Workshop: Working with Wiki's in Development Organizations - 13 February 2009

More and more development organizations are turning to wikis and other social tools to better communicate, document and share knowledge, collaborate, and exchange information.

Wiki’s are one of the most-used examples and are widely used in the ICCO Alliance ComPart initiative, as well as other development organisations.

On 13 Febrary 2009, ICCO and Euforic organised a workshop on 'Working with Wiki's in Development Organizations'.

This knowledge sharing session capitalized on the presence of David Weekly (founder and CEO of PBwiki) and other partners to share lessons and experiences, exploring how wiki’s are contributing to more effective development exchange.

Who's David Weekly?

I've been programming since I was about five, went to Stanford after coding for MIT and Harvard Physics, and am the founder of PBwiki. Our company has 30 employees and serves over 700,000 groups around the world - The Netherlands is our 12th most popular country for originating traffic, with about 30,000 uniques/month. My first trip to the Netherlands was in 1999 for the ACM International Programming Competition in Eindhoven; my girlfriend was our "team coach" and we snuck out to go clubbing in Amsterdam between events. A great deal of what motivates our team is the positive impact that we make in the lives of those that use our product: getting emails from Peace Corps workers in Namibia or seeing pictures of labs full of children in Costa Rica using our service really fire us up. I personally am very interested in this topic – I gave a talk in Geneva at the Palace of the United Nations in 2001 on community development technologies and attended the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia on the same. I flew to Ghana in 2004 to teach kids how to use computers. So of course we're very excited to be able to support development organizations with collaboration technology. I'd be delighted to hear what people are doing or hoping to do with their wikis and what other collaboration tools they're using in their organizations. Thanks so much for this opportunity!