Wikis and communities resources
From [[http://cpsquare.org CPsquare]], the community of practice on communities of practice.
Wikis and Communities title: Social Media is not Community author: Rachel Happe date: 10-Jul-2008
url: | http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2008/07/social-media-is-not-community.html
I'm finding that there is a lot of confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content...which is *not* community.
title: Community Patterns Roadmap author: Ward Cunningham
url: | http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CommunityPatternsRoadmap
CommunityPatterns have some notable differences from other types of SoftwarePatterns. Unlike most other information products there is usually little in the way of defined goals or requirements that a community must meet. In fact the community is the goal and the software implementation that supports it is usually subject to multiple constraints and near constant review and evolution.
Whether started as a place for those sharing a particular set of interests to meet and interact or for a more activist purpose; a living community quickly becomes an end unto itself. CommunitiesAreInfiniteGames is one way to look at it.
ChristopherAlexander in the prologue to A PatternLanguage discusses how living communities naturally employ PatternLanguages and how those PatternLanguages are discovered through trial and error, it is hoped that the WikiPages below will help us distill our CollectiveExperience into recognizable and useful patterns.
title: Building Learning Communities with Wikis author: Dan Gilbert, Helen Chen, Jeremy Sabol organization: Stanford University date: 2007url: | http://www.wildwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=%E2%80%9CBuilding_Learning_Communities_with_Wikis%E2%80%9D
Chapter 4 in Wiki Writing:Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom (2008)
As more and more students have access to technology and wireless networks, opportunities to collaborate, participate, and define how knowledge is organized are opening up at a dramatic pace. These opportunities make it possible for learning communities to engage more students, to operate in new ways, and to sustain collaboration over longer periods of time. To better comprehend these developments this chapter introduces a framework for understanding how wikis can support the creation and maintenance of learning communities.
title: Harvesting Knowledge from Text Conversations author: Nancy White date: 16-Mar-2008
url: | http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2008/03/16/harvesting-knowledge-from-text-conversations/
This is the second in my latest series of online facilitation method tips and mini-podcasts. John Smith asked me to write up the practice some of us have been nurturing on the KM4DevWiki to encourage summarizing and harvesting of learnings from key community conversations in our email list on to a wiki.
title: Working wikily author: Beth Kanter date: 03-Dec-2008
blog: |http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/working_wikily/
[This is from a series of posts about working wikily on Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media.]
Back in May, I discovered and fell in love with the phrase "Working Wikily" coined by Lucy Bernholz. I don't know how many phrases she's originated in the nonprofit, social media, and philanthropy - but this one is a gem. It was also the title of a report "Working Wikily: How Networks Are Changing Social Change" a paper Gabriel Kasper and Diana Scearce of the Monitor Institute. The paper provides concepts and specific examples. It is heavily influenced by the writings of Clay Shirky (“Here Comes Everybody”).
I loved the phrase and concept so much I that I used for a series of reflections and learning related to the NTEN WeAreMedia project. Now we have the Working Wikily Blog ( workingwikily.net ) which is exploring making sense of networks and social change.
title: Working Wikily: Bridging Online/Offline Learning and Content Creation/Community Building author: Beth Kanter date: 12-Nov-2008
This is part of series of reflections on what I've learned about working wikily through working on NTEN's WeAreMedia wiki - not so much the content, but the community curriculum development and knowledge sharing process.
title: Case study: We Are Media wiki and community author: Dave Cormier date: 08-Nov-2008
url: | http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/11/08/we-are-media-and-some-thoughts-about-community/
1. No matter how good a community, its ideas, its positioning, there are almost always a couple of people working their tails off to keep it what it is. 2. Community participation is almost entirely about the responsibility of the participant.
We are media project ( www.wearemedia.org )
I've talked quite a bit about this project this year. Beth Kanter was kind enough (after I volunteered) to ask me to be a critical friend on the project… (and I should be receiving a t-shirt soon!) I really can't say enough about how much I like what she's done with this project and the quality of the content. It also serves as an nice case for just how much work is required to get this sort of thing running. Go to any page and click the history button and what you'll see is an excellent community organizer, helping things along, tweaking the wiki, encouraging contributors, finding new ways to keep participation interesting.
If you are looking for a great resource for social media, check this project out. If you are thinking of starting your own, look very closely at this project. Trying googling the project url, look through the wiki, and you'll see how a pro does the job.
title: Working Wikily: Balancing Participation on the Homebase and Outposts author: Beth Kanter date: 09-Sep-2008
url: | http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/09/working-wikily.html
The WeAreMedia project is housed on a wiki, but the conversations and contributions don't always take place on homebase (the wiki), sometimes they happen at outposts like people's blogs, in the comments, and other places. So, one role of the wiki gardener is to not only make sure homebase is neat and tidy, but to scoop up the distributed content and make sure it is linked in the right place.
title: Working Wikily: The Power of the Newbie, Balance Quality/Quantity, Sustaining Participation author: Beth Kanter date: 07-Aug-2008
url: | http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/08/working-wikily.html
The "Power of the Newbie" came to life for me yesterday as part of the WeAreMedia Wiki Project when I got a message from a new participant:
- Finding the project confusing; not sure what I am looking at or where to begin--can you point me the way; not sure what I am looking at?
The subject-matter on the wiki is changing as Qui Diaz points out. But the user support items need to change as the community changes too! As the "wiki gardener," that is an something that should be part of the regular maintenance -- putting on your newbie glasses and revising the support documents.
That leads me to questions about how to make it easy for people to jump in mid-stream once there has already been content added. How to make newcomers and others who may be lurking feel comfortable enough to contribute.
knit: Wiki Patterns author: Stewart Mader
url: | http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns
Looking to spur wiki adoption? Want to grow from 10 users to 100, or 1000? Applying patterns that help coordinate people's efforts and guide the growth of content, and recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder growth - can give your wiki the greatest chance of success.
Wikipatterns.com is a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki adoption. It's also a wiki, which means you can help build the information based on your experiences! Beyond this site, there are many other additional resources.
knit: How to launch a wiki-based community: SPRIG title: A Moment of Clarity author: Michael Idinopulos date: 16-Feb-2008url: | http://michaeli.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/index.html
The customer had asked me how you launch a collaborative, wiki-based community. We didn't have a lot of time--I was late to pick up my kids from school--and I had promised him a 60-second answer. What I said was, "Look, it's really very simple: Structure, populate, review, invite, and garden."
It's a good, and simple, way to remember how to do it. So I propose "SPRIG" as the acronym for remembering how to launch a collaborative community:
- Structure the wiki up-front with stubs and links
- Populate it with real content
- Review what you've done within your core group and refine the structure as needed
- Invite a few people who have relevant knowledge and relationships and will be into the idea
- Garden the wiki content as things get going.
title: What is wiki gardening?
Pruning the wiki, keeping it tidy. Pruning, tending, and cleaning up the wiki as it grows. The objective of good gardening is to lend the wiki some shape, but not kill it with rigid rules or taxonomies.
Activities include: adding links ("linkifying"), merging duplicate pages, breaking long pages into shorter pages, adding tags, and clearing out old or confidential information.
The definition of good wiki gardening varies with the group needs and culture. Some groups, for example, have a greater tolerance for messiness than others. For some, messiness is fertile. But it does entail paying attention to making the information most accessible.
Related terms for the wiki gardener role: wiki shaper, wiki gnome, wiki zenmaster (gnomes improve content, zenmasters improve format and appearance)
title: Working Wikily: The Secret Life of A Wiki Gardener - It Ain't Just Weeding author: Beth Kanter date: 18-Sep=2008
url: | http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/09/working-wikil-1.html
Using a gardening metaphor, I drill down into the fine art of wiki facilitation.
This is part of series of reflections on what I am learning about working wikily through the WeAreMedia wiki. In my last reflection, I talked about balancing participation on home base and outposts. In this post, I'm going to take a deeper dive into the actual work tasks of a wiki gardener - it is a bit more than simply weeding.
title: WikiGardener (aka WikiGnome) author: Stewart Mader
url: | http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/WikiGnome
In Wiki Patterns, Stewart Mader calls a "wiki gardener" a "WikiGnome."
A WikiGnome is a person who performs small edits on a wiki to continually improve its overall quality.
WikiGnomes are important to the success of a wiki because their edits increase the value of everyone else's content, such as:
- Cosmetic editing to keep the wiki from being overrun with "weeds" (typos, misspellings, poorly structured sentences and paragraphs)
- Add or fix links to make sure relevant content is navigable within the wiki
- Improve the flow and clarity of content improve the readability of the page
- Setting an example for other users of how and when to use the wiki
knit: Wiki gardening tips organization: Transmissionurl: | http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/Wiki_gardening
A wiki is a place where people gather to collaborate. Like a meeting room or a living room, it gets cluttered after a little while. Another common metaphor is a garden, which gets overgrown without regular tending. Spending small amounts of time gardening on a regular basis helps to make your wiki easy to navigate and a pleasant place to work.
Here are some techniques to use when you have some spare quality time to spend with the wiki. Add yours!
- Pick some pages and clean them up -- correct misspellings, collect and condense comments, regularize the way lists or comments are formatted.
- When you are working on a topic, find the relevant pages and make an index of those pages. These finder's aids are a long tradition in archives management where you need to quickly get to a few relevant documents mixed in with a large quantity of routine correspondence.
- Add links from the home page to often-used index pages
- Condense discussion into a statement of the end result, and add a link to the original discussion. See gardening, which was merged into this page.
- Break long pages into meaningful sub-pages. Add links to the sub-pages from a main page.
- Add existing pages to appropriate categories.
- If you have old pages that you are no longer finding useful, make a link near the top of them to new pages that have more relevant information on the subject.
- Remove obsolete material. Create linked archive pages if the material is useful
- Everyone on the team can participate in continuous improvement. Depending on the structure of your team, it may make sense for one person to have special responsibility for maintaining a set of pages. Or it may make sense to have a designated gardener.
- Gardening is most effective when it's done a bit at a time. Team members can take responsibility for making something they are working on more useful for everyone.
source: | http://www.eu.socialtext.net/exchange/index.cgi?wiki_gardening_tips
