Corporate Collaboration
With TWiki
By Peter Thoeny
We take collaboration on the Internet for granted. Email is the most ubiquitous method we use to share ideas with others. There are also mailing lists, Usenet groups, bulletin boards, and proprietary systems like Lotus Notes. Each one has its purpose, and each one has strengths and weaknesses.
The WikiWiki system offers a new method for collaboration. Programmer Ward Cunningham adopted WikiWiki (from the Hawaiian term for "quick") as the title of an experiment he conducted for the Portland Pattern Repository. In his words, WikiWiki is a set of informational Web pages "that are open and free for anyone to edit as they wish. They're stored in a database and managed using some Perl CGI scripts. The system creates cross-reference hyperlinks between pages automagically." Cunningham's idea was to create a Web site on which anybody could create and change Web pages via an ordinary Web browser. Such an idea seems chaotic at first, but the system works amazingly well.
Cunningham's original WikiWiki Web has inspired a whole avalanche of clones. A number of these clones are Open Source projects, including TWiki, which I partially developed at Wind River (see "TWiki Deployment at Wind River"). TWiki is especially useful for corporate intranets. While each clone has practical extensions, each one also adheres to the goals of the original system.
WikiWiki
Cunningham designed the original WikiWiki system with four properties in mind.
