Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

My congratulations go to Connie Crosby for her talk on Wikis in Legal Practices (Do Wikis belong in Law Firms)

Slides here

Despite howling winds driving a blizzard conditions and a late change of venue, 16 people successfully ventured toInsomnia on Bloor and Bathurst. My thanks to Marc Laporte, who was visiting from Montreal to run Tiki Fest Toronto, and who surfaced and reminded several wiki people I’d not yet met in Toronto. Also, thanks a lot to Nelson Ko of Citadel Rock for going well out of his way to make sure we had a projector.

I am happy to say, the audience was not disappointed - Gerald Matlofsky, a progressive lawyer and friend of mine emailed me to thank us for the talk.

“After the fact”
Connie mentions in her blog the killer distinction that started my love for wikis:

One distinction is that with knowledge management systems, the emphasis is submitting documents and analysis after the fact. Wiki use emphasizes work in progress and collaborating on the end result.

Arthur Andersen used to have a “repository” where you were supposed to “clean up” and “file” work you had finished with. Using a wiki creates an ongoing meeting context where everyone mushes in their thoughts, creating engagement on both side. Contrast this with boring “after the fact” repositories, after all would you rather:

1. read a book and guess whether it applies to you or
2. listen to the author pitch and then have the opportunity to converse.

Its only when both parties are benefiting that energy is reciprocally produced and sustainable. Knowing where someone else is going seeds specific opportunities for synergy going forward.

So, it was exactly my conviction that wikis could act as a medium for negotiating or “modelling” knowledge: because it makes touched ideas interesting to both parties. And such ongoing discussion, which feeds collaboration between live projects, is a real first step towards giving people in an enterprise the means to collectively join the dots and really think together.

Would you like to talk at Toronto Wiki Tuesday?
I’m committed to making Toronto Wiki Tuesday a venue for your stories. No matter what your use case, e.g. an interesting personal use, powering a public community to generating new levels of harmony or disharmony within the firm, we want to hear about it.

Give me a call. 416-786-6752.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Speaking Engagements, Wiki, WikiWednesday, Social Media, TorCamp, Knowledge Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.