Wiki Brainstorming and Problems with Wiki Based Collaboration

As organisations increasingly rely on geographically dispersed workforces there is an emerging need to collaborate on projects that span distributed teams and different time frames. This includes a need for collaboration in the form of brainstorming. Wiki may provide a powerful medium for asynchronous distributed collaboration in such situations. A design for evaluating the use of wiki as a shared workspace for asynchronous distributed brainstorming is described. Implementation of this design was unsuccessful and it was considered that failure may be the result of fundamental problems with wiki as a collaborative technology. A revised design is presented for the evaluation of problems with wiki-based collaboration and the factors affecting such collaboration, based on hypotheses derived in part from traditional brainstorming research. A natural structure of factors affecting wiki-based collaboration emerged from the results which are discussed. Study conclusion presents ‘The Wiki Cycle’, a diagrammatic representation that highlights the process factors that affect the success or failure of wiki-based collaboration and which shows the interaction of these factors by way of a series of feedback cycles. This provides a framework for future work by making explicit some of the process factors and dynamics that affect wiki-bases collaboration.