I currently work for a small office that is a division of a state agency in Florida. In this environment, an office wiki would be very useful in the following ways.
For one, new employees coming into the office receive an agency-wide HR handbook but they don’t receive any information on policies and procedures within our specific office. A wiki would be a great way to explain simple items like our organizational chart, emergency notification tree, employee roles and areas of focus, how to reserve a meeting room or conference line, etc. Then, as policies and procedures are changed, the wiki could be added to or edited appropriately.
I also collaborate with a large advisory council and hundreds of partners around the state on a regular basis. One major project we have underway is revising the goals and objectives in our statewide strategy. In order to get feedback, I have to email documents out to everyone, ask them to track changes or write out edits, email it back to me, and I then incorporate changes. If all of this were done in a wiki, it would save a lot of time and cost.
As another class blogger mentioned, a wiki would be a great way to keep track of bills, amendments, committee meetings and so forth during legislative session. Right now we use Lobby Tools to track this information, but it would be easier if everything could be maintained in one space for our internal office and we were all consistently up-to-date.
One challenge to implementing these kinds of changes is Florida’s broad public record laws. At times, our office receives requests for all documents, emails, and notes regarding specific topics. The multiple contributors to a wiki would make it difficult to determine specific authorship and extract the needed information for public record. Another challenge I foresee is management being unwilling to relinquish control over the content and information contained in a wiki. Many management officials within my agency are very specific about having complete oversight into agency work projects, content, who does what, etc.
So, although a wiki would be a useful tool, I don’t see it being implemented in the near future. The State has rarely been accused of being an early adopter of new technology (as I type in software from 2003). We will probably only be able to begin thinking about these possibilities when a national agency, or other state agency, starts modeling them.
