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The Wiki Way

By Eugene E. Kim

I used to be in awe of people who could file. Try as I might, I could never come up with a system that worked for me. More often than not, I'd give up and stack my papers high on the floor. I never understood how people came up with systems that worked.

And then, I had a revelation. Rather than devise a filing system up front, I would observe my own work tendencies and evolve a system over time. I started by filing items in chronological order in unlabeled folders. Whenever I found myself retrieving the same papers over and over again, I would create separate folders for these papers. After a short period of time, I had discovered a working filing system that I never could have planned ahead of time.

Most collaboration software resembles bad filing systems. It enforces a structure that's too rigid, making assumptions about how people want to collaborate, and then forcing them to work that way. More often than not, such assumptions are wrong. Software vendors seem to forget that the way to figure out how people want to work is to observe them working.

The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web By Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham Addison-Wesley, 2001, 435 pp. www.a