SIGs) shares wisdom, hints, and lessons learned on different aspects of facilitating virtual STC communities, whether subject matter- or geographically-based. Currently, SIG leaders are rapidly exploring various collaborative tools and management styles to provide benefits for their SIG members—and to recruit SIG volunteers and leaders. As Edwin Schlossberg says, “True interactivity is not about clicking on icons or downloading files, it's about encouraging communication.” SIG leaders are working on just that. We hope that some of the information in this series will be applicable and helpful to other STC community leaders as well. Judith M. Herr, STC SIG Advocate |
(Scene 1: A discussion about wikis develops between You and Me.)
You: Why are you so passionate about wikis?
Me: I’m not. I’m passionate about collaboration. And wikis suit our collaboration needs.
You: Remind me what a wiki is.
Me: A wiki is really just a Web site. Anyone with minimal training can create and maintain information on a wiki. The learning curve is almost flat, but the potential for learning is gigantic.
See Wikipedia for more information about the origins of the wiki and the word itself.
You: We already have a Web site and a great webmaster. We don’t need this wiki.
Me: Even though you can use a wiki for just about anything, I’m proposing the use of it for collaboration among the leaders of a chapter or SIG. What do members of the leadership group do? They share, exchange, and develop information relevant to their job functions. They collaborate. This is usually done by e-mail.
Let’s say you use your home e-mail for all this collaboration. One day, you arrange to have a conference call from your workplace with your leadership team. You realize you left all your printed copies at home, and all the electronic copies are on your home computer. What now? Instead of being unavailable and inaccessible, all that information could be online and available no matter where you are and no matter when you need it. That is when an online application like a wiki becomes very useful. Posting information can be done by anyone, at any time, from anywhere. You do not have to depend on one experienced person to do all the work.
You: We have a few novices on our team who are just starting out as technical communicators. They aren’t used to this type of work.
Me: No problem. The wiki I recommend for beginners (or busy experts) is the Peanut Butter Wiki. I set up such a wiki in five minutes. You have a tool and a Web site at your fingertips for free. Yes, I have previously worked with Web sites, but the directions are so easy that I believe anyone can do it.
After the Web site is up and running, experts and novices alike can immediately start to add content. As they work on it, they can apply their technical skills of structuring and communicating information. This is also the perfect opportunity to mentor beginners. They won’t run shrieking into the night, vowing never to volunteer again. They can add another skill to their résumés—and so can their mentors. As the group’s knowledge grows, the wiki grows. Your efforts build a history to benefit future leaders.
The Peanut Butter Wiki site provides templates to help you start your wiki, and explains all the practical things like backups and so on. Its ease of use should ensure that no one is excluded from participating in the management team and making contributions. It’s like peanut butter sandwiches. How much effort would it take you to teach other people how to make peanut butter sandwiches, even if they have never before seen peanut butter in their life? And if peanut butter is foreign to you, I am sure you’ll find someone who can teach you!
You: Before I get hungry. . . in what way is this better than e-mail?
Me: You can stop being overwhelmed by e-mails. So many people complain about the quantity and the size of e-mail messages. Many a mailbox has come to a grinding halt with massive documents being transmitted back and forth. Just post them on the wiki, and your mailbox will breathe a sigh of relief. Users with the old 56k modems will also breathe a sigh of relief and stop worrying about their phone bills. Newsletter groups can really benefit just for this reason.
You: Ah, but if people have low-capacity modems, they won’t want to go online. What do they do?
Me: You only have to go online when adding information or retrieving files. Peanut Butter Wiki uses notifications for all updates. It sends you an e-mail notification any time someone makes a change. The changes and the author are listed in that e-mail.
Don’t worry. There is security. You use passwords to sign in, and you can even make the site “invisible” to anyone who does not have a password. You need to visit www.pbwiki.com to sign up. Check off the option for notifications while you are there. Then you can sit back and enjoy the e-mails.
Don’t sit back too far, however. You’ll want to participate and contribute, of course! The notifications benefit those who do have a speedy Internet connection, but do not have the time—or do not remember—to visit the Web site.
You: Editing the wiki means I still have to be online for a while, right?
Me: Yes, but not a long time. You can compose your thoughts in Word or Notepad at your convenience without being connected to the Internet. (You can even use paper for brainstorming at the beach or on the train!) When you are ready, you just go online, log on to the wiki, paste in your work, and log off again. The interface of this particular wiki and others I have seen is “light,” meaning that it displays quickly on your screen with no expensive delays while the site downloads unnecessary graphics.
You: Does this take more time than working with my familiar e-mail program?
Me: Think about it. Composing an e-mail or composing an article on the wiki takes the same amount of time, more or less. There is no real time loss. It may take you a bit longer to make your contribution to the wiki as opposed to just sending an e-mail. This may be due to the material already on the wiki. You may want to move some information or do other tasks that take a bit of time.
This is where added value comes in. All your efforts will be shared. You do not risk just sending one bit of information in an e-mail to one person. Everyone’s information is shared equally. Remember, we’re talking about collaboration here. You have the potential to keep track of all the loose ends that could otherwise go missing under different circumstances. Suddenly, it no longer feels as though you are spread across different time zones. It is as though you are all sitting in the same room, exchanging ideas.
You: The times, they are a-changin’.
Me: People are talking about wikis as well as other collaboration tools. Even though wikis may not be a part of your day job, it is definitely worth your while to know them and similar online collaboration tools. Another wiki to investigate is MediaWiki. Google Docs has also been used for collaboration. These are just a few examples.
Wikis are not going away. They may appear at your workplace, at your child’s school, or in your other community activities. What would it be like if the family came to its favorite technical communicator for help and you didn’t have the answer? Why not give it a try and see what can develop from this new way of collaborating with your STC colleagues?
What do You say?
Karen Mardahl, a technical writer based in Denmark, works for Vitesse Semiconductors. She and Lisa Pappas, comanagers of the AccessAbility SIG, use wikis for their leadership team and for the SIG newsletter Achieve!, thanks to the initiative of Terry Smith, past Achieve! editor. The format of this article was inspired by Jean-Luc Dumont’s article, “Asking Questions,” in the January 2004 Intercom.
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Sidebar: SIG Leaders Use Wiki to Communicate Virtually SIG leaders are now using a wiki as a new way to communicate virtually. The wiki gives members of the group access to information such as telephone conference details whether they are at home or at work. Guidelines for such tasks as preparing virtual elections and running a live Web seminar as well as other important details related to SIG leaders’ work are maintained more easily on the wiki than through an e-mail exchange, where all members might not have the latest updates. The SIG leaders’ wiki is currently password-protected because it contains personal contact information. As the leaders’ knowledge and experience grows, this may change, but for now, the wiki can only be viewed by SIG leaders. |