Where I work, we’re building a wiki to share knowledge. We want to use it to capture the information required to get new people up to speed and to document our process for developing web sites. I’d love to use it for more than that, but we’re starting small.

At places I’ve worked before, we’ve tried to do the same thing in a more official format — you know the drill: a printed document, a bastard project that that some poor soul was asked to put together in two weeks, “Because we’ve been trying to build this thing for years.” I’m anxious to see if the more informal, update-on-the-fly approach works better, or if it drifts off into a sea of forgotten bookmarks.

Below is a snippet from Andrew McAfee, my newest hero.

Within most organizations at present, the great majority of consultable digital information is either highly structured (customer order records stored in a database), a reflection of the viewpoints and priorities of the formal hierarchy (newsletters), and/or static (document repositories). As a result, this consultable information does not show the current state of the organization as perceived by its members, nor does it accurately represent their views, skills, judgments, experiences, activities, etc.

In fact, it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.