Prologue+Wiki=collaboration

etoolkit

I wondered last week about the ways we can use online tools to collaborate on projects – I had on my mind the etoolkit that David Wilcox (and now Beth Kanter, Emma Mulqueeny, Alex Stobart, Nancy White and Steve Dale…) and I are developing in the open.

My issue was that while wikis are perfect for putting stuff together and bringing together thoughts and resources, they aren’t that great for conversations or throwing out ideas, which is where group blogging can have a great impact. The trouble is that a standard WordPress (say) blog is rather an unwieldy beast for this task, making you sign up for the blog, log in, go to the admin panel, then click write post etc etc…

There’s an obvious solution here, and that’s the Prologue theme for WordPress. Makes it dead easy for people to contribute ideas, with the possibility of threaded conversations using the comments. Perfect. I have started one for the etoolkit here. It’s hosted at WordPress.com which means that while allowing others in to contribute is a little clunky, there’s little harm done or money lost if nobody uses it.

Developing an open toolkit

David Wilcox and I had a meetup earlier this week, where we talked about the different ways that organisations need to be approached in terms of how they might make use of social media and web 2.0 stuff – or not, as the case may be.

We touched on David’s work at the RSA and the subsequent collaboration for membership organisations; as well as some of the outputs of events like the Social Media Big Day Out and the barcampukgovweb.

Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, if there was a toolkit out there which provided the materials needed for an organisation to work through the options, decide what their issues are and figure out how they can meet those issues with a mixture of on and offline responses.

So we did the only thing a pair of self-respecting social hackers do, and set about creating such a thing – and all in the open, of course. You can find it all at the etoolkit wiki. Don’t worry, that’s just a working title.

It is envisaged that the toolkit will be made up of 3 elements:

  1. The toolkit itself, a prepared pack of information
  2. A facilitated workshop
  3. A dedicated network space for post event support and discussion

The toolkit itself will be made freely available, probably under creative commons. It will be open enough to be easily bespoked for a sector, whether charities, local gov, membership organisations or whoever. People can pick the toolkit up and facilitate the workshop within organisations; or consultants could specialise in delivering it themselves and charge for it.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and please do sign up with the wiki and start to contribute your ideas if you would like to.

Working together

I really like the idea of using the web to bring people together and work on problems out in the open, rather like David Wilcox and Simon Berry did in their bid for the Innovation Exchange project.

They used Drupal, a group blogging platform that does tonnes of other stuff, which is great for enabling people to throw ideas out and let the community respond to them. It’s got pretty low barriers to entry as pretty much anyone can hit the ‘create content’ button and dump their brains onto the screen. There’s an immediacy about this approach that I like a lot.

But I am also a fan of the wiki as a form of collaborative working, and wikis do have advantages over something like Drupal in terms of getting a ‘product’ finalised. What it doesn’t have is that immediate ability for people to be able to chuck thoughts out to gauge a reaction as to how useful they are. Editing a wiki page has a seriousness that writing a blog post doesn’t have.

I suppose what I am after is a decent wiki for Drupal, so that all the good stuff in the blog posts and comments can be moulded together. Google Sites could do this perfectly, as its ‘Announcements’ page template is effectively a blog. But there are too many limits of public involvement in Sites at the moment for it to become usable in this context.

If anyone has any suggestions for something I am missing, I would love to hear about it!

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