Getting started with a wiki from scratch can be a daunting task- particularly if your organization has been sorely in need of a knowledge management and collaboration system for a long time.  A shared drive that has as much out of date and inaccurate content as it has valuable information will ultimately result in a failed attempt at knowledge sharing- since no one knows what is worth looking at.  Keeping everything in email can be even worse, as critical information is trapped on someone's PC, with no way for new employees or partners to access it.  You might have a home-grown solution, created by people who don't know the first thing about how to manage information.  You might have all or none of these, but when you realize that you need a better solution, and a wiki fits the bill, here are some tips on how to get your team started.

Communication
It is always a good idea to fully explain to everyone the benefits of a wiki, and how those benefits apply specifically to everyone.  If you can give people a reason to contribute- then they will at least give it a chance.  If you can convince them that their jobs will be easier, that they will ultimately be able to save time, or show exactly how they can work better with their co-workers, then you are almost assured that you will be able to build a solid foundation for your wiki.

Incentives
These can be as simple as incenting everyone on your team to add one new page and contribute to someone else's page each week.  Or throw a pizza party if your team reaches a content goal of a specified number of pages.  If all else fails and you are in management, you can also tie bonuses and performance evaluation scores to wiki contributions- though this is not something that we recommend.  The more that people feel like they own the content, the more organic growth you will get, which is the key ingredient to a successful wiki.

Initiatives / Projects
Take a topic, an idea, or a difficult problem and challenge your team to solve it purely though wiki collaboration.  This not only gets people familiar with the wiki, but it demonstrates the power of the tool, and you get a great resource at the end of the initiative.  If you work on projects within your wiki, create a meeting agenda item to review various pages that you can create for Issues / Problems, Lessons Learned, or Status Updates.  By bringing your laptop to the meeting and displaying the wiki for everyone to see, you get great participation and exposure.

Get Everyone Involved
There are always people in every team who are the recognized and respected leaders.  Get these people to contribute, and you will see others follow suit.  Also, if you can, get your Managers, Directors, and Executives to contribute.  Even a comment here or there will let people know that upper management is paying attention, and thereby validating the content in the wiki. 

There are a number of approaches for starting a wiki- and most are reasonable and will lead to success.  The keys are: getting people to understand what a wiki can do for them as individuals as well as the company, providing concrete examples that show the value of the wiki, and getting the right people involved.

When speaking with current and potential clients, we often hear questions such as: "How should I set up my wiki?" or "What is the most effective way to enter my content into a wiki?" Usually these types of questions are framed within the context of being able to effectively and efficiently use the BrainKeeper Wiki Software. However, clients often overlook the need to maximize adoption and ultimately ensure a successful implementation of a wiki.

Unfortunately, there is no standard, cookie cutter, vanilla template setup for starting to use a wiki. However, if you keep in mind that the best adoption rate will come through ensuring that the use of a wiki fits well into the current processes of your company, you will have a great head start. Here are three good tips to getting your wiki setup:

1) Use Existing Structures

If your company is split up into departments and generally work along those lines, create workspaces based on departments to group related content together. If you company is more project centric (consulting, small team implementation) then create workspaces for each large project. Certainly there will be some overlap, but thinking about how team members currently work together will make it easier to find information and collaborate within your wiki.

2) Define Clear, Consistent Direction

Hopefully, a wiki will change the way you work- for the better.  But with any change, it is important to make sure everyone understands the new expectations.  As a part of your wiki setup process, define what will go into the wiki and what will not.  If you have existing processes for communication and collaboration, you should review those policies to see where the wiki makes sense to be included.

3) Get Input From Others

When the decision is made to purchase and use a wiki, make sure you get input from the people who will be using it.  If you are in Product Management and you want Marketing to use your wiki, make sure they help you with the first two items: developing the structure and outlining the directions.  You will get buy-in from everyone you need to make a successful implementation.

One last note is that all three of the above should not be done and forgotten.  As adoption increases and your organization changes, it is important to continue to refine the structure of your wiki, update the directions and expectations, and work with others to ensure that your wiki remains a valuable tool for your organization.

There are a number of us who have a passion for realizing the potential of knowledge- in all forms. Those of us here at BrainKeeper have made the gathering, categorizing, and serving of information via the internet our career for many years. So, we are very interested and excited as to where some of the more modern software conventions are taking us. We are most interested in concepts such as:

• Social collaboration software (such as WIKIs) applied to the corporate environment
• Software as a Service and its increased adoption- Web 2.0 as is relates to a dynamic, rich user experience
• The maturation of information delivery methods, such as RSS, ATOM, and BLOGGING

We'll take a look at the first topic here, and address others in future posts.

A good number of us have witnessed several trends developing in the area of online communication. Sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn have proven the value (or at least the interest) of personal online collaboration, and similar initiatives are constantly in the works to capture a part of this 'social networking' concept.

Why is it, then, that the tools developed for communication within the corprate sector have not been heralded or adopted with nearly the zeal that these 'personal' sites have? Where this has even been recognized as a valuable initiative, companies are turning to homegrown knowledge bases and open source WIKI products to solve issues of intra-corporate knowledge transfer, maintenance and retention. These solutions have the potential to address the needs for which they were created, but most implementations end up being nothing more than a check box in the to-do list of a CIO, or they sit dormant after a lackluster kickoff- or the saddest situation: they are only used by a fraction of the employees and the potential is never realized.

There are some more structured, fee-based solutions available- with more being developed, that hope to capitalize on this opportunity. While some are close, we have not yet seen a system that is simple enough for the majority, while having the full set of features needed to address the challenges that face companies who need online, distributed, interactive collaboration. I doubt we will see a 'MyCompanySpace' site anytime soon, but whoever can provide a complete solution will have quite a breakthrough.