Elizabeth Albrycht posts on 'Thinking About Wikis' at the Society for New Communications Research blog as a prelude for a research study on the use of wikis among knowledge workers in creative roles. Over the past few weeks several of us have been putting together a social marketing wiki. I was surprised to find that she considers us among the early adopters of this technology for community collaboration and knoiwledge management. Here are some of her thoughts from a preliminary review of research on collaboration.
- How do you encourage individuals to contribute their knowledge when it is a primary factor in the way they are evaluated and rewarded? The latter leads to knowledge hoarding to increase value vs. knowledge sharing, which is what collaborative systems are designed, at heart, to do.
- How do you deal with group dynamics in order to keep participants productive?
- How can the collaborative technology be designed to be a part of an employee's work process vs. an add-on system?
- How can you best support the learning curve demanded by the technology?
Her group has also distilled seven factors that seem to be critical for success in designing and implementing a wiki.
- Support of Reputation Development
- Clear Procedures of Management and Discipline
- Defined and Followed User Responsibilities
- Content: Knowledge Creation and Decision Making
- Group Attributes
- Effective Wiki Design
- Training/Convincing People
I invite you to read her post - and be sure to check some of the online references at the end of it. Then join our social marketing wiki experiment in using social media to enhance all our abilities to do bigger and better social change programs.
Technorati Tags: Communication Research, Social Media, Society for New Communications Research, Wikis
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