Public Sector Wiki Uses

[Nina AdriannaParticipant]

I’m taking up @nicholas Charney on his suggestion that “Perhaps what we need is a compendium of wiki uses in the public sector“

We have launched a wiki for our 30,000 employees. Little traffic thus far. I think partly it has to do with people not knowing what to use it for. I’ve therefore created a page on our wiki to list all the potential uses, thereby also demonstrating a practical use.

Please let me know what you’ve used a wiki for, internally, for a large group of government employees, so that I can add it to our list.

And, if you’re working for the BC Public Service, make changes to the page I’ve started.

Thanks!!

[Bowen MoranParticipant]

Have you seen Matt Hall’s “One Wiki to Rule them all” post? It’s a great vision of what a large organization wiki could (should?) look like.

I proposed, designed, helped build, train and run a large wiki-based corporate intranet for my Branch. We used it for everything from Staff Profiles to benign document hosting.

[Nina AdriannaParticipant]

I did see Matt’s post.

It’s a great high-level argument of why we should have wikis. Cool news is that we HAVE one in the BC Govt. Now, how to actually USE it?

I’m looking for specifics, so that people can actually ‘get it’ and start adding pages.

Thanks for your thoughts!

[Khaled BouriParticipant]

Hi Nina,
I am not surprised of the little traffic on your wiki. It is hard to make people change their way of doing their work.
I am actually trying to convince a small group in my agency (FDA) to start using a wiki as our shared work space. Will see how it goes. I think it works better if you start with small groups that have common goals/interests and then scale it up. You may need first to identify potential early adopter and they will then convince other people in their circles.
Nonetheless, there are very successful examples using wikis at very large federal agencies. The DoS, DoS, and the CIA have created agency-wide wiki and seem very successful. These agencies created Dilpopedia, the DoD Techipedia and the Intellipedia.
Good luck

[Nina AdriannaParticipant]

Thanks Khaled!

It’s a good idea to find early adopters. Since there are already some people using wikis a little bit within their own work teams, maybe a strategy might be to encourage them to move their content from their smaller wikis, into the larger wiki.

[Sterling WhiteheadParticipant]

Acquipedia for the acquisition workforce is another example. It’s pretty small but has great material.

[Tim ConstantineParticipant]

We use our wiki to house our forms (Word templates), policies, and procedures. We have videos of computer processes, links to internet resources, information on how to use our phones, fax machines, and computer software. We house old documents in the wiki for “records retention” purposes.

Although not the “wiki way” we also setup a structure to our wiki so the content is organized by job. The front page of the wiki lists all of the additions and changes we’ve made over the past month or so.

We discussed the wiki, and how we would us it, several times before we rolled it out, but most people didn’t “get it” until we seeded the wiki with some content.

There’s a learning curve in how to use the software, so we trained a few people in how to post content and attach documents, and encouraged people to get content to those people.

We set deadlines for moving existing forms, policies, and procedures into the Wiki, and we removed that content from all other locations.

Finally we don’t call our wiki a wiki. Everyone would giggle when we said “wiki”. We call our wiki KiM (for Knowledge Management), and we have a picture (avatar) of KiM on our wiki to give her some personality.

[Nina AdriannaParticipant]

Thanks for the overview, Tim! I’m going to add some of what you’ve said to our list of potential uses.

I also really like the idea of having deadlines to transfer existing content over to the wiki. It indicates that there is a credible mandate for the wiki, something we still don’t have.

We call ours ‘Wikilumbia’, which incites giggles and raised eyebrows, but maybe if we gave him/her/it some personality like with KiM, that would change… 😉

[Nicholas CharneyParticipant]

INAC is currently using GCPEDIA (Government of Canada Wide Wiki) as a portal to draw people in who are working on cross cutting files re: Aboriginal peoples (with limited success).

It has also replaced some of out intranet functionality (unofficially) by allowing sectors to quickly self-publish without having to jump through any hoops.

btw – good luck w/this; I will be keeping an eye on it so I can draw down more possible uses…

[Gary JonesParticipant]

Hi Nina.
Not strictly ‘replyng’ to your post but I have a related question/issue. Here in HM Revenue and Customs (one of the UK’s largest Government departments with circa 70k staff) we have started to use electronic ‘Community Forums’ (via our intranet) but I am constantly getting ‘push back’ re:

– how can you prove/measure a business benefit for this sort of (internal) social media?
– what is the optimum level of ‘moderation’ over what is posted and how is that best done?
– how do you get senior leaders’ engagement/involvment?
– how do you ensure that posters (postees?) aren’t ‘wasting time when they should be getting on with their day job”?

Answers on a postcard….

Gary
Head of Digital Communications
HM Revenue and Customs

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