Collaborative Document Creation: Volunteer School Committee Drafts a 300 Page Report

I sent an email to my management school list serv asking for examples of wiki usage. One of the replies was from Sanjay Patel who worked on a committee in his local school district tasked with visioning "The School of the Future."

He was enthusiastic about how the wiki had worked for them. He laughingly characterized the group as "middle-aged not technically savvy people."

"The Visioning Committee tasked with writing a report on the School of the Future was made up of middle aged not technically-savvy people. We were a diverse group: teachers, administrators, parents, business and industry representatives, companies who hired locally. The tech coordinator for our school system suggested we use a wiki to log our research and pull together the multi-hundred page document we were to create. And it worked.

The wiki built on wikispaces allowed us to work on the report at a significantly faster rate than emailing back and forth. We also used the wiki to invite students in to read and contribute. We could post when we wanted, read, and respond to others."

They surprised themselves about how well and easily it worked:

"In one hour we were trained and we structured the wiki. Our school system's tech coordinator held an hour long training/workshop. There were 20 of us. We whiteboarded the structure and learned how to use the wiki. At the beginning, people were uncomfortable with editing other people's work. They would just write something underneath another person's writing. Then a couple of us decided, 'Let's get it done,' and started commenting in the text itself and editing. Others joined in. One of the things I liked best was that I could make an important contribution to the project without attending every meeting."

He explained they used the wiki for logging research and drafting the document, then used Word to finalize it.

"It evolved that people specialized on topics or sections of the document—researching an area and then drafting content. Two or three people would work on a section.

In the end, the tech coordinator, copied everything by section out of the wiki and edited and formatted it in Word to create the final deliverable report which we submitted to the School Board."

Some of the reasons it's likely that the wiki worked so well for them was that it fulfilled a real need--easing the process of collaborative document creation, and had at least one person, the school tech coordinator, who helped guide the wiki.