Have You Heard of Wiki?
Have you heard of wiki?
Similar to many other practices, civil engineering practice is collaborative by nature. Professionals have to collaborate within internal project teams, with clients, contractors, concerned citizens, and others. Email, fax, audio conferencing, and web conferencing have recently supplemented the traditional paper based communication and in-person meetings. Yet, according to published studies, majority of professionals are not satisfied with their collaboration experience. Collaboration problems include issues such as delays receiving input, difficulty quickly retrieving relevant information, difficulty interpreting feedback, or using incompatible software applications.
Wiki, a relatively new collaboration platform, can readily address most of these communication problems. A wiki is a website that can be edited by anybody who is granted permissions. Wiki consist of individual pages that can contain links to external files such as PDFs, Word documents, or images. Wiki can also embed standard communication media such as email and instant messaging. People who access the data and documents in a wiki, are also authors of the wiki, making it ideal for information sharing. Wiki content can be categorized, links among pages can be easily created, and all page revisions are archived - wikis thus excel as resources for archiving documents and tracking workflow. Compared to other content management systems, they let users easily gather all the up-to-date information and correspondence pertinent to a project within one central location. Finally, wikis can be used to develop shared corporate knowledgebase or "memory". When implemented wisely, wikis can amplify traditional business practices and introduce potentially revolutionary form of collaboration within and between teams.