Small Group Wiki Practices

From WikiSym 2008

Open space section, 10 September, 2008.

Contents 1 Participators 2 What was here? 3 Who was here? 3.1 Nikolay 3.2 Andreas 3.3 Konstantin 3.4 Alex 4 Communication, awareness or product creation? 5 Communication/awareness practices 5.1 Vision sharing 5.2 TriAngulation pattern 5.3 New members guide 5.4 Minutes from meetings 5.5 WorkLog 5.6 Skype Logging 5.7 WhoWeAre 5.8 Social wiki 6 Product creation practices in wiki 6.1 Brainstorming 6.2 Wiki snapshot as product 6.3 Write design documentation 6.4 S.O.P. in a wiki

Participators

• Nikolay Yaremko
• Konstantin Kolomeetz
• Alex Trinkl
• Andreas Rüping

What was here?

We have participated in a structured OpenSpace session, where each of us have 5 minutes to write some PostIts on wiki practices he used in his own small groups; then we discussed each topic, determining if it was a success story and sharing insights learned.

Who was here?

Nikolay

• organizing small groups of 3-10 people; around 3-5 groups in a year;
• we use wiki as a group glue, creating group awareness
• here I want to share my expertise & find more insights on wiki usage

Andreas

• occasional wiki user; independent freelancer, webdeveloper, consultant
• use wiki in projects with 5-20 people
• here want to find out, how to use wiki properly in a small group

Konstantin

• intranet services manager in a company of 1500 people (500 developers working in small groups of 5-15 people)
• our intranet is based on wiki
• want to find what patterns may be in a wiki for small groups & how to bring these patterns to people

Alex

• work in group of 10 people, doing quality, documentation, method description
• want to find a strategy to make people accept wiki technology

Communication, awareness or product creation?

Most of our practices can be distributed between two categories:

• commutication/awareness practice around some workflow (for example, backlogging)
• practice of direct collaboration on a some product inside of wiki (such as documentation)

It seems that communication/awareness practices are a way easier to adopt, comparing to practices of direct collaboration.

Communication/awareness practices

Vision sharing

Put a vision on a wiki and use it to sync members' vision and to lead a project

• key issue: it is hard to formulate & maintain complete vision description
• so wiki-vision is short
• allows to indicate changes of vision and keep teammates aware of it

TriAngulation pattern

Each group member writes 3 short statements on some common topic like "vision of project", "aims of projects", "what is X", trying to describe it as accurate as possible.

• usually it is enough to think of 3 statements from different points of view to explain what are you thinking of it
• as a result we have group awareness of triangulated topic

New members guide

Created an introduction for new project members as a page (or pages) in wiki.

• introduction kept up-to-date because when newbies find problems, they ask for advice -- that leads to older members updating introduction
• that was a success

Minutes from meetings

Used wiki in project schedule, created documents to wiki-pages during meetings.

• prepare a meeting agenda (collaboratively, each one can contribute some point of it)
• meeting report is based on that agenda

WorkLog

What we have done, in small statements. Helps to jump in.

• similar to backlog of agile development, but covers wider topic of any group-related activity
• provides members with some sense of history -- awareness of what we assume as our achievements also

Skype Logging

Skype sessions or long email discussions can be summarized in wiki: both decisions and next actions.

• skype logs are pushed to wiki as-is
• then some people find time to distill them in decisions, next-actions, key-points

WhoWeAre

Each group member creates a wiki-page about himself/herself -- with name, photo and other valuable personal information. Usually it is required to have some group-oriented stuff:

• contacts (how we can reach you?)
• personal aims and goals related to project
• expertise and past projects/groups

That allows group members to find experts for some problem area quicklier, organize vision-related conversations more effectively, etc.

Social wiki

Wiki is a good place to create & maintain

• list of team members (and their personal traits)
• list of restaurants nearby
• list of social events

Product creation practices in wiki

Brainstorming

Brainstorming for a web-site (or concepts of two main pages)

• start with empty page
• single sentence regarding some topic (website)
• then draw schemes to create main pages/scheme of a web-site

Also brainstorming with list of open issues

• design enhancements
• possible future features

Wiki snapshot as product

Wiki was used to create a CDROM catalogue -- all work was done on wiki pages (including uploaded images, etc.), then there was taken a snapshot of a whole wiki and that snapshot was published on CD.

• that was 1 month project with 70 pages
• example of wiki usage as a production tool, HTML editor
• snapshot is a cheap way to provide small group members with artefact they just created

Write design documentation

Design documentation started with a few sketches, completed at the end of project.

• problem: documentation may become splitted between PDF & wiki
• solution: generate PDFs only afterwards
• problem: rich documentation leads to great amount of wiki pages created -- that requires some wiki-gardening
• also we need to provide some starting structure at the beginning of work
• problem: documentators were not glad to switch to wiki from their own documention instrument

S.O.P. in a wiki

We tried to bring SOP (standard operating procedure) to the wiki

• the aim was to centralize writing of procedures
• settings up soome forms/templates -- forms & templates were helpful
• project is not finished yet, now we are trying to enforce some document workflow
• it seems that wiki is not good enough for organizing any workflow-related activity