On Wed, 14 May 2003, Bill Seitz wrote: (01)
> Could you tell us more about wiki's failure at your current gig? What
> was used before wiki was made available, what was the mode of failure,
> has some other new tool been used since....? (02)
Although there is a team of developers involved in the gig (this
is work on Indiana University's Knowledge Base
(http://kb.indiana.edu/)[1] I would not call it, until recently, a
collaborating team. It was more of a group of individuals who
occassionaly came together to assign tasks and then went off
alone to do them. (03)
I came along and tried to encourage the group to use wiki but
I've since realized it is too soon in the process. There's little
buy in to communicate, let alone collaborate (I think one
preceeds the other). (04)
The lack of communication is the result of a few issues:
turnover, managerial reorganization, and a general sense of "oh
my god have too much to do to add more overhead." (05)
I think it takes a special environment to understand that the
overhead of communication is usually worth it. (06)
In the past much of the communication was done in person, as the
team was together. Since the reorg that's not the case. There's
always been a mailing list, but it is not thought of as a
reference tool (yet). A logged IRC server has been implemented
which is helping to encourage communication and is certainly
helping the group become more of a team with a shared set of
goals (Because we tell rude jokes, amongst other things). (07)
[1] At some point I'd like to start a separate thread on the next
generation of the KB. It strikes me as a perfect opportunity to
implement or experiment with many of the more formal
representations that we sometimes talk about here (XTM, XMFL,
RDF, etc).
--
Chris Dent
cdent@blueoxen.org (08)
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