Often times, I’ll learn some institutional process, like the proper way to fill out a blank form, or how to route the blank…only to scratch my head over it 6 months later when it comes up again. “Now what goes in this box again??”
Or perhaps I want to keep track of 6 important account codes, or document instructions for something that I know well, but my coworkers are fuzzy on. I need to be able to write it up, store it safely, and forget about it. When it comes up again, I’d need to find it quickly and easily. Not only that, but maybe I learn the basics, and a coworker gets more details later, or realizes my documentation needs editing.
“What is this magic!” you demand in amazement. Well, step right up folks, because it’s called the wiki.
“Oh no,” you grimace, “blech.” Well, ok, when wikipedia made them famous they were ugly as sin, required coding to use, and had a User Interface only an engineer could love. I’m happy to report they’ve come a long way, baby.
We use one today in our office, and while they’re still a little ugly, they’re really simple to use, have an enterprise-y social network feel to them, and are very stable and cheap to run. We use Confluence, a product of Atlassian. For ten users or less it’s only $10/year, and all the money goes to charity. For larger groups it costs more, but the plans are very reasonable and the software is really solid. [Update: and now they'll host your wiki in the cloud for the same $10!]
This allows everyone in my office to document things, tag it with labels that describe the type of info on the page, save it and forget it. Anyone who wants to can open it, access the info, edit the page, attach files to it, add external links, embed images, video or sound. We can all find any page by a quick search for keywords, or by the tags we’ve grouped things in.
There’s a standard text editor (no coding!), social features to share pages with coworkers or work-groups, the ability to “follow” a topic as edits happen, or review changes over time and revert to previous versions, and it’s accessed through a standard browser. Easy, almost fun, and useful.
No more saving notes to yourself in network folders, or scribbled away in files – just post it, tag it, save it and forget it. As your organization builds up this internal “knowledge base”, it’s like having your very own Help Desk, and everyone has contributed slowly over time, so the burden of creation and updating is shared by everyone. It helps ease transitions when staff turns over, and cuts out wasted time from re-creating wheels. Give it a try!
