Over on the DMN Communications site, Scott Nesbitt has a review of Alan Porter’s new book, WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit. Scott was the person who introduced me to wikis and helped me set up our space on the TMX wiki – he knows his stuff and the review is worth reading. The book looks like it is too.
The approach that Porter takes with WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit is interesting. And it’s fun. Porter uses the metaphor of preparing and seeding a garden. And, if you think about it, a wiki is a lot like a garden. You need to do a lot of work up front before planting the seeds. Then, you need to nurture and maintain the garden.
All that work can be worthwhile when it comes time to harvest the information. And in 10 chapters Porter walks you through the phases that you need to go through in order to do that effectively.
He take you through each phase of planning, implementing, and maintaining a wiki. But with any software implementation, you need to do a lot up front. I recently read a tweet about Sharepoint that applies to wikis: the failure of an implementation has little to do with the software and just about everything to do with the way the software was implemented.
Though not stated as such in WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit, this was (for me) one of the underlying lessons in the book.