I do my best thinking when I'm talking. That may sound funny, but it's true. When I write, I tend to overthink the issues and get ahead of myself. But when I'm talking to another person, or better yet a group of people, I slow down and spit out what's really essential. (I'm a solid E on the Myers-Briggs test.)
So it's not surprising that I had a moment of clarity the other day while talking to a customer. The customer had asked me how you launch a collaborative, wiki-based community. We didn't have a lot of time--I was late to pick up my kids from school--and I had promised him a 60-second answer. What I said was, "Look, it's really very simple: Structure, populate, review, invite, and garden." As soon as the words had passed my lips I thought to myself, hey, that's pretty clear. Maybe I should write it down. And now I have.
It's a good, and simple, way to remember how to do it. So I propose "SPRIG" as the acronym for remembering how to launch a collaborative community:
Structure the wiki up-front with stubs and links
Populate it with real content
Review what you've done within your core group and refine the structure as needed
Invite a few people who have relevant knowledge and relationships and will be into the idea
Garden the wiki content as things get going.
In my next few blog posts, I'll elaborate on each of these activities. So stay tuned. And if my tone seems conversational, now you know why.
BTW, "SPRIG" may not be the world's catchiest acronym. Maybe we could do "SPRING" playing off the first two letters of "Invite". Any reactions or counter-suggestions?
Please leave it at SPRIG, it is quite catchy, or at least catchy enough! SPRING on the other hand, not so much, because there is already a SPRING framework in the J2EE world, that'd be confusing IMHO.
Posted by: Jing-Jing | February 18, 2008 at 02:08 PM
Here is my response... Thanks for the acronym.
http://randomlysporto.blogspot.com/2008/02/sprig-or-spring-good-acronym-i-used-it.html
Posted by: Stella Porto | February 19, 2008 at 01:31 PM
How about "nurture"? Getting Wiki's and collaboration off the ground takes quite a bit of up-front effort, even with willing early adopters ...
Posted by: Iang Jeon | March 13, 2008 at 02:08 PM