The World Beyond Email… is Wiki, Wiki, Wiki!
…last Monday in Reveries Magazine’s “Cool News of the Day”
Collaborative Wiki. “E-mail is a tremendously overloaded tool,” says Gary Boone of Accenture Technology Labs, explaining part of the appeal of “wiki,” as reported by Michael Totty in The Wall Street Journal. Wiki, as you may know — or wiki-wiki — is Hawaiian for “quick,” but it is also the name of a type of web page that is gaining favor as a way to help “companies and work teams to trade ideas, share intelligence and track projects.” While wiki web pages look pretty much like any other, the difference is that it is easy for any visitor to “add new material .. or change what is already there.” All the changes are tracked and saved so nothing is ever lost.Most everything behind this GlobalChicago Home/Weblog page runs as the GlobalChicagoWiki and a number of other wiki’s are hosted here for other projects and organizations in the GlobalChicagoGarden. Wiki is also the perfect ongoing, online, everyday companion and supporting technology for OpenSpaceTech.[Wiki is being used] to create an online encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org. However, its simplicity and low-cost (available as shareware) has made it attractive commercially, in fact some are comparing its potential popularity to that of instant messaging. “The disadvantage of not having the sophistication of more elaborate tools is outweighed by the ease of using it,” says Gary Boone.
A company calledStata Labs, for example, is using a wiki “to manage its customer-relations program. As customers e-mail requests for new features or relate problems, the information is added to the wiki, where it can be viewed by developers in India, or by Stata’s chief executive in San Mateo, California. Stata’s vice president of product management, Andy Stack, notes the advantages versus e-mail. “With e-mail,” he says, a lot … gets trapped in one-off conversations,” whereas the wiki “has the ability to capture … side conversations and make them available to all others.”
Accenture’s Gary Boone meanwhile says his group “uses wiki pages to organize reports on bugs and requests for new features in the software they’re developing,” as well as to post “speaker schedules, lab announcements and tech-related news.” The wiki, he says “may represent a sweet spot between nothing or just e-mail and … more elaborate systems.”