Book Club: Wikinomics

Michael Ross said...

The downloadable online membership directory in csv format is a nice step in the right direction. With that kind of thing, we can keep track of who is new in our ward and might need a visit and who moved out. It would be helpful if you could add to the csv file some kind of unique member and family identifiers.

For members, there are their membership record numbers, but you use them to give people login IDs to the ward website, so you probably want to keep that confidential. You could create another unique identifier for members or figure out another way to grant people access to ward websites. It sure would be nice to be able to tell if the John Smith that just showed up on our records was the same John Smith that moved out three months ago or a different one.

I don’t think there is currently a unique global family identifier, but it would be helpful for tracking families moving in, out, or within the ward. If a father and mother get divorced and all the kids stay with the mother, the cleanest record keeping approach would be to take the father out of the family and leave the rest of the family in place. Without a globally unique family identifier, the best we can do is attach the family to the head of household’s globally unique identifier. Problem is, the head of household changes from time to time, while most of the rest of the family can remain intact. This can require some record keeping acrobatics without a globally unique family identifier.

May 29, 2007 5:11 am #

Tatiana said...

Wikis are awesome! I’m totally a fan of using them in millions of ways. I think wikipedia is only the start. I’m trying to get my company right now to promote an internal wiki to function as a central repository for all our corporate knowledge. I’m in an industry (nuclear power) in which the workforce is mostly retirement age, and we have huge problems of knowledge transfer to the new generation taking over. Add that to the critical nature of the quality of our work, and we definitely need all the tools we can get to help us out. The book Wikinomics is about something rather different, about using the collaborative efforts of unpaid contributors to make money. I’m not sure how exciting that is to me, but the non-commercial ones I love. Wikipedia is amazing.

Check out my wiki on the web at http://www.avertinghumanextinction.org. I’m just getting it started, and gradually adding more content.

June 2, 2007 2:47 pm #

Daniel said...

There are so many ways wikis are being used today. One exciting one is which has great potential is wikis as genealogical research tools. Werelate.org is one of the best example of a this. I have also implemented a wiki that has restricted access to family members for capturing histories of our living family members.

June 3, 2007 7:00 am #

Aaron Curtis said...

I haven’t read Wikinomics yet, but I look forward to doing so. On a related note, there’s an article in the Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/06/05/small-teams-advance-open-source-effort/ that describes how collectives are especially useful for solving problems. They point out, however, that problem identification is best performed by individuals and small groups.

This would seem to validate the anecdote you just shared. The executive understood the problem clearly and was able to marshal the collective to solve it. If the collective had simply been provided the surveys, seismic data, etc. and had been asked to come up with a relevant problem they could solve, they probably would have ended up with more glitter than gold.

June 6, 2007 1:20 pm #