Developing Usable Experiences

Information Islands of Culture and Context

June 29th, 2011 7:15 am —  32 views

The decision to create a separate wiki for my team at work many years ago was frowned upon and discouraged by a number of people. Particularly those that had used the first wiki within development. Their perspective was that their wiki was a resource for all of development, a place for teams to put all their information.

My perspective was to have a wiki that was an island of content, relevant to the responsibilities and projects of those tending it. A more personal place. A place where a search returns your own pages. It would be like having to search through everything in your house as well as my house to find that missing thing. It’s easier to find things when you’re looking through your own stuff.

There was lengthy debates on why we shouldn’t become a small island of information, but my intuition and purpose told me it was the right thing to do. We now have 100′s of pages in our team wiki, organized into guides, how-tos, references, diagrams, and even pages with color coded SQL queries for those recurring requests. It is a focused island of contextually important information, increasingly critical to the maintenance of the product and systems developed by my team. I use it everyday. But this perspective does not mean I’m opposed to centralization of information. I think there are effective ways to do it that allow for integrating islands while leaving them islands.

All wiki systems are islands of content. The quality of information offered by an island is up to its inhabitants. Unfortunately, there is one thing I have found over years of cultivation and encouragement, is how unwilling people are to create or update wiki pages. That happens to be a big challenge.

It has helped to have our own sandbox, our own private island, to shape and transform. Most wiki users are hesitant or don’t understand how to create and edit pages. It happens to be a very public thing, authoring wiki pages, writing blog posts. Constraining the context to a team, tasked with overlapping responsibilities, the island is likely to get better care1. This type of ownership is important to cultivate in a large organization. It is the soil in which roots of synergy and innovation take hold.

There are many islands of information content, some larger, some smaller. But they are all islands. If you explore them you’ll discover whether they are truly cared for or not. Dig a little deeper and you can discover if they are really used or not. Traffic analysis is a dead give-away.

In an information rich, island friendly organization, people can find what they’re looking for because of how things are organized. Organization of information relies on awareness of other islands of information, not conquering and subsuming. At least not right away. The people using the information will know when to migrate, if they know the option is open to them and can discuss its appropriateness.

For example, I don’t publish these blog posts on corporate blog resources because they don’t belong on that island. But if you’re curious about me, you can find this island from the corporate one. That’s how the web works. It’s beautiful.

Image: This was taken with my iPhone during a day long training session on working across cultures. I wrote the word “nerds” in the culture part and “Hunger” in the human nature part. The teacher was explaining work done in this field, Hofstede came up.

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  1. This is completely unsubstantiated I realize. I would have to research and analyze data from content islands used within an international corporation to validate this claim, but my intuition is clear on this [↩]

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3 Comments 

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3 Responses to “Information Islands of Culture and Context”

  1. Dawn on July 1st, 2011 6:16 pm

    I can’t begin to understand entirely, but I do know I was always hesitant to work on the AA District Library wiki…afraid of messing it up. You know me.

  2. Spike on September 8th, 2011 8:26 pm

    If only those people would find this post and comment on it. I could learn so much. We don’t talk. Would we if I had used their wiki?

  3. Dawn on November 20th, 2011 6:26 am

    Probably should check out their wiki!

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