Gen Y: My Wiki Adoption Story
February 26, 2009 – 11:08 pm | by Daryl TayI’ve been volunteering at my secondary school scout troop with a few of my friends since 2005 and among “management”, we’re the most junior, the rest being school teachers. The difficulty that plagued us forever was that we were very scattered. Some were in school (and within that group, different schools), some teachers, some working adults. As a result, with the exception of physical meetings, it was very hard for us to share information that required decisions to be made.
The one singular thing that got on my nerves the most, was how documents (and meeting minutes in particular) were continuously sent via email. Some people had multiple email addresses, when the documents were updated people frequently referred to different versions thus creating a lot of confusion.
Thus in April, 2008, our wiki was born, primarily to deal with the issues of documents. A file dump, if you will.
I had to sell the idea upwards, but luckily there was little to no resistance to it. The problem though, only one other person and myself were actually using it.
Fast forward to 2009 and now we have a full-blown “Project E” (that stands for electronic) team, with the mission to fully digitise everything within the unit where possible. It’s a great feeling to see the team (most of whom are 18 or 19) embracing the tools and really realising that it is a hugely beneficial alternative to anything we’ve used before.
So we’re having proper meetings now to work out the kinks. How should the pages be used? Are we going to develop a template for our “project” pages?
And the biggest question of all: How do we get everyone – not just the Project E team – to really use this as an organisational tool?
It’s interesting to see how the wiki has developed from a file dump to an actual tool. Just having one practical usage has led to further exploration and incremental usage.
I’m going to keep blogging about this story as it progresses. Right now we’re trying to get everyone from the Gen Y segment on it, next stop, the “older” segment (aka the teachers). I can’t wait to see if it will happen.
Tags: documents, file dump, Gen Y, generation y, scout troop, wiki, wiki adoption, wiki as an organisational tool
6 Responses to “Gen Y: My Wiki Adoption Story”
By ssumin on Feb 27, 2009 | Reply
yes, pls update progress! Same problem I see with any new tool – it’s really only a few people adopting it. Email, that familiar beast, is still the preferred communication and sharing tool. Probably because we definitely check it regularly, as opposed to having to go to another platform for info.
By Daryl Tay on Feb 27, 2009 | Reply
@ssumin: Yeah and I thought it might be easier given that everyone is Gen Y and everything, but it really is more difficult than I thought. I think specifically for wikis you really need the right team before starting one.
By Jo on Feb 27, 2009 | Reply
Looking forward to hearing more.
BTW 2-3 years ago, my father who was in his late 70’s used to grumble incessantly about people sending documents by email. Put them on the server, he would fume to his fellow professionals.
There are three basic management issues here:
a) Double-handling – or multiple handling! A document should be handled once and once only. So the the originator stores it immediately. Reviewers and editors open it once and act on it immediately. All the moving documents around is waste (and exhaustion).
b) Confidentiality – the old guard should like this. We don’t want copies of documents floating around the webosphere.
c) Audit trail – have the requisite people checked, noted and acted on the document. We could install expensive software to track what we have done. And even with all the expense we don’t know what decisions were made and not recorded. When a document is in one place we know how the information was used (barring deliberate attempts to use the information for other purposes.)
Yes, begin with the early adopters. Others will come on board “to look at the photos” to use a parallel with Facebook!
Which wiki are you using BTW. I use jottit for simple wikis, wikidot for bigger projects because it has a forum and wikimedia for wikis that I keep for myself on my laptop. pbwiki is the wiki of choice for conference organizing over here.
Cheers
Jo
By Daryl Tay on Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
@Jo: Indeed. The “look at the photos” analogy is definitely relevant here. Then from that it’s just incremental steps.
I’ve used both wetpaint and pbwiki, for this particular project I’m using pbwiki, which I find very, very user friendly, but I think wetpaint has a nice forum function.
By brian on Mar 5, 2009 | Reply
interestingly enough, i just started a pbwiki for my church as well. mainly as a tool to project manage an easter event that involves many different departments
but the youth group are doing most of the work, and it’ll be interesting to see how the supposed Gen Zs take to this style of collaboration.
By Daryl Tay on Mar 5, 2009 | Reply
@Brian: You should run a parallel update on your blog too!