Peeking Inside a Wiki: Planning A Conference

For me it’s exciting to peek inside an organization’s wiki. It’s the best way to learn about how you can use one.

The Johnson Center (that’s the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University) used a wiki to plan their NP2020 conference. (NP2020 group pictured to the right.)

The screenshots below, for me, show—very simply—the power of centralizing information for lightweight project management.

Home Page-Orienting the User
Here's the wiki's home page with the wiki's purpose, a space to enter the conference goal, a link to last year's archive, and current announcements. (Click to enlarge the screenshots in a separate window.)

On the left is the navigation bar which has two main sections: Reference and Current Info. Current Info has dynamic information about such things as marketing and logistics.


Information—with context
Here's the page you arrive at when you click Meetings on the left navigation bar. There are action items at the top and then links to archived meeting notes.

After the meeting date, the meeting is described briefly. This is one of the exceedingly useful things about a wiki: information can be contextualized.

Broadcast email becomes the announcements archive


....retained, searchable and not cluttering your inbox.

A Table is Used for a Work Checklist
Here's the marketing checklist. Of course anyone working on the conference can add tasks, change due dates, and add the date completed. You don’t have to bother your colleague asking if that bit of the work was done—you just look here.




Centralized summaries
Finally, one of my favorite summary pages.

One liners: a record of all key decisions that have been made, centralized in real time. I was told that these were often referred to.





For the public, information about and a knowledge base of the conference
It all comes full circle. There is a public facing wiki for conference attendees. And as each session transpires, notes are entered by participants in the wiki, creating a record of the conference or knowledgebase.


Thanks to Brian Satterfield’s article on TechSoup for leading me to the Johnson Center.