history

Anytime you’re trying to organize, coordinate, and communicate with more than two people over more than a few days, you’ll realize that relying on email (or Facebook, or Twitter) to carry the burden will drive all of you crazy. Someone’s going to miss a message, the “right” people won’t be cc’d or (worse) everyone will be cc’d. On every message. Good times.

After a few of these “I can manage the whole thing via email” disasters, hopefully you’ll start to realize that a centralized “hub” for your team / project / organization might just save your sanity.

A Brief History of Hubs

Then came the “quality” movement and its efforts to quantify and codify the information available from the Wes’s of the world. “Sure, you could go talk to Wes, but we can’t all talk to Ted at the same time, so let’s just write down what Wes said and then we can go back to that the next time we have a question.”

_{Note: This would have been a great time to buy stock in three-ring binder companies. Especially the really, really big three-ring binders.}

And, just as everyone was becoming comfortable with their bookshelf o’ binders, along came the internet and widespread use of personal computers. In the (ultimately futile) quest to become paperless offices, documents were scanned into “document management systems”, we created our “shared drives” and uploaded files to our corporate “intranets” and suddenly all workers had access to all the information they needed, right?

Not quite.

Now, not only had the information been separated from its human hub (which could interpret context and apply judgment), we’d added more layers of bureaucracy and abstraction. A two-minute call to Wes had been replaced by “where’s that #!@* procedure on the intranet? … No, not *that* version, the *new* version…. What do you mean I have to send it to X to get it approved so that Y can post it? … Never mind, I’ll just find that email that A sent me, I think that was the current version…”

Unicorn (via ffffound)

So, if bureaucracy was the problem, then the solution must be self-service, right? Enter the wiki. Now everyone can create their own content and make it available to others who can then edit and improve and contribute and then, in the magical land of unicorns and rainbows, we’ll have a dynamic and robust source of institutional knowledge and tribal wisdom and we’ll all live happily ever after….

Well, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen too many unicorns lately.

The great wiki experiment has had some notable successes (um, Wikipedia anyone?), but outside the realm of technologists and large organizations (who have lots of those technologists), I think the usefulness of wikis has peaked. If I want to share information with my friends, I use Twitter or Facebook. If I’m working collaboratively, I can use Google Docs (or perhaps Google Wave), or a variety of 37signals products. And, if I’m going to organize, coordinate, and communicate with a specific group of people, I’m going to use WordPress.

Coming soon: From Wiki to WordPress (why we’re making the switch)

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