Invitations and Becomings

Browsing through some bits and pieces, I came across this quote from Mark Choate's book Professional Wikis

"Being propositioned by some young twenty-something about brain-dumping your wisdom into a wiki after having every utterance scrutinized by your superiors for your entire career is like suddenly being told by your wife of twenty years that she thinks you should loosen up a little and get a girlfriend."

It made me laugh - it still does - but the more I think about it, the less I'm satisfied with just laughing. Because there's something serious in there. After all, is it so obvious that we should all loosen up a little, be a little more promiscuous with our knowledge, or cognitive surplus or whatever?

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.

One by-product of a recent debate about email's compatibility or incompatibility with wikis is that we can begin to understand not only weaknesses as a medium of collaboration, but also its strengths.