Wikis compared to Email, Discussion Groups and Blogs

I met Bryan Watson of EP-Enterprises for a meal about a month ago. Last week Bryan telephoned me to ask if I’d mind re-explaining the relative merits of Wikis compared to Email, Discussion Groups and Blogs.

This is the slide I’d shown him. Based on some notes I’d made a few years back, I’d compiled this for our Blogs and Wiki Workshop at KM World 2006 but I didn’t get chance to show it due to time constraints. Bryan found it useful so here it is

All forms of sharing conversation online:

• eliminate the masses of copies inherent with email,
  • and reduce total disk space and the management problems that ensue;
• this therefore:
  • ensures consistent results from searches,
  • means messages can be pointed to by links,
  • provides a starting point whereby everyone that can view the same, online copy

Blogs and Discussion forums are Conversation tools:

• Discussion forums (such as phpBB) centralize conversations, creating an asset for the organization that runs them.
• Blogs thread together conversations dispersed across blogs mostly belonging to individuals. The generates a real sense of identity on blogs, the blog effectively becomes an individual’s face on the internet – bringing together everything that person says – raises the stakes and enhancing engagement. Discussion forums seldom provide such a contributor-centered perspective. Bill Ives can tell you a wealth of information about blogging.

Wikis do more than exchange views, they facilitate the integration of views. Wikis are Negotiation tools.

• Wikis are means for a group to truly negotiate over meaning, align on values and build action plans together. The open nature of Wikis, where anyone can move or reword content facilitates collaborative idea structuring. The very lack of structured barriers between postings enables the next person to cut & paste conversation fragments around the wiki . Working on the same document (rather than linking between posts, or tacking on yet another comment) creates a workspace for situated cognition, where participants are forced to co-author the document. Co-authoring, in turn, ensures participates find a wording that summarizes the content, first by acknowledging differences and often by bridging through super-ordinate, more profound, concepts that explain a dilemma.

Such bridging on helps co-authors find common understanding and align on principles for go-forward actions. Because a wiki is online the content of the wiki is visible through an enterprise. This provides process and decision transparency across the whole organization’s idea value chain. Further, the nature of a wiki is to provide the means to surface simplicity. Anyone viewing the wiki has the ability to reword the content that has accumulated and make it easier to read.

Such reinterpretation and rewording provides real value to readers. Readers no longer need to wade through multiple views, often containing duplicate and obsolete content. Instead readers can read the summary.

Neither of the other forms of communication listed above provide that.

I hope you find this explanation useful. And as always, I welcome feedback.

Technorati : Blogs, Discussion Groups, Email, Wiki, km06, km2006