Luis Suarez - “Grow Your Wiki” Grows into Specialist Consultancy:

In case you don’t know much about Stewart, which I doubt, since he is a very prolific blogger, incredibly engaging speaker, writer of one of the most essential books on wikis and corporate wiki adoption: Wikipatterns, active twitterer, too (On top of various other social networking sites!), I can honestly say that you are missing out on one of the smartest talents within the Enterprise 2.0 space we have nowadays.

Thomas Vander Wal - Stewart Mader is Now Solo and One to Watch and Hire:

Stewart wrote the best book on understanding wikis and adoption, Wikipatterns and is my personal favorite speaker on the subject of wikis. Others may have more broadly known names, but can not come close to touching his breadth nor depth of knowledge on the subject. His understandings of wikis and their intersection with other forms and types of social tools is unsurpassed.

Martin Menu - 3, 2, 1… Wikignition!:

If Stewart leaves evangelization to ROI, it could means the market is now strong enough to feed consultancy companies and not only software and technical companies. That is really a good news for wiki users that will be able to be helped and advised by strong professionals, neutral from a software or a platform.

Jon Mell - New wiki consultancy:

I’d particularly recommend his concept of BarnRaising workshops - check out his services for more details. BarnRaising workshops solve the problem of having an empty wiki when you first launch, which no-one will use. The wiki is actually built during the BarnRaising workshop so that when people go back to their desks, they have something of value they can use together.

Sherif Mansour - Wiki adoption - growth to the next level:

This is great news for the Enterprise Web 2.0 community and organisations around the world looking to increase collaboration and knowledge sharing between their employees.

John Tropea - Grow Your Wiki Consultancy Services:

There are lots of enterprise 2.0 type consultancies, but a non-vendor consulting specifically about wikis must be a first…Congratulations to Stewart for being a pioneer in his field, and best wishes for spreading the word.

Other mentions from around the web:

• Scott Abel - Wiki Master Stewart Mader Goes Solo With Grow Your Wiki
• Doug Cornelius - Stewart Mader Launches a New Venture
• Rachel Happe - (on Twitter) @slmader is starting his own Wiki consulting business
• Stephen Collins - Stewart Mader goes indie
• Dennis McDonald - Daily Notes for August 11, 2008: Stewart Mader is announcing formation of his own full time wiki consultancy. Congratulations, Stewart!

A big, heartfelt THANK YOU! to everyone who has commented on the launch and my work with wikis.

Are you implementing a wiki in your organization? Get a subscription to my services: You’ll get excellent guidance, visibility as a leader in embracing new tools, and you’ll be helping to support the insight and analysis I provide on Grow Your Wiki.

I’m pleased to announce the speakers for this inaugural WikiFest. They come from organizations of all sizes around the world, including IBM, Chevron, University of Helsinki, Boeing, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, //Seibert/Media, and wikiwise. The range of industries represented is fantastic: Energy, Media, Technology, Transportation, Aerospace, and Education.

Each will talk about their experiences leading an enterprise wiki initiative, and offer timely advice that can help you guide your organization’s wiki efforts.

Soobaek Jang and Brian D. Goodman - IBM

Soobaek Jang and Brian D. Goodman are responsible for IBM’s internal wiki adoption. Over the past three years, they have supported over community of over 300,000 registered users working with over 20,000 wiki instances containing over 380,000 pages. After sharing high-level background, they will discuss three key lessons in managing wiki deployments and adoption in large-scale enterprises.

Camille Goksever - Chevron

Camille Goksever will present lessons learned deploying the first wiki at Chevron’s Richmond, California refinery. Presentation will focus on how a wiki triggered cultural changes in an organization of non-technical users.

Antero Aunesluoma and Heikki Wilenius - University of Helsinki

The University of Helsinki’s wiki service was opened in august 2007 - equally to staff and students. The adoption strategy has been strongly driven by the needs of users, all the way from selecting the software to formulating the rather liberal policy of use. At the moment there are more than 400 individually administered wiki spaces, supporting online collaboration on studies, research and administration. In this session we will showcase how the University of Helsinki has adopted the wiki. Until this far the story has been a success but there are certain challenges already waiting for a solution.

Sean Munson - University of Michigan, The Boeing Company and Derek Hansen - University of Maryland

We discuss the results from two studies of the wiki deployment and adoption. In the first, we provided three online patient support mailing lists with wikis, help files, and suggestions for use based on study of the CSS-D mailing list and wiki. The second provided a Boeing workgroup with a wiki to document and publicize their past work. In both cases, the social challenges were more difficult than technical challenges. In both instances, users were reluctant to edit others’ content and were unsure of what (and how much detail) to add. Identifying a wiki team or wiki champion, encouraging a small group to initially seed the wiki with content, introducing the wiki concurrently to many potential members, and allowing and encouraging authors to take ownership of content helped to ease adoption issues.

Martin Seibert - //SEIBERT/MEDIA

//SEIBERT/MEDIA is a German web agency with over 60 employees and experience since 1996. We started to use our new wiki in July 2007 and have been experiencing a tremendous usage increase and a lot of successes, that I would like to share. Additionally we have collected a couple of good insights, on how to sell a wiki both from an economical perspective and an internal perspective to clients.

Lex Slaghuis - wikiwise

Lex Slaghuis of wikiwise will discuss bbservations and experiences on wiki concepts within a large local Dutch government agency. An analysis of current collaboration processes is presented with five recurring collaborative patterns. These patterns were identified by clustering the collaborative ‘issues’ of employees. The patterns are of interest as they seem to influence each other as well as they provide quick and easy overview of the organizational collaborative processes. Some of these patterns also appear to relate to typical wiki capabilities, such as RSS-feeds and link indexing.

It’s a new site the magazine’s publishers are hoping will engage - and build - its audience by giving them the ability to read, save (bookmark a story someone else has already added), and add news items from around the web.

The fact that I can save relevant content - even if it’s not from BusinessWeek - is a good move for the long-term success of this site. Richard Pérez-Peña of the New York Times says:

This is hardly a revolutionary idea in the wiki era, but for a mainstream publication, it represents a significant loosening of control. (But not too loose — new topics require editorial approval, promised within 24 hours, and objectionable posts will be taken down.)

BusinessWeek has a number of features planned for the site:

Activities around stories (like saving, adding and soon commenting) will raise the most relevant information to the top of the results.

Users can also create their own personal profiles which will keep track of their activities allowing other users to see what information has been useful to them.

Bloggers can add RSS feeds of their postings to relevant topics and their content will appear in those topics when postings match relevant keywords for that topic.

For a while now, I’ve been unimpressed with the options for saving business-related articles I find useful and want to revisit or reuse. Digg is just too juvenile, del.icio.us has been stagnant as a product (to be fair it did get an upgrade recently, but it’s been so long that I haven’t gone back to see if anything has improved), and my web browser’s bookmarking feature just seems too dated - I’m afraid anything I put there will be out of mind.

But Business Exchange has kept me coming back. Since Thursday, I’ve created two topics (Enterprise Wiki Adoption, and Presentation Design & Delivery), participated in eight (by reading or saving stories), added 6 stories and saved 10. I’ve also added 10 people to my network, which allows me to see the stories they read, add, or save.

I like the idea that I can keep track of stories I find relevant & useful, in the context of a community of other businesspeople, and that shared interest in highly focused topics can reveal more stories I might not otherwise have found. Now if only they would release that feature that lets me add the RSS feed for Grow Your Wiki…

Business Exchange is slated to be released in September 2008.

Evening Gathering - 3rd September

On 3rd September from 7-9PM, the Whuffie Club is holding an evening gathering at The Werks (Map). I’ll conduct a short session on wiki use in organizations, answer questions, and then we’ll have a mixer afterward. Sign up for 3rd September

Workshop - 4th September

On 4th September at 9:30AM, I’ll be conducting a half-day workshop at The Werks on Effective Project Management Using a Wiki. If you’ve been thinking about using a wiki, are just getting started with one, or want to maximize existing wiki use, this is an excellent opportunity for you and your team to learn how a wiki can help you manage projects.

Teams can use a wiki to organize and work on critical documents and project plans. It lets people work more efficiently between face to face meetings and becomes a magnet for all the information relevant to a project. This workshop will show you how to:

• Organize your project on a wiki
• Help your team make the change from trading emails and attachments to gathering, building, and editing information on the wiki
• Manage everything related to the project, including background research, notes, URLs, timesheets, meetings agendas & minutes, action items, and finished documents, presentations, and files

Sponsors:

Register

If you have any difficulty registering, please let me know.
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Martin Seibert and Matthias Rauer of //Seibert/Media in Wiesbaden, Germany are generously providing translation of my english-language articles into german, and will also be posting the german-language articles on the //Seibert/Media Weblog.

Visitors to Grow Your Wiki from Germany make up the second largest group after those from the combined english-speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia), so I’m especially pleased to be able to offer a localized edition of the site.

Grow Your Wiki - Deutsch joins Grow Your Wiki - Polska (launched in May), and is the second international edition of Grow Your Wiki to launch this year. As I wrote when the polish edition launched, the german language edition is not necessarily an exact copy of the english edition, and posts may not necessarily appear on the german blog at the same time as the english blog.

You can now switch between the english, german, and polish editions of the site by using the drop-down menu to the upper right, just below the subscription options. I hope you enjoy this new edition!

The right sidebar has been given a new visual treatment, with graphics that match the green and dark grey colors in the logo and titlebar.

Blog readership, and options to subscribe by RSS or Email are now grouped at the top right. If you aren’t already subscribed, there’s no better time to do it than now!

Below that, information is grouped in 8 sections: Consulting, Speaking, Books, Search, Popular Posts, Recent Comments, Features, and Community. Four of these are new:

• Consulting
  The new Consulting section on the right introduces my services, and links to more information, Feedback I’ve received from clients and colleagues, and Login for existing clients.
• Speaking
  Looking for information on where I’m speaking next, the presentations and workshops I offer, and how to book an event with me? Did you know I offer 7 different workshops on topics including: project management, research workflow, wiki nitty gritty, etc.?

  The new Speaking section on the right links to completely refreshed speaking pages that include speaking topics, my schedule, slides and videos from my recent presentations, and an easy contact form to get in touch with me.

• Recent Comments
  Which articles are people discussing? Check out the new Recent Comments section to see the newest comments from Grow Your Wiki readers.
• Features
  Have you seen the popular video series 21 Days of Wiki Adoption? How about Vincenzo Cammarata’s guest series on the 8 Cultural Key Drivers for Wiki Success?

  Check out the new Features section for these and the newest feature: Wiki ROI: My guest series on the Wikinomics Blog.

I hope you like the new site design, and I welcome feedback! You can leave a comment below, or use the contact form.

Grow Your Wiki is growing - into a specialist consultancy focused on organizational wiki adoption.

This is as much a launch of something new, as the continuation of something I’ve been doing for a long time. I built my first wiki in 2003, for science curriculum, and building The Science of Spectroscopy showed me the amazing capability of a wiki to bring information to life, and get people more deeply involved in its creation, growth, and use.

Since then, I’ve been working with organizations to introduce wikis for internal collaboration, knowledge sharing, and project management. I’ve done it both as a full-time job, at Emerson College and Brown University, and as a consultant for a number of other organizations.

In late 2006, I joined Atlassian (makers of the Confluence wiki) as their Wiki Evangelist, and have continued to evangelize the benefits of wiki use in an organizational context at conferences, on blogs, and in my latest book Wikipatterns. I’ve also continued to work with a broad range of organizations on their wiki adoption efforts.

In the past several months, I’ve been fielding more and more questions from organizations that want to know how to get wiki adoption going the right way. I believe that to make wiki adoption successful and fully realize its benefits, they really need a good plan for managed growth that takes into account their size, history of enterprise software use (or misuse!), ensures people get the most out of their wiki use, and helps minimize performance and efficiency issues related to too-rapid growth.

So, I’m launching this new venture to focus all my energy on helping organizations get the most out of their investment in wikis as a collaboration, knowledge sharing, project & meeting management, and communication platform.

To that end, I’ll be leaving the full-time employ of Atlassian as of this Friday, August 15th. I’ll continue to work part-time on some special projects for the company until the end of September.

If you’re looking to grow wiki use in your organization, I’d love to help you plan a strategy for managed growth. You can use the contact form to get in touch, and I’ll get back to you within two business days.

In the past, said Stacie R. Hankins, a special assistant at the United States Embassy in Rome, when the ambassador prepared to meet an Italian political figure, the staff would e-mail a memo about the meeting and attach biographies of those who would be attending to be printed out.

Today, she said, they still produce the memo, but “now they attach a link to the Diplopedia article” — Diplopedia being a wiki, open to the contributions of all who work in the State Department.

Diplopedia (Wikipedia entry) is not just changing that one practice - it’s part of a larger shift called eDiplomacy:

The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture,” said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003.

The transformation from culture of defense to culture of sharing that I often talk about in my presentations is in full effect at the State Department, and it’s helping people not only build the most up-to-date biographical information on diplomats and issues, but also collect the tacit knowledge that’s equally important but less prestigious - ordering lunch, for example:

In addition to reference material like the 200 biographies of Italian political and business leaders, the more than 4,400 Diplopedia articles reflect the range of the staff’s concerns — among popular articles are high-minded titles like “Foreign Affairs Professional Reading List” and mundane ones like “Building Pass.”

The advantage of Diplopedia, she said, isn’t necessarily the ease of creating new material, but the ease in finding information. “The political section used to keep biographies on political people, and the economics people kept biographies on economics people,” she said. “It was not always up to date. You didn’t always know what the other had.”

The practical information, likewise, is material that was floating around the halls of the State Department, but not typically written down.

“Not to resort to clichés, but it demonstrates the long tail effect,” Mr. Johnson said. “A lot of things are not things that you would put on a traditional Web site. If someone directed a desk officer to create an article, it would not be about how to order lunch. That might seem trivial — but getting food into the main State Department building is not an easy task.”

1. Spaces

Internet wikis often have all content housed in one “place,” so that any user can see the entirety of the site’s content all together. Enterprise wikis allow for information to be organized in spaces (individual wikis that are part of the enterprise wiki) based on project, department, team, etc., and access to those spaces can be granted to specific users.

2. Security

Internet wikis are often open for anyone to read and edit, sometimes without even requiring one to login. Enterprise wikis are typically not open to the public or partially open, i.e. some spaces are open but others are not. To access an enterprise wiki, you have to login, and your account has to have permissions set so that you can access particular spaces. Permissions can also be set at the page level, so that a person might login, access a particular space, and have editing rights on some pages, but only viewing rights on others.

3. Integration

Enterprise wikis are designed to allow user account, group, and access information to be provisioned from authentication and authorization systems like LDAP and Active Directory, so that a person can login to the enterprise wiki with the same credentials that they use to access email, the company network, etc.

4. Typical Uses

Enterprise wikis are often used for:

• collaboratively building documentation
• creating and maintaining knowledge bases
• project management
• gathering tacit knowledge (knowledge not related to any specific project but essential to getting things done in an organization)
• meeting management, from agenda to minutes and action items.

Generally, an enterprise wiki will be used in a much wider variety of ways than an Internet wiki, because it is intended to support the wide-ranging needs of the people within an organization. Internet wikis tend to be used primarily for one main application, as is the case with Wikipedia.

5. Contribution Level

On public wikis, we often speak of the 90-9-1 Theory, which explains that 90% of users will “lurk” or simply browse pages, 9% will contribute occasionally, and 1% will contribute frequently, and account for most of the contributions to the wiki.

On an enterprise wiki, the contribution level is much higher based on the fact that people are contributing as part of the daily course of their work, as opposed to voluntarily contributing to a public, Internet wiki. This contribution isn’t necessarily compulsory, as a top-down mandate will usually hinder more than help wiki adoption. Instead, it’s the result of well-executed wiki adoption strategies that place the wiki at the center of the core activities of a team, such as meeting management, building a support knowledge base, or collaboratively writing documentation for a product.

To find out, I interviewed Alek Lotoczko for this feature article on The Content Wrangler: NYK Europe: Wiki Keeps International Shipping Firm on Course:

“We wanted something that was quick, lightweight, social, fun to use and easy to deploy, something that could function as an intranet out-of-the box and that could also be used for news dissemination.”

Read on to find out:

• How to demonstrate the wiki’s potential, make the business case, and grow use in a grassroots effort.
• How knowledge on the wiki is organized.
• 8 popular wiki uses at NYK.
• 6 ways the wiki has improved business processes at the company.