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April 27, 2006
When Wikis Suck and Don't Suck For Law Firms
After posting about why wikis suck for law firms, I'm finding my concerns both ignored, addressed, and transcended. But one use of wikis that I did not consider was to do cross-firm collaboration on legal matters. Thanks to Evan Schaeffer for promoting this to my attention.
I have also had a little more experience with wikis since my original post, and would like to modify my thoughts regarding their use. Mainly, wikis work best when they create a resource for a group, rather than replace, supplant, or build off of existing resources.
That's my experience with smaller (< 100) groups using wikis. When your group is greater than 100 (eg wikipedia), then the criteria shifts to making a resource organized and accessible for the entire group. Hence, for small wikis in a traditional law firm environment, wikis won't create original resource (in most cases. I’ll examine the exceptional cases, where wikis could create a resource, in a later post.).
Here’s a red herring: ”We don't do wikis because we have no control over them.” Control may be distracting, but its not a worthwhile objection. All but the most Enron of places want to leverage the skillsets of their employees. Sorry, that's my attempt at corporatese. Anyway, once you frame social software in terms of knowledge management and project collaboration, the red herring of control dries up.
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Posted by Noel at 05:36 PM
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