Blogalyst Stowe Boyd has a seriously great article on wikis in Darwin. Its a good intro to wiki, compares them with weblogs, highlights their emergent properties and role as social tools.
...Wikis are built upon an inherently open model of social interaction and collaboration, with very little constraint placed on the participants. In a sense, this puts the onus back on the members of a project group to self-police: to build structure out of the minimalist forms of Wiki components, to correct others' grammar, syntax and wrong-headed arguments, to cajole others to your viewpoint or ideas where the project should be headed. But it's exactly this frisson between partners, affiliated around shared purpose, that builds social ties and generates social capital. Wikis directly support us in our efforts to get more from the whole than the sum of the parts.Stowe also bases his views upon using Socialtext in the context of a workshop where he actively collaborated with other participants.
The specific Wiki technology that we applied for the workshop was provided by Socialtext. Taking a step forward toward the socialized enterprise, their exemplary technology includes blogs right in the framework of the basic Wiki tools. This combination of complementary social tools is much more powerful than using the two technologies in parallel but unintegrated.I was especially struck by the value of real-time Wikiing, as a running sidebar to the presentations and direct interaction in the workshop. At any given time, several of the 30-odd workshop attendees were capturing their own streams of consciousness or the comments of others, and it was obviously the case that Wikis have an amazingly steep learning curve, since many were total novices to Wikis. (Note: steep learning curves are the best sort, despite the conventional mistaken notion about them. A steep learning curve means you learn something quickly, not that something is difficult.)
Stowe has been following this space for some time now. He shared with me a copy of an old report of his on Social Tools from back during the boom. What changed since then was the ability to unleash emergent intelligence inside an organization without requiring side-activities, but fulfilling real needs for people to work together in simple ways.
