Wiki..Quick and Easy Collaboration

Gettin' Wiki Wit It
A new online tool allows workers to collaborate quickly and easily.
By Andy Opsahl
October 2006
In Hawaiian, the word wiki wiki means quick or fast.

But when computer programmer Ward Cunningham used the term to describe the set of formatting tools he created in 1994 that allow collaborative discussion to take place online, he shortened it to just wiki.

Even a few years ago, the word wiki meant little to most people. But the explosive -- and some say controversial -- growth of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone with Internet access can edit, has popularized the term, as well as the software that makes wikis possible.

With this popularity, it's no surprise that several vendors are developing types of wikis, and that government is also looking into the technology.


The Federal Approach
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) implemented a wiki in 2004 as part of a collaborative work environment suite of online decision support devices. The GSA used that wiki for a U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) chartered workshop to improve data maintenance and referencing.

The wiki allowed remote attendees interactive participation in discussions and enabled them to submit comments. When the on-site participants broke into small discussion groups, remote participants posted their comments, and also had quick access to the comments made in those on-site group discussions.

"It's very easy for our community members to participate without having to travel," said Susan Turnball, senior program adviser for the GSA. "Prior to the wiki, they would probably be sitting in their offices, just listening to presentations with nothing in front of them."

The wiki's user-friendly aspect of the process kept remote participants from being passive, she said, and prevented decisions from being made only by on-site attendees.

"Originally we estimated this project would take 18 months," Turnball added. "It was completed in 180 days and was successfully issued by OMB. It's actually being adopted by states right now."


Community Application
Wiki technology is primarily used to allow groups of nonprogrammers to collaboratively create applications, said Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates, a technology consulting firm. The collaborative concept of a wiki has been around for several years, she said, but interest from nonprogrammers hadn't been considerable until recently.

"Now you have lots of people offering wikis in the context of user environments," Wohl said. "In some cases, they're offering them for fairly specific purposes, and in other cases, you can do whatever you want with them."

Groups that create wiki applications can customize the rules for how people participate.

"You could decide whether you want membership in the wiki to be by invitation only, or whether anybody who comes across can join," Wohl said. "You could decide whether to have different role levels among the people who can participate in the wiki, so some people can only read things, and some people can read and write. Some people have sort of administrative capabilities where they can delete things other people write or set up in a group."

Wiki groups typically divide users into subgroups to work on different parts of the application rather than a big "jam session," she said, which sometimes happens. "You want to split it up by topics, by groups of people, by projects, by dates or however you're splitting it up. Wikipedia is just an example of a wiki that's been split up by topics.

"Typically the point of a wiki is to let multiple people collaborate," Wohl continued. "You probably wouldn't use a wiki if one person were doing the whole thing, because there are other tools that are just as useful and less trouble."


Customizing Applications
IBM is developing a technology called Enterprise Mashup, which would let users place individual application functions -- such as phone number searches, GIS devices and other functions -- in the combination and on the location on the screen they found most useful.

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Andy Opsahl
Staff Writer