Who? Me??

Random musings which I rather not say out loud :)

Wiki as a KM Tool

with 10 comments

In my past 3 months at Illumine (which is a Knowledge Lab), one of the first thing that struck me was their emphasis on models. More importantly knowledge models … instead of focusing on how the knowledge flowing in the system (which what most of the KM tools focus on), the company focused on the model in which that knowledge was generated, distributed and improved. Interestingly, the organization themselves have a very loose KM in place. Right now it is basically a samba share of different folders. It’s that simple.

In an attempt to make sense out of the zillions of files on my current project, I decided to explore some interesting ways to ingest this content into a system. Immediately, Mediawiki came to mind. This is what Wikipedia is made out of.

The How

Installation was easy, you download the tarball from here. You extract it into your hosting space, and follow the simple and easy-to-use instructions in the setup wizard. Voila!! You will have a working wiki!

But that is the easy part,

The Cons

  1. Structuring the Wiki becomes ARPITA (A-Real-Pain-In-The-Ass) ps – on a side note, I feel sad for all the Arpitas in the world
  2. Writing and creating the wiki content is also difficult since you have to stick to the wiki syntax
  3. It is not as free fall a structure as you can think it to be
  4. n00bs do not want to contribute to the Wiki, they only want information, which means that you are writing wiki content all the time

Despite these issues, I still liked the idea of a wiki and am currently having my own personal wiki, because of

The Pros

  1. A personal wiki becomes a KM meme, where you just ingest content and the sense and navigation emerges after a period of time
  2. The final product looks smashing, helps me sort through the content
  3. This becomes a documentation and KT process for me as well (not that I am looking for replacements!!)
  4. The wiki can be scaled to my team members using the Discussion spaces, and it will also then clarify my knowledge meme

What do you think?

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Written by Prasad

July 11th, 2009 at 10:18 pm

Posted in Technology

Tagged with , , , ,

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  • http://blog.dsignbeyond.com/ Hypnos

    Like the new template. Cool and elegant.

  • http://www.guyofthe90s.com donny

    hmmm….went a lil above my head. wouldnt a google desktop do this ? btw i did take on a new domain n hosting of the blog :) (change the url in ur links)
    and another….am using ubuntu ! pretty neat except it doesnot play java flash games well….lags bigtime ! shall mail u in detail abt my difficulties of ubuntu !

    • http://www.kidakaka.com kidakaka

      Ahhh .. ubuntu :) .. welcome to the world of open. will update the links. waise, what r ur current plans these days?

  • http://maxmayur.wordpress.com Mayur

    Have you lost interest in writing a blog kida? You seem to go in an oblivion every now and then

  • http://kidakaka.com/blog kidakaka

    OMG!! Caught with my pants down :) … yeah.. i do fade into oblivion

  • http://www.guyofthe90s.com donny

    current plans – will mail u the same…any help on how i can make funkysnooker.com play on ubuntu without a lag….even forums r useless :(

  • http://kidakaka.com/blog kidakaka

    dude, u need to update ur jre :) thats java and not flash :)

  • http://www.guyofthe90s.com donny

    hmmm….thats a good point ! :D waise my jre is 6+ version…did try tht too…anyways i think ubuntu has a prob with running java games…btw how do i unistall a program which the synaptic mgr doesnot think exists ! waise…this new layout is very nice aka the likes of cleartrip…quite soothing n functional !

  • http://kidakaka.com/blog kidakaka

    @don try running this command at the terminal – sudo apt-get remove

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