Wikis as the corporate third place

When explaining to people what a wiki is, I often struggle - not because I don't know, but more because wikis actually are so many things. Responses like "Oh, so it's a website?", "It's an agile content management system?", "Is it like groupware/Lotus notes?" are all very typical. And in a way, they're all correct.

Well, today I thought of a completely different way to explain what a wiki is - wikis are the corporate "third place" for information. Let me see if I can explain this, slightly off the wall, theory.

The Third Place
The concept of the "third place" was invented by Ray Oldberg, and can be defined as:

A place other than home or work where a person can go to relax and feel part of the community.

I first came across the term in Howard Shultz (the man behind Starbucks) book "Pour Your Heart Into It" where he likes to define Starbucks as the third place in our lives. In his case:

• The first place (the home) provides a comfortable atmosphere, with little social interaction.
• The second place (the work place) provides social interaction, but without the comfort of a home.
• The third place (Starbucks) provides a happy medium - more social interaction than your home but with more comfort than a work place.

Corporate Information Places
I think one can look at wikis in a similar fashion, when comparing them to their alternatives.

What are the first and second places in terms of information within an organisation?

The first place for information within an organisation is the humble Word document. Like it or not, corporations have billions of thoughts, specifications and ideas tied up in Word documents. Word isn't going anywhere, but Word isn't perfect.

The second place for information within a company is email. Email is a communications medium that has morphed into an information store. Our email clients are part communications device, part to-do list, part personal information archive - and, despite recent improvements, they're still only really good at the first!

So in a corporate information environment,

• the first place (Word) provides good structure and persistence for documents, but very poor communication and agility
• the second place (email) is great at communication and very agile but very poor at structure and persistence

The Wiki Place
Wikis then can be seen as our third place for corporate information:

• the third place (a wiki) is provides better communication than Word, but more structure and persistence than email.

Emails are deleted, filed-and-forgotten or just lost - a good wiki doesn't have this problem. At the same time, writing or editing a wiki page should be as easy and as fast as writing an email.

Word documents on the other hand are terrible at communication (no, track changes does not count as good communication) but they are good at structure - headings, sections, bullets etc.

Of course, wikis have other advantages not mentioned (simple linking for one) but I think it's a different way to try to explain what exactly it is this whole 'wiki thing' is all about.

Like I said, it's maybe a little off-the-wall - but give it some thought :)

(Note that in both cases, third place does not replace the others. Mr Schultz may not like it, but Starbucks isn't going to replace your home or work anytime soon. By the same token, your company is not going to get rid of Word documents or email, but they will get value from a wiki in certain circumstances)

Comments

[Dan]

I like the introduction of Word / Email being polarised in the scales of structure / communication - but seems to miss Instant Messaging?

I would put it past Email in the lowest form of structure and highest level of communication. Not sure if this could come here at all, due to the low level of IM usage compared to Email ... and the question is rather retorical anyway as it doesnt really matter where it fits in!

As IM is slowly being accepted as having merits in the corporate world, so too will Wiki's eventually.

[Vincent Massol]

Great post Mike. This is eerie! This is exactly how I describe a Wiki when I am doing pre-sales and trying to explain the different communication tools we use for doing distributed development... :-)

You may also be interested in the diagram I have on slide 16 of http://www.codehaus.org/~vmassol/blog/AOSD%20-%20Agile%20Offshore%20-%2020041217.ppt It shows the place of wikis in term of team knowledge sharing when compared with other tools. I'm sure the diagram could be refined though.

Congrats for your new blog. Your "wikizen" name is excellent. I'll be watching the space :-) (BTW, you'll be happy to know that I've been doing a full-day trek in India yestrday, wearing the confluence tee-short all the time ;-)).

[Ivan Pope]

Mike,
Excellent start. Wikizen, I love it already. I'm using the term Social Media (or sMedia), rather than Social Software, at http://blog.ipmedia.info/blog.html

[Robert Atkins]

Actually you can replace a workplace with a coffee shop: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66276,00.html