visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Apr 08 2009

Category: Articles

No Comments »

In small teams who use wikis for conversational knowledge management and team coordination, lack of awareness of activity in the wiki and of existing content in the wiki causes duplication of effort, a lack of motivation to contribute, lack of use of content in the wiki, and lack of linking of related content in the wiki.   These are all problems of lack of awareness: of awareness of activity and awareness of existing content.

Currently, these problems can be ameliorated only through manual work by team members, which takes time away from both contributing to and using the wiki, and from from the actual role the team fulfills in their organization.   If shared by all team members, this work requires its own cooperation and coordination mechanisms.   If team members are assigned specific maintenance roles, this causes knowledge acquisition bottlenecks.

Thus, the problem is to augmenting current wiki software with automatic awareness mechanisms which will alleviate the above problems while doing so without compromising the core wiki design principles (Cunningham 2008).

Background

Over the past five or so years, wikis have become increasingly used as informal (”conversational” (Wagner 2006)) knowledge repositories, especially for small to medium sized teams (Klein and Smith 2008, Majchrzak et. al. 2006).  These team wikis offer typical benefits of more formal knowledge management systems while the lowering barriers to entry and reducing knowledge acquisition bottlenecks common to those more formal systems.  The core wiki design principles (Cunningham 2008) are what enable this.

Team wikis are maintained collaboratively by all members of the team.  Domain experts write pages in the wiki in their areas of expertise in order to help the rest of the team or to record team knowledge and other content.   This helps team knowledge sharing, coordination and collaboration and single and double loop learning (Majchrzak et. al. 2006).

There are two problems with wikis however:

• Lack of awareness of activity. Getting teams to adopt wikis and use them to share their knowledge and help coordinate team activities is not easy.  One thing that helps encourage most or all team members to use and contribute to the team wiki is the knowledge that their fellows are also doing so (in that pages are being created and edited) and using it (in that people are accessing the pages and potentially using the knowledge — this is especially true for one’s own pages).   Furthermore, team members can duplicate effort because they don’t realize that other people are working on the same kinds of things they are.   So this is about the awareness of activity.  Awareness of use is valuable from both a team morale and giving perspective, and from a management perspective (if management can see that only one person maintains the wiki, they can take steps to encourage more use).
• Lack of awareness of existing content in the wiki. The domain experts are typically not information architects, and as such, wikis tend to grow organically and chaotically.  As wikis grow in size, content gets lost because its creation in the wiki is not communicated to or noticed by other team members.  This can, in turn, cause duplication of effort because an author creating a new page may not realize that a similar page already exists.  Finally, if a page has been lost in this way, it will fail to become linked to other, related knowledge, decreasing the overall usefulness of the wiki.

Addressing awareness of activity, most wiki software have features built into them which attempt to rectify this kind of awareness: a RecentChanges page, a page subscription mechanism (notifying the user when a page has been updated), and various automatic lists of extant pages, but these have proved ineffective in practice.

For awareness of existing content, some wiki proponents and some have proposed wiki maintenance roles and processes (WikiPatterns 2009) for team members so that the load of architecting the content in the wiki doesn’t fall to one person (creating a knowledge acquisition bottleneck).  People in these roles create organize and clean up content, creating page hierarchies and linking related content.   This also has proved hard to implement because (a) such activity takes time away from the direct business purpose of the team, (b) it takes time away from actually capturing and updating content in the wiki, (c) it requires a special skillset (information architecting) that team members for the most part are unlikely to have, (d) it requires coordination and collaboration.   These qualities make such activity highly susceptible to many of the failure modes of humans (Cockburn 2002) — people make mistakes, people are inconsistent, people prefer to fail conservatively, and people are creatures of habit.

References

1. A. Cockburn. Agile Software Development. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2002.
2. W. Cunningham, “Design principles of wiki: how can so little do so much?,” in WikiSym ‘06: Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis, Odense, Denmark, 2006, pp. 13-14.
3. Klein, R. and Smith, M. (2008). Pursuing the peak of excellence: Wiki as a knowledge base. In SIGUCCS ‘08: Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services conference, pages 167-172, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
4. Majchrzak, A., Wagner, C., and Yates, D. (2006). Corporate wiki users: results of a survey. In WikiSym’06: Proceedings of the international symposium on Symposium on Wikis, pages 99-104, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.
5. Wagner, C. (2006). Breaking the knowledge acquisition bottleneck through conversational knowledge management. Information Resources Management Journal, 19(1):70-83.
6. http://www.wikipatterns.com/, Retrieved Feb 21, 2009.