We opened our MediaWiki install for business on September 5. A few weeks of tweaking later, we actually started to tell people about it and stopped updating the old CMS driven intranet. We now have 326 pages and in the last five working days, 25 different people have made hundreds and hundreds of edits.
It doesn’t work for everything – we still haven’t found a way to shoehorn an anonymous ‘suggestions’ box into it – but you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who edited anything on the old intranet over a period of three years!
In the process, we seem to have blunderingly followed most of the best practice recommended so far in Blog on Wiki Patterns 21 days series, though I’d disagree with Day 1 on how one shouldn’t mandate Wiki use. If we’d opened it up as an “alternative” intranet, we’d have ended up with nothing but confusion and duplication. But then, the cookbook approach to organisational change – whether through social media or other means – is always something that one should take as a starting point for context sensitive improvisation.
Meanwhile, I’ve finally finished a set of corporate (ugh) blogging guidelines. More on that another day.
Filed under: Higher Education, KM, information management, organizational change, wiki | Tagged: HE, intranet, KM, MediaWiki, organizational change, wiki
