Social Glass

Last year I started work on a project and thought it’d be a great opportunity to run through the requirements process using a wiki. My cohorts and I quickly procured a server, downloaded MediaWiki and installed the FCKEditor plugin (which probably does more harm than good, but that’s a different matter). We then started recording minutes, requirements and action items in the wiki and used it to store shared documents as well. Internally the team, which was somewhat technical and exposed to this stuff, thought it was great.

We then exposed a portion of the wiki to the client who was largely unaccustomed to the idea of writable web applications. Almost unanimously they asked “what does wiki mean?” to which I replied “well, it comes from a Hawaiian word meaning ‘fast’…”

But once they saw us use it, once they saw how quickly content could be edited and how each page version was neatly cataloged they became very impressed with the software. I received several compliments from them on how helpful the software was and we’ve since adopted the wiki as a requirements/collaboration standard for the project.

In retrospect it’s neat to look back and see the reaction of first timers when the light-bulb turns on. Those of use who are used to blogging or evangelizing about Enterprise 2.0 often loose sight that most out there are “un-enlightened” and oblivious to the meaning of terms like blog, wiki, tag, etc. It’s important to spend time explaining the fundamentals for this stuff to gain mass adoption.