Wednesday, October 25, 2006

An Agreeable Wiki

Story of their Intranet Wiki

Darren Chase

We had a woodpile

Our Scenario

  • Large library staff
  • Diverse knowledge and expertise
  • Wide variety of projects
  • Communication is compartmentalized

Our original intranet was a woodpile

  • Shared windows folders on network drives
  • Woodpile: we knew where all the wood was, but finding a specific piece…

Our needs, desires, and secret wishes

Wanted: fast, cheap miracle

  • Collaboration
  • Documentation/policies
  • Troubleshooting/FAQs
  • In-house control
  • Web accessible
  • Organization
  • Ease of use

Kaleidoscope of options

  • Keep the woodpile: shared files (PDF, Word, Excel)
  • Static HTML pages
  • CMS (content management system)
  • Blog
  • Wiki

And the winner is… WIKI

Chose Twiki – it’s superfantastical

Why we *Heart* Twiki:

  • easy editing
  • Access control
  • File locking
  • Webs
  • Revision control
  • Plug-ins

Building Twiki

  • Linux (can work on other systems, this is what they had)
  • Apache
  • Perl 5.8
  • Perl modules (instead of SQL/databases)
  • Plug-ins

Refreshing wiki

Implementation is done. Training and buy-in depends on staff support.

Effective support builders:

  • Make it easy to join & use
  • Keep it simple
  • Must be “real world”
  • Hands-on training
  • Continuing wiki refreshment

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