Organizing the UI for a Wiki - Finding the right balance

Updated on 25 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

I am a big fan of Wikis as a collaboration tool, and understand part of my appreciation for them is that I am more of a "free format" sort of person -- rarely looking for a template.  Thus my reasoning behind the post Collaboration is supposed to be messy.  

At the same time, there is a need to provide some organization for a wiki or it risks going all out of control and becoming unusable for those who prefer templates.  This article on Wiki Design (scroll halfway down the page to see it) provides some good tips and insights into how to loosely organize a wiki, from people who have experience doing so.

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Effective Collaboration is Supposed to Look "Messy"!

Updated on 25 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

As I lament how poorly most people use today's collaboration tools, I also put some of the "blame" on the collaboration tool makers for making people think the work effort is supposed to be pretty.  I am a great fan of wikis, but many of the examples they show look more like clean web layouts than successful collaboration.

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Even the U.S. State Department Now Uses Wikis

Updated on 25 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

A recent article in Ars Technica (State Department moves from telegrams to wikis) describes how an agency known for moving at slow speed and having challenging technical requirements (e.g., no LAMP-stack applications, need to meet ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) standards) has made the move to wikis to share information.  This is an important milestone and puts the large enterprises that rely on email as their collaboration communications tool to shame.

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Writing/Editing Tools for Collaboration

Updated on 25 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

We outlined our Taxonomy of Collaboration Tools in an earlier post. In this post, we focus on writing/editing tools for collaboration. For each type of writing/editing tool, we offer a brief description of its purpose and a list of such tools.

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Team Brainstorming and Innovation in 2010

Updated on 24 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

In Short Stories From The Front people mentioned that brainstorming within a virtual team was difficult to impossible; for example, “Especially brainstorming in a virtual team is almost impossible.”; and, “The virtual world will never deliver the value of the hallway conversation.” Why is it so difficult? We aren’t living in the stone ages! In the stone ages we could run down the hall to our local “guru’s” office and solve a problem. A few hours later we would emerge feeling happy

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