Wikis and command and conquer management
A disappointingly short interview with Jimbo Wales, the founder of wikipedia nevertheless contains some great insights about the nature of wiki-like collaboration on corporate intranets.
I like best his judgement that it’s good when “people don’t have to get permission to do something useful.” This feels right to me – I would rather that my minions team did twenty things without asking me for permission, and got some things wrong, than deferred to me at every step.
On trusting employees, his approach seems very sensible: “You don’t expect people to vandalize the wiki any more than they would vandalize the Coke machine. If you anticipate problems with employees maliciously changing documents, you’ve got much worse problems.”
As an aside, it does make me laugh that a site called CIOInsight which positions itself at the cutting-edge of IT has no RSS feeds available and doesn’t even have valid HTML pages. I hope a redesign is in the wings.
I'm Ben Griffiths: