The Wiki Champion

The wiki environment works best when you have a champion or viruoso. Why is a champion necessary? Because the champion is a person who both understands the process of the work for a given project or business (the domain), and how to use a wiki (collaboration practices). The champion is an advocate, and plays an important role at the grassroots phase. The person provides user training, helps create wiki applications, monitors content, and sends collaboration hints to users, such as: "Did you know you can automate the meeting minutes? Here is how...", or: "You can use a spreadsheet formula to calculate the total. Do this...". The Champion is often the wiki administrator as well.

While working for the upcoming Wikis for the Workplace book, Dan Woods and I interviewed dozens of wiki-friendly businesses, and every one of them had a champion who played this role.

Once a wiki scales across departments it is important to rethink the role of the wiki champion; the one person wiki champion could become a bottleneck. One way to address this is to view one's role not as the all-powerful wiki master, but as a facilitator for incubating new wikis and champions within the organization.

2007-05-19 | Peter Thoeny | Category Best Practices