WikIT:About
From WikIT
WikIT
WikIT is an attempt to provide a medium for the informal exchange of information among Colgate ITS staff, our IT colleagues and collaborators at Colgate, and invited guests.
A Wiki is generally open to its community for contribution and editing via a web browser. You may wish to check Wikipedia as one of the best examples, where its community is the entire world. At least for now, while WikIT is open for reading to the world, it is restricted for editing by the greater Colgate ITS Community.
I see this wiki as a communications vehicle which is powerful enough to allow users to exchange ideas, documents, and data in a format which is flexible enough to provide the information inobtrusively (or as "obtrusively" as the community member wishes). Adding information does require a user somewhat beyond the extreme novice, yet does not require a PhD in Comp Sci.
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IT people need access to information to do our jobs. We use information to remind us how things are configured; to advise us of what is working and what is not; to provide fixes; to suggest ways to work better; and, much more. This information must often be timely - it is important to know when a service is down so we don't spend hours trying to configure and connect to something which isn't even alive. And in this era of continual technological change, even when we know the answer, we are wise to check on-line resources to determine if the answer has changed!
IT information currently flows in many ways, none of which by themselves satisfies the needs of each IT user.
- Web pages are a primary source of information, generally easily accessible from any web browser on a networked computer, but they suffer from a couple problems. Standard web sites require specific access privileges and a web editor program (e.g., FrontPage) for users to add information. The overhead of adding information to web pages or pages to sites is often such that the information is not current. Check the current IT site computing.colgate.edu for many examples! Furthermore, the information which is to be exchanged often doesn't warrant the overhead of formatting for the official web - it just needs to be there, quickly and simply.
- E-mail messages provide information directly, but often not at the time we need the information (too early and I lose it, too late and it's not pertinent) and not in a way that the community can easily access it later ("I know there was a message but I deleted it!"). Furthermore, the addressing of e-mail to the correct group or groups is not easy ("Should I send the server outage message to all students during the break -- most will not care but those few who do try to use the server will need to know?).
- Mailing lists (Listservs) provide some improvement on the selection of information, permitting the user to subscribe to the information desired (you can subscribe to "server status" or "macintosh help" or the like). They can also provide a useful history if the lists are archived, permitting a user to delete a message (clearing their quota) while still allowing them to retrieve the info later. Archives can also provide a search mechanism to make retrieval easy, even if the message was never read. Mailing lists also provide for the easy contribution of information by the community.
- RSS feeds provide some of the mailing list functionality while removing the load on your InBox.
- Blogs are good for maintaining information quickly and easily, but are designed for publishing by a user or group and not for collaboration - updating and exchange among a larger community.
Basically, everyone has their own information that they like to receive and their preferred channel for receiving it. For example, I love the information that our hardware tech sends occasionally about printer configuration, but I definitely hate having it in my e-mail.
The ideal system for information exchange provides:
- Easy submission of information (the lower the overhead, the more likely the information is current and complete)
- Some catalogue mechanism for organizing that information that doesn't get in the way of "easy submission" (to permit standard organization and searching when we don't know exactly what we want)
- Easy submission and association of supporting information, e.g., screen captures, PDF documents, to make the information more useful
- Search capability beyond the catalogue (full text) (to ofmake the information useful beyond the catalogue)
- RSS feed (to let people identify changes easily)
- A selective notification system that can e-mail the user with changes which that user deems important
The wiki technology comes closest to all this, in my estimation, and I propose its use for internal (and informal external) IT information exchange. I suggest that this role be informal because I don't want this mechanism to suffer the overhead and therefore the likely fatal flaws of a formal alternative. I believe that a formal system, designed rigorously for unrestricted, supported access by the entire community is inherently too costly to be effectively maintained by ITS. What we need is a less formal system which has more, but perhaps less structured and complete and certainly less formatted, information which is open to the ITS community. Locations within such a system would be places to direct general users for information, but not for novices to traverse (although this separation is not possible to enforce!).
