In many firms a lack of information flow creates problems between the departments and within the departments. The company I am working for, a travel agency, is not an exception. Last year we introduced a wiki to my colleagues in our intranet.
The definition of a wiki in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) contains the words “collaborative works”, so I was asking myself: “Can a wiki be a groupware?”.
To find that out I checked the lecture slides for a definition of groupware. According to the slides groupware supports group activity, that is communication, collaboration, coordination.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication) communication requires a sender, a message and a recipient. These terms could be also used in the case of the wiki. A person, the sender, publish an information, the message, in the wiki. Persons from other departments or within the same department, the recipients, are reading this information.
Collaboration can be created by sharing knowledge, learning and building consens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration). With the possibility to place information centrally knowledge can be shared. The departments can learn from each other and documents are provided on a central place so everyone can use it and a consens can be build up.
Coordination means to make different people work together to reach the same goal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination). With a wiki a first possibility can be created for working together.
A second definition mentioned in the slides was that groupware is a computer-based system that supports groups of people engaged in a common task (or goal) and that provide an interface to a shared environment.
Also these requirements are fulfilled by a wiki. It is a computer-based system which supports people to communicate, collaborate and coordinate. Access through the companies intranet makes it also a shared environment.
Taking a closer look to the definitions of groupware and finding out that wiki fulfills the mentioned terms leads me to the conclusion that a wiki can be used as a groupware.
--Simone Strasser
Our groupmate Simone Strasser wrote this post! I just posted in our blog for her! :P
ReplyDeleteWiki can definatelly be Groupware. For example our department of Education have a course "media in the field of education and new reading skills" (straightfoward translation): http://fi.wikiversity.org/wiki/Mediakasvatus_ja_uudet_lukutaidot/Syksyn_2010_kurssi
ReplyDeleteThat course relies in Wiki all the time. You have lectures, but there is no absolute need to attend. Course material is uploaded into wiki and instead of using slides the lecturers type into Wiki while talking to crowd. Plus every student may modify course pages. Actually they have to! There is now examinations or so, students just complete the course Wiki.
That sure is a new way to study and educate, and for me it worked much better than old fashined book examn (when you can't remember a thing after a while). If your interested about the field check out more from Wikiversity: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page
A challenge with Wikis is that they require building the content and keeping the internal structure intact so that others can still navigate in them and find the things that have been updated easily. Even simple things like attaching an image or a link to the text can be difficult for a person who is not used to editing hypertext. The attitudes towards data and knowledge sharing need to change first. etc.
ReplyDeletesee e.g. [Beyond Ubiquity: Co-creating Corporate Knowledge with a Wiki] for an analysis of requirements towards Wiki.