One of the tricky parts of introducing a wiki into an organisation is getting people in the habit of using it. It's really a chicken-and-egg problem: without content, the wiki is boring and noone uses it; if noone uses the wiki, no new content gets written.
At Atlassian now, we have a thriving internal wiki. Our internal blogs get up to 40 new blog posts and comments per day. Discussion abounds on everything from marketing and pricing to development improvements. How did this happen?
Atlassian blogs this morning: 34 unread internal posts
A subtle ploy already employed when I joined Atlassian was getting staff to record their timesheets in a personal space in Confluence. Not only is it an easy way to edit and submit a timesheet, but it gets staff to create a personal space and become familiar with editing wiki content.
Whether this originally done to encourage collaboration via the wiki, I'm not sure. I'm pretty certain is has had a big effect, however. It cuts out the biggest hurdle in getting people involved in a wiki: not knowing where to start. We say: start with your personal space, and move on from there.
As an example of the effectiveness of this ploy, consider again the internal blogging. Six months ago there was minimal internal blogging at Atlassian. The company was growing fast, and different teams were getting out-of-touch with the big picture. When the suggestion was made to start blogging internally, everyone having a personal space with their timesheets in it made the transition to this really smooth. We always had the tools, but having the personal space structure in place meant people became comfortable with the idea pretty quickly. In just six months, internal blogging is now firmly a part of the Atlassian culture.
3 Comment(s)
Matt,
Great post. The issue of how to fire up wiki adoption is a question I get constantly from customers.
One interesting insight I heard recently was that people have to start out working on content in a peer group. In other words if your boss (manager/director/VP whatever) creates some content as a user you are going to be very cautious. Most likely you will just not change, update, or otherwise mess with anything they have written - at least in the beginning.
This is an interesting and not well understood conundrum. It's not exactly a social network but shares some of the same challenges in gaining momentum. Once a wiki does 'catch fire'/'achieve critical mass' the momentum only seems to increase.
By Brendan Patterson at December 8, 2006 3:04 PM
When you say "internal blogging", I am not sure I understand. Do employees in Atlassian blog on top of Confluence or some other more blog-centric software. And if they do use Confluence as a bliki, I wonder how they do it. Do they just setup a 'space' and use the news feature to "blog".
Just curious
Anand
By Anand Sharma at December 8, 2006 11:39 PM
Hi Anand,
Yes, every staff member at Atlassian has a personal space in Confluence (these are available from Confluence 2.2), and creates news items there as his or her blog. Personal spaces aren't shown by default on the dashboard or in search results, so they don't clutter the "real" content of the wiki.
To read the posts, everyone in the company subscribes to an RSS feed of news and comments in personal spaces. That was the feed with 34 unread items in the screenshot above. We also have it on a page in Confluence using the RSS macro for those who don't yet have a feed reader installed.
Regards,
Matt
By Matt Ryall at December 10, 2006 1:32 PM