Project Management and Collaboration

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranet and Knowledge Management systems. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”. (from Wikipedia).

Definitions:Wikis in Plain English by Common Craft.

Networks: Wiki Wednesdays in London.

Consultants: Wild Apricot’s Online collaboration tools for non-profit board members post about Google Documents; Beth Kanter’s Wiki primer; Online Project Management Software in the Real World by Michele Murrain and Laura Quinn from Idealware; Andy Gibson’s The Human Intranet presentation.

Organisations: Basecamp shares case studies about how organisations use their tool.

Blogs:Organizational Wikis Keep Knowledge From Walking Out the Door by Michael Stein in the Non-profit Times; Non-profitTechBlog’s Non-profit Project Management post; From Zero to Sixty: What type of Project Management tool is appropriate? by Peter Campbell;What Would an Ideal Project Management Tool Look Like? by Andrew Filev.

Tools: Huddle; Basecamp;wikis; Google Apps; Google Docs.

Data sources: Read the comparison of wiki software on Wikipedia.

Publications:Using Wikis for Online Collaboration: The Power of the Read-Write Web (Online Teaching and Learning Series (OTL)) by James A. West and Margaret L. West; How Wikipedia Works by Charles Matthews, Ben Yates Phoebe Ayers; 21st Century Collaboration Resources by Michael C. Gilbert;The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki; Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. 

 

How to set up a virtual office

by Andy

There are so many cheap and free tools for running a business these days, it’s a wonder why organisations still spend so much on IT. Here are a few tools to try out to increase your productivity:

  1. E-mail and calendar from Google Apps. Get you and all your staff e-mail addresses at your company’s web address, plus task, calendar and scheduling – all for free!
  2. Shared document drive from Windows Live Sync. Share and sync documents whenever you’re online from any computer in your network, and work on them offline too.
  3. Telephone and video conferencing from Skype. Get everyone in your team signed up and make free voice and video calls wherever you are, and hold team chats while you work collaboratively. You can also buy Skype-in numbers so others can call you from normal phones.
  4. Contact management from Highrise or SugarCRM. Cheap CRM tools to keep track of who you’ve contacted and what you said to them.
  5. Document co-authoring from Google Docs. Write spreadsheets together in meetings and author word docs concurrently with colleagues without all the usual version control hassles.
  6. Task and collaboration tools from Huddle. Record minutes of meetings, work on documents together, assign tasks and swap updates in this free project admin tool. (Basecamp is good too.)
  7. Simple intranet from iGoogle. Google offers its custom homepage features to businesses too, so you can set up a team or company homepage filled with feeds from useful sites and their tools.
  8. Team blog from Wordpress. Set up a private or public blog to post updates from meetings, projects and other useful information, and cut down on company e-mail.
  9. Digital office chatter from Twitter or Yammer. Don’t miss out on the hum of office life: keep your colleagues in the loop with these free and cheap micro-blogging services.
  10. Research and link sharing from Delicious and School of Everything. Don’t keep your sources hidden in your favourites, share and tag them publicly so colleagues can use them too.

There are new productivity tools emerging all the time, and most of them are free or cheap, so keep checking the resources above for the latest updates. And remember to share any good stuff you find back here too!