Invitations and Becomings

As I suggested in my previous post, it's easy to treat email and wikis as competitor technologies, especially if you're a wiki evangelist, but this is isn't the best option. The real challenge is to capture knowledge that is being shared successfully through email, i.e. when you wouldn't want to get rid of the email list, but want to capture the knowledge. In light of the interesting responses I got on LinkedIn and here, I now think there are two parts to this.

1. Make it someone's responsibility to transfer useful information from the list to a wiki, and do whatever gardening is required (i.e. organising, linking, formatting, editing, etc). This really can't be done automatically, because all you'll ever get is a list dump, which gets more and more ugly and unmanageable ever day.
2. Make sure the person responsible isn't one of the people who keep the list alive. For example, don't punish the people who participate most or contribute most to the email list by weighing them down with additional responsibilities. These people are often the brightest and most knowledgeable people in your organisation and you'll just discourage them from making the effort to participate in the list at all.

The upshot of this is that the best human bridge between email and wiki is probably a trainee or inductee who's getting to learn the ropes. For three reasons

For the inductees, it encourages them to follow the conversation, gives them an excuse to ask questions (e.g. to clarify terms etc), and forces them to become familiar with what is already on the wiki.

But it also means that they have something to contribute very quickly, which are pointers to the relevant wiki page for other members who haven't visited recently.

This would help to keep the wiki in the collaborative loop as it were, and take the pressure off the senior participants to keep the wiki up-to-date, since they're usually the most time-poor. Inductees likely have more time to perform the task while they're getting up to speed with the business.

Thanks to Gavin Golden, Eric Scheid, Scott Gavin, Lex Slaghuis, Bernard Sia, Ken Ross and Nick Fletcher for their insights.