Many grassroots Web2.0 initiatives often fail because of the lack of support by management. I felt that is was important from the beginning to approach senior management to ensure that if the adoption of an enterprise wiki solution was well supported at a high level.

Some of the traits of the siloed grassroots wiki's I have come across in my organisation are:

• Downloaded open-source software.
• Hosted on a single pc or local server.
• Usually started by an IT professional.
• This person was usually the wiki champion/ evangelist.
• This person was also the main contributor to the system.
• Usage failed to grow because of the lack of key content within the system
• The wiki "died" as a result of this

In an attempt to counter some of these traits for my pilot, I have examined wiki implementation patterns in the case studies and white papers I have come across. It seems that the usage of a wiki has to be allowed to grow organically. The constructivist theory of learning infers that the more people use and contribute to something, then the better it becomes. This was certainly the case with Wikipedia.

A recent example is the launch of the external wiki site by Sun Micro-Systems - wiki.sun.com. They launched the site for internal staff to document and collaborate knowledge about products etc. In just 10 weeks, they had over 1000 unique pages created!

Some other stats include:

Number of users: 1144
Number of spaces: 94
Number of pages: 1006
Number of page revisions: 6362

They also used the Confluence product which I have been looking at.

I think an important concept is the words I have been using to describe the benefits of wiki use:

"One" - 1 portal, 1 copy of a page or document, 1 place to work etc.
"Re-use" / "Less Re-work" - Find, Search, Link etc.
"Collaboration" - No more email spaghetti, multiple user access.
"Notification" - Keep updated.