Wiki Wiki's are Wicked Cool

On the side (ha!) for the past 3 years I have been supporting my local NPR station through service as a Community Advisory Board member. In the past this has required little more than volunteering for major fundraising events (=free admission! and a nonfinancial way to support the station when broke!) as well as quarterly meeting attendance.

Recently, however, our participation has been upped. And I have Wiki technology to thank for keeping the time commitment and stress levels down! We are (the station, and coincedentally, me too) marking our 30th years this year, and developing a community wide 18 month long celebration. Without revealing our top secret :) plans, suffice it to say, the CAB members will have to be much more involved over the next year and a half than we have in the past. In comes the Wiki.

We meet so infrequently that we can't make decisions or have meaningful discussions and expect tangible results in decent amount of time. So, I suggested a Wiki. I have since built us one, and we offered quick tutorials and words of encouragement for those who feel frightened by technology. I used PBWiki and am just tickled with how user friendly the interface is. I told my less than tech board members (a few of whom were rightfully vocal about their apprehensions) that the application would be as easy to manipulate as any other online tool- like email and so on. They didn't trust that, but at this point, I can see that they have all been to our Wiki and many have contributed.

The one regret that I have with this experience is that I knew little about the Wiki format (other than by word of mouth) before I created ours and understand from friends who are spending an entire semester creating one that the capabilities and long term effectiveness could be much greater than the one I built overnight! But at least I got us going, I guess!