Victory!

In the last 48 hours I’ve gotten a bunch of colleagues to throw down and start using a wiki to share information for a closed-door project. The team has shared values and a community of practice, but very diverse expertise and huge geographic dispersion. How, then to collaborate?

In my opinion, the success of wiki adoption rested on three crucial causes:

1. The group had ongoing activities that suffered from an observable crisis. The sentiment was that existing systems were broken and ripe for change.
2. The group had high barriers to personal communication and few opportunities for face-to-face meetings. Web technologies such as Skype and wikis benefited this community greatly.
3. The group had prior experience contributing and drawing from a prior web-based archive. The loss of that resource motivated people to throw down and help recreate the resource. The wiki was an efficient way to organize contributions from an existing group.

Lots more to say here; but the skinny version is that the wiki worked when the group was ripe.

What makes a science wiki tick?

Nature has a great article discussing various business strategies for making a collaborative scientific resource work. What makes some grow and others wither? What returns does a scientific organization get on its investment in public, collaborative technologies? Is there a way to see that contributors and the host organization all reap the rewards of their work?

From the article in Nature.

The science wikis face a tougher challenge in building critical mass, if only because they’re aiming at a much smaller audience. One obvious strategy is to avoid fragmenting that audience. As Evelo points out, “biologists aren’t going to work on a dozen wikis to see which will survive”. They are going to want the various wikis to be interoperable and mutually supporting, so that the data they enter in one can be easily ported to another — or will even flow to all the appropriate sites automatically.