Over this past summer I’ve been working on a project for my wife Laura. She’s the technology teacher at school and needed an easy way for her teachers to create their own classroom webpage. Before Webster’s Classroom she had to manually create every teacher’s page and ftp it to a county server downtown. Needless to say, no one had websites.

We created an easy way for teachers to do this by using Webster’s Classroom. Best of all, we’re offering it to teachers absolutely FREE. Laura got a warm reception from her peers when she demonstrated our software during the first few days of school. A number of teachers have already used our software to setup their own customized classroom webpage and appear enthusiastic about using it throughout the year. We have many plans for additional features in the next year. So far we are getting very positive feedback on the site and we are excited to add new features to the site. We will be aggressively marketing it at the software matures over the coming months and I’ll be sure to post updates every so often on it.

I have initiated and promoted the use of wiki software in the two most recent companies I’ve worked for. I will explain my experiences with starting a wiki withing these two different working environments: a large corporate and a mid-sized company.

While working for a large company I realized there was some fundamental problems in the flow of information among our team. Not only our team but the entire project the company was working on. The project was a large military integration project that was struggling to get off its feet after the company won the bid from for it. My team was 10-15 programmers of varying skills. No one talked to each other about work and the people who did know what was going on kept it to themselves because it gave them a political edge over everyone else. Its extremely difficult for everyone to row the boat in the same direction if we aren’t communicating. I setup a wiki to solve the problem.

I was the only one who used it at first but once I had amassed a small amount of information on the wiki, other people started looking more into it. Some of my team didn’t want to use the wiki because they felt it was politically motivated or had their own motives. This environment wasn’t healthy for getting anything accomplished and was mostly just a part of the nature of large government programming contracts. The wiki wasn’t embraced by everyone but those who used it found it useful. I eventually left this miserable project for better opportunities. Fortunately, I left at the right time because no more than 2 months after I left the entire team was either laid off or reassigned. This was not a successful use of a wiki.

The second environment I installed a wiki was for a mid-sized sales driven company. Their main source of information was some random CMS install that was a pain to edit or add things to. It was used mostly by sales agents but really everyone except programmers (we have our own secret wiki). I installed a wiki to replace the CMS. The wiki was immediately put to use by moving everything from the CMS to it. People have continually added to the wiki and made their own pages and sub pages for different departments and so on. Its now grown into something extremely useful that’s used throughout the day by the entire company (minus the programmers). I’m very happy with how its being used especially since these are non-technical people using it and they’ve done so much with it so far. I didn’t need to coax anyone to use it and I didn’t need to play any political games to show people it was a useful tool. There was a need in the company to more easily share information and the wiki filled it.

I attribute the success of the second wiki to a few things:

• lots of information already existed and it needed a better way of accessing it
• a graphical editor that resembles a word processor
• instituted from the top (management) down rather than the bottom (me) up

I’d be interested in hearing from other people with experiences setting up a wiki in their workplace so please comment if you’ve done so.