Knowledge+Wiki+Workshop

=The Knowledge Wiki Workshop, 8 July 2009 = toc

1. Origins
The workshop owes its origins at least in part to a question that arose within the member groups of the British Computer Society (i.e. Branches, Specialist Groups, Young Professionals Group etc). Instead of publishing a printed Member Groups Handbook with guidance notes for how the groups could best run their activities and play their role in the Society, would it not be better to have an electronic version managed by a content management system? And would a wiki engine perhaps provide a good tool for this which would additionally support collaborative authoring and maintenance? ¶ Conrad Taylor rephrased this issue in an abstracted form and posed it to the KIDMM email discussion community. It soon became evident that there were a number of other people exploring the use of wikis for the management of standards, guidance and other forms of organisational knowledge. Might we not usefully run a workshop on that? ¶ Marilyn Leask, Professor of Education at Brunel University, offered her department’s premises as a free venue, and Steve Dale and Conrad Taylor undertook to organise the day. In the event we had 32 participants plus a few others who weren’t able to make it.

2. No agenda
The workshop was not planned according to an agenda. What we did have – by virtue of the way the event was announced – was an intention to share what we know about the use of wikis and related technologies to gather together and organise the knowledge which organisations (and networks) need to function more effectively. Not so much encyclopaedic knowledge-bases of general interest, like Wikipedia; more the kind of knowledge we are thinking of could encompass such things as shared glossaries, shared organisational history, standards, rules and procedures, who's who, what's what, where's where. And we wanted to reach a deeper understanding of:
 * 1) how wikis and similar technologies work
 * 2) what differentiates them and how to choose and implement one
 * 3) how one encourages participation, manages workflow and review procedures
 * 4) keeping them current and managing conflicts in the editorial process
 * 5) defining an appropriate and practical model for governance.

3. A resource document
Conrad Taylor had prepared a resource document for the event which provided a suggested minimal definition of what a wiki is and how wikis work technically, plus an exploration of ways in which the hundred-plus available wiki systems vary in the functionality they provide, and ending with summary information on half a dozen quite popular non-hosted wiki systems. This can be viewed as a Scribd document or retrieved as PDF from our Notes and docs page.

4. How we organised
We met in one of the Education Department’s rooms, laid out rather like a primary school classroom, with tables around each of which five or six people sat. First we went round the room – each person in turn introduced themselves briefly and **offered three ‘tags’** to flag a set of concerns. Then we took sticky notes and wrote out some **proposed topics** which we might try to address during the day. ¶ The sticky notes were then stuck on the surface of a couple of flipcharts and Steve Dale and Marilyn Leask tried to organise these into categories during a coffee break. The idea was to use these categories to drive the agenda for the day’s discussion. (This worked more or less, but might have worked better had we had more time.) ¶ We did have two presentations during the day. The first was by **Edmund Lee** who outlined the standards and guidance work at English Heritage, and a couple of experimental applications of wikis. **Steve Dale** talked about the Communities of Practice of the Improvement and Development Agency, and the project on which he and colleagues are embarked to gather the knowledge generated in those communities into a Knowledge Hub.

5. Lunchtime wiki teach-in
Richard Millwood had set up a Wikispaces wiki for the workshop – //this// wiki – and offered to run a quick practical introduction to how it works during the lunch break, in the Department’s computer teaching room. There was good take-up for this session, and by the end of the day about 18 of us were ‘signed up’ and had had a little experience in wiki-editing.

6. Break-out sessions
Four themes emerged – genres, roles, wiki project lifecycle and the barriers to entry – which were tackled in parallel breakout sessions. Each of these sessions has its own report within this wiki already: follow the links above, or from the Workshop reports page.

7. Forthcoming: other workshop reports, organised by theme
An audio recording was made by Conrad Taylor of the entire plenary part of the workshop. This can form the basis for the extraction and writing-up of significant emergent themes in the coming weeks. The wiki format also allows for the emergence and collaborative elaboration of ideas and reflections from the day. We have already established a **Topics Arising** section of the wiki to organise round these emergent themes.

8. Mentioned in dispatches...
The workshop has been mentioned in people’s blogs:
 * Derek Wenmoth — entry in **[|Derek’s Blog]** (with photos)
 * Adrian Barker — on the blog of the **[|IDeA Strategy and Development Unit]**