Tecnologies col·laboratives: noves oportunitats per a la participació

Internet se ha incrustado en la vida cotidiana de muchos ámbitos de la población. Ante todo fue el crecimiento de internet lo que permitió la distribución de información entre millones de personas. Después ha sido la explotación de la comunicación y el tejido social, es decir, las relaciones entre personas. La colaboración se ha explotado a una escala sin precedentes hasta entonces. El web es un campo de investigación muy amplio, que enlaza bastas áreas de investigación, como la representación del conocimiento, el marcaje de objetos, la notificación y muchas otras cuestiones que se plantean durante la creación de sistemas de información compartida y desarrollo colaborativo. Las tecnologías colaborativas deben ayudar a alcanzar el principio que marcó uno de los pioneros de la colaboración, Douglas Engelbart: «Los problemas de la sociedad se expanden a un ritmo sin precedentes, por lo que necesitan soluciones a escala. Nuestra propia supervivencia depende de nuestra capacidad de trabajar juntos de forma más eficaz, más inteligente, para obtener colectivamente soluciones. Los ordenadores -cuándo se usan correctamente- pueden ayudarnos a alcanzar este reto». Las tecnologías colaborativas permiten, entre otras funciones, compartir los lugares preferidos con los compañeros, encontrar sus documentos y mensajes de correo rápidamente mediante el etiquetado, escribir sobre sus experiencias de trabajo en la página personal (blog), indicar en una comunidad de usuarios lo que hacemos y lo que hace el resto en tiempo real, o bien hacer sobre un mismo documento compartido el trabajo de un equipo de proyecto. Todas estas nuevas funcionalidades son el resultado de lo que se ha denominado web participativo. A lo largo de este artículo se realiza un análisis de la vertiente más tecnológica de la colaboración con una descripción de las herramientas y las tecnologías de colaboración más relevantes

EMPLOYING WIKI AS A COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION REPOSITORY IN A MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY: THE NBC UNIVERSAL CASE

Wiki has been widely accepted by educational institutions, homes, and corporations, and is expected to grow continuously. Business enterprises quickly recognize the value of shared content: Some of the largest corporations, such as Google and IBM use wikis to manage daily operations and to share information among employees. This case study presents how NBC Universal developed a wiki, and used it to enhance knowledge-sharing, thereby achieving significant costsavings, performance improvement and employee satisfactions. This case shows Wiki can bring greater value to an organization with a dynamically changing structure in which capturing and sharing of tacit knowledge is critical for its success. By clearly demonstrating benefits of collaborative information repositories in the widely-recognized media and entertainment firm, this case will provide valuable learning opportunities to both professional and academic audience

Wikis as tools for collaboration

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, envisioned it as a place where “people can communicate … by sharing their knowledge in a pool … putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out” (Berners-Lee, 1999). For much of its first decade, the Web was, however, primarily a place where the majority of people took ideas out rather than putting them in. This has changed. Many “social software” services now exist on the Web to facilitate social interaction, collaboration and information exchange. This article introduces wikis, jointly edited Web sites and Intranet resources that are accessed through web browsers. After a brief overview of wiki history, we explain wiki technology and philosophy, provide an overview of how wikis are being used for collaboration, and consider some of the issues associated with management of wikis before considering the future of wikis. In 1995, an American computer programmer, Ward Cunningham, developed some software to help colleagues quickly and easily share computer programming patterns across the Web. He called the software WikiWikiWeb, after the “Wiki Wiki” shuttle bus service at Honolulu International Airport (Cunningham, 2003). As interest in wikis increased, other programmers developed wiki software, most of it (like WikiWikiWeb) open source. Although wiki software was relatively simple by industry standards, some technical knowledge was required to install, maintain and extend the “wiki engines.” Contributors needed to learn and use a markup language to edit pages, and even if the markup languages were often simpler than HTML, non-technical users did not find these early wikis compelling. In the early years of the twenty-first century, a number of developments led to more widespread use of wikis. Wiki technology became simpler to install and use, open source software was improved, and commercial enterprise-grade wiki software was released. The not insignificant issues associated with attracting and managing a community of people who use a wiki to share their knowledge were discussed in forums such as MeatballWiki (http://www.usemod.com/cgibin/ mb.pl?action=browse&id=MeatballWiki&ol did=FrontPage). The public’s attention was drawn to wikis following the launch, in January 2001, of the publicly written Web-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). And wiki hosting services and application service providers (ASPs) were established to enable individuals and organizations to develop wikis without the need to install and maintain wiki software themselves. By July 2006, nearly 3,000 wikis were indexed at the wiki indexing site www.wikiindex. org, popular wiki hosting services such as Wikia (www.wikia.org) and seedwiki (www.seedwiki. org) hosted thousands of wikis between them, and Wikipedia had more than four and a half million pages in over 100 languages. Moreover, wikis were increasingly being used in less public ways, to support and enable collaboration in institutions ranging from businesses to the public service and not-for-profit organizations