Coworking Wiki Upgrade: New Website & "Building a Better Tool"
Kevin Skiena
We recently completed a revamp of the project website. There's now more information about our goals, our execution plan, and our budget. We also posted a new blog entry in response to community feedback (pasted below). If you're still on the fence about donating, feel free to contact us with your concerns or questions. There are plenty of other ways to get involved, too, like copy/pasting this message and sharing it with your members or coworking friends. Thanks for helping us get the word out!
Building a Better Tool
We received some great community feedback in last week’s post, Your Wiki, Your Voice, and we’re hard at work addressing your concerns and implementing your suggestions.
Visibility
We’ve been giving the wiki a hard time for its deficiencies (and we’re not about to stop yet – this is a renovation project, after all!). For all its problems, we’re lucky to have such a highly visible platform at our disposal. Catalysts, space owners, and coworkers are already likely to find and visit the wiki. Search engine optimization isn’t our problem, and it’s a fantastic problem not to have.
“Difficult,” “Hit-or-Miss,” and “Overwhelming”
Those are just some of the words you used to describe the current Coworking Wiki. The first few links on the homepage will send you to separate pages for the Coworking Directory, Catalysts, and space owners, but if you were to stay on the page and scroll down you’ll find a long, somewhat organized list of worthwhile information and resources. Most of the links still work, but a lot of them don’t. Plunge further into the wiki and you’re likely to get lost or confused. For example, there’s a “Just Interested” link on the homepage under “What stage of coworking are you at?” Click on it and you’ll get a reiteration of text from the homepage, plus another link to a quixotic and overly-general discussion of Building Blocks, the point of which is really just to direct you to a SXSW conference PowerPoint from 2006. My personal favorite is the “Interested Individuals” link on the “Just Interested” page, which I thought was broken until I realized that the link is only meant to route you to the page you’re already on (I’m not comfortable telling you how long it took me to figure this out).
Enough picking on the wiki! Solutions, please!
Yes, thank you. The first task is to categorize, structure, and clean-up the wiki’s existing content. We started work on a hierarchical headings chart after identifying the wiki’s main user groups. These are: Catalysts, space owners, and present and potential coworkers. Each of these stakeholders will have very different needs to explore through the wiki. A Catalyst will be interested in gauging local interest, founding a community, and commercial leasing. We’re still swooning over Rayann Larsen of The Work Spot’s suggestion that we pattern flow through the site after the process that a user would naturally follow, “inception to execution to growth . . .” Using this technique for each stakeholder group, we will identify specific topics of interest, make those topics our section headings, and fill in the blanks with text and resources. We’ll still provide links to helpful external links where appropriate, but one of our goals is to make the wiki a shared knowledge base rather than a redirection tool. (The Updated Wiki Plan)
There’s a lot on the wiki to categorize, structure, and clean-up, and collaboration and community are two of our greatest values, so we’ve started the simultaneous task of assembling dedicated, talented coworking space employees to assist in ongoing site maintenance. This group of a about 5 individuals will make one-year commitments to the project, and their work on the project (which should be limited to about 5 hours a week) will become part of their regular job functions (we’ve already got some!). Just to be clear: the time team members spend on the project will occur during their regular hours (no overtime necessary), and compensation for their work will essentially be donated by the spaces they work for. This approach has several advantages:
1. It’s sustainable! You may have noticed we’re trying to raise money to implement site changes, coordinate the team, and build some software. Once that work is done, and the team is assembled, the services offered by the site and the upkeep necessary to run it essentially become free. We pay to get over this hurdle, and then it’s done.
2. It broadens the experience and diversity at work on the project. Coworking is a widespread, global movement. As with any large constituency, there’s a huge variety of beliefs, talents, and skills that should be represented. Right now, the core group at work on upgrading the wiki is mostly in Seattle, WA, and we’re very eager to broaden our talent pool.
3. It’s flexible. We don’t expect the wiki to stay exactly as we make it after the redesign. This system of oversight creates a model that can continue well into the future, with team members transitioning out after year-long commitments, and the size of the team expanding or contracting along with project demands.
Once the jobs of staffing and cataloging are underway, the public face of the wiki should begin to change in some really dramatic ways. One of our goals is to make it a comprehensive and useful community tool for information and collaboration. The site boasts a Catalyst “Getting Started” guide, but it’s woefully incomplete. By identifying specific targets, we can request information from the broader community or begin to fill in the gaps ourselves. When it comes to collaboration between spaces, the site already connects to a few helpful tools and examples. We can provide brief descriptions of what these things are instead of just linking to them, and if it turns out that we’re just scratching the surface, we can organize them by type (examples: Inter-space Collaborations That Benefit Coworkers; Electronic Tools for Managing Coworking Staff; Techniques to Increase Socialization and Networking Between Local Coworking Spaces).
Our most ambitious goal is upgrading the wiki’s Coworking Directory to a map-based, searchable platform in which the listing results are controlled by the spaces themselves. We’ve already identified the model and started work on a prototype. We’ll provide space owners with a tool that will generate some HTML code for their space’s website. The code will not change anything about the website’s appearance, but it will isolate and organize the information for the space’s listing. Our search tool will generate a listing from the code and display it to wiki users. Space owners will control their own listings, and they can update it whenever they want without contacting us. The wiki’s Coworking Directory is different from other services in that it’s not commercial or for-profit; it’s controlled and operated by the community, and it’s completely neutral (no featured listings).
What We Need
We’re still trying to grow our team with new members, volunteers, and donations. We’re always looking for feedback, too! We never want to lose sight of the fact that the Coworking Wiki is a community tool that belongs to everyone, so your comments are always welcome.