Wiki

Well, I've gone and done it:  I've broken my wikiginity and gone and started a collaborative workspace forum to help me edit the new Gower Handbook of Internal Communicaiton.  You can see the results here and already the beast is coming alive.  This morning as I was minding my own business when a suggestion for a chapter on internal communications and outsourcing wings into the book from India.  Last time the book was editied in 1997 it was put together with scissors and glue: now contributors can get their hands into the guts of the project and post their own stuff - and comment on the work of others.
It's amazingly good fun to see the Handbook write itself in this way. For heaven's sake don't tell Gower - they'll be wondering what value I'm adding in the process.  I feel like a middle manager let loose in the swirling currents of social media - wondering if I'll have a job at all in the new information soup.
A couple of observations have struck me in my wikiness.  The first is that this stuff is free: the software and the platform are costing me nothing, zilch, niento.  I am sure like Skype I will end up contributing a few dollars down the line to enhance my experience, but it's peanuts.  The second thing is how futile is the idea of an editor at all.  I am in the middle of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and I feel like I'm living what he theorises so elegantly about.  Put more heads together and you get a better product, no matter how much you might think that some of those heads are hot, wrong or out with the fairies.
So I know it's a silly name - but embrace the Wiki.  You may not know that it makes sense - but trust me, lots of others know it does.