The wiki: a good tool for organisational knowledge management?"

How can we best capture and organise the knowledge assets of an organisation, make them widely available to everyone who needs access, and keep them fresh and current? From filing cabinets to electronic document management systems, there has been no shortage of solutions, but many have been experienced as too costly, too complex to manage easily, and hard to make accessible across the enterprise.

One class of free/cheap Web applications which looks attractive as a basis for organisational knowledge-sharing is the wiki. A wiki is a reference Web site, the pages of which can in principle be edited over the Internet by anyone, simply using a standard Web browser. Each wiki has at its heart a Content Management System. In addition, each wiki system uses some form of textual mark-up to add styling, links and metadata.

This informal workshop is an opportunity to share knowledge and opinions about the use of wikis (and related applications) to maintain collections on information useful to an organisation, a community or a network. Indeed, although the public's perception of wikis is defined by Wikipedia, Ward Cunningham's pioneering wiki was created as a place for programmers to share knowledge, and there is an accumulating number of other examples in use and in development.

Our focus will in particular be on applications aimed at managing such things as guidance notes, best practice advice, descriptions of organisational structures and procedures, rules and regulations, standards, how-to's and similar resources. Although we have chosen the wiki as a focus, that doesn't preclude talking about other forms of collaboration software, used either as an alternative or as a helper application.

There's no denying that wikis get a bad press, largely because of the dark side of that phenomenal success which is Wikipedia. "The content can't be trusted," people say. Or cited, add the academics. The content never stays still: some people regard that as a blessing, others a curse. And bad publicity attends when fights break out in editing wars over content, people covertly edit pages to enhance their image, or vandals make a mess.

Therefore our workshop will not only consider technologies and ideal stories, but also take a hard look at issues of editing workflow, version control, authority and governance, data security, peer review and other technical and social approaches aimed at bringing out the best of wikis as a means of knowledge-sharing, while avoiding the pitfalls.

The workshop is being organised by the KIDMM community, with meeting space kindly provided by the Department of Education at Brunel University (Uxbridge campus). Attendance is free, but must be notified in advance; lunch is not provided but the campus has plenty of restaurants.

If delegates wish to make a booking for a room on the night of the 7^th or  8^th July then they can do so by:

Ringing: 01895 268001

Emailing: lancaster-staff@brunel.ac.uk

Room rates are as follow:

Lodge: Single occupancy only, £40 per night room only.

Suite: Single occupancy - £54

Double occupancy - £69 Triple occupancy - £84

This include breakfast and use of the Spa.