Use It!

It's hard to evangelize the use of blogs and wikis if you have hardly any time to do it your own. It's almost like buying a book on efficient time management and then saying "Well, I don't have time to read it anyway". It's a problem we face, but on the other hand: it gives us the opportunity to think and learn about restrictions and possible requirements we face while introducing these features. Especially with intranet, we need protected areas that are not free to the public, we have big concerns about what to say if we know that our colleagues are probably going to read this. Will they like it? Will they make us look like idiots, because we made some mistake? Or will they make us look like idiots, because we are using the wiki as if we want to become famous for it? In a brief talk I head today with Mathias Schindler, member of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, he told about some new and not yet fully worked through experiences he had while promoting Wikis to enterprises. It's not easy to - according to the wiki-rules - ignore the rules, if you are about to do this in an environment that usually pays you for resepcting rules. And it's not easy to start something just to get it started - knowing that you can't complete it perfectly, but also knowing that someone has to start the discussion or nothing will ever happen.
Actually, I think this is the way things work: you have to start something somehow. It will be good, as long as there is nothing better. If everything that is done later, tries to improve the first draft, everything is ok. If it focuses on blaming missing information, mistakes, errors - this is waste of time. That's how opne source software works, that generally how every creative process works. Sometimes it is hard to admit that, but nothing gets better just because we think about it harder. It can only get better if we start to use it, test it, discuss it with others. Well, we can only do that, after we have started it. The new facette that comes into play through social media is publicity. That makes you more vulnerable, but after all it makes you stronger - you get more patches to apply. If the deeply negative and destructive comments are more, don't blame social media. Blame your environment - or the way you handle your staff and your peers.

But just use it.