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.

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.