undpwiki: innovating undp's communities of practice (2009)
DESCRIPTION
The UNDP Wiki is a prototype of online knowledge base (wiki) aimed at supporting UNDP’s internal communities of practice for exchanging comparative experiences, lessons learnt and best practices around policies, programmes and projects of the organisation. Wikis are collaborative sites that allow users to create, edit and organize content to be shared online. This prototype has been developed and presented to the UNDP Knowledge Management team in 2009.TRANSCRIPT
UNDPWIKIA wiki as a collaborative tool for UNDP
Several thousands of employees
Operating in 166 countries
Main areas of work:
Democratic Governance
Poverty Reduction
Crisis Prevention and Recovery
Environment and Energy
HIV/AIDS
“rain” of knowledge
UNDP Organic
One Community of Practice for each area of work
Two facilitators for each CoP
Tool: mailing listsCore product: Consolidated Reply
UNDP Knowledge Management strategyHow UNDP manages shared knowledge
Consolidated Replies are a synthesis or summary of responses to a member’s query and are also supported by country experiences and researched materials. They provide a comprehensive summary of responses to any given question, query or
discussion that takes place on the Communities of Practice, in a user friendly format designed to make key information available at a glance.
Consolidated Reply
1. A network’s member asks a question
1. A network’s member asks a question
2. Individual replies are gathered from the network
1. A network’s member asks a question
2. Individual replies are gathered from the network
3. Facilitator prepares the Consolidated Reply
1. A network’s member asks a question
2. Individual replies are gathered from the network
3. Facilitator prepares the Consolidated Reply
4. The Consolidated Reply gets sent back to network
1. What happens to old Consolidated Replies?
how to handle revisions and updates?
can old CRs be found and used again easily?
2. Where is the community?
who are my networks's mates?
how can I find someone with the skills I need?
Limits
Solution: wiki integration
A wiki is an editable website.
1. Unlike mailing lists, it’s a place where content is organizedcategorize pages and make them easy to find based on custom criteria (countries of relevance, topic areas, contributors…)
2. Unlike traditional websites, it’s dynamic: pages are extremely easy to updatechange each page's content without having to log into a content management system like WordPress or access the server via FTP or other means: you just hit the edit button.
3. It’s expressly conceived for co-authoringkeep track of a page's authors and edits, and revert edits if needed
per page discussions
4. It makes it possible to upload and share files on wiki pages
5. It’s a social platformcategorized profile pages
Solution: wiki integration
A wiki is an editable website.
With many options available in the web, MediaWiki is likely the most advanced, feature-rich, free wiki package available.
MediaWiki's main strengths:
stable: being originally written for use on Wikipedia, it’s constantly maintained and developed by thousands of developers.
extendible: with 1300 and growing extensions, it makes it very easy to integrate the wiki with additional features
customizable: it’s open-source
Choosing the right wiki engineMediaWiki = stable + extra features
UNDPWIKIHow It Works
For each network, the wiki stores the complete archive of Consolidated Replies.
Each Consolidated Reply is categorized and therefore made searchable by:
networks
regions / countries of relevance
topic areas
country office formulating/contributing to the query
person formulating/contributing to the query
date of issue
custom keywords (optional)
UNDPWIKIHow It Works
Region pages:
graph displaying distribution of CRs within the region's countries
automatic list of most recently posted CRs related to region
UNDPWIKIHow It Works
Country pages:
list of CRs related to the country
list of Country Experiences on the country
UNDPWIKIHow It Works
Country Office pages:
list of queries asked by members of CO
list of CRs contributed by members of CO
list of profiles from the country office
UNDPWIKIHow It Works
Topic pages:
list of CRs related to specific topic
UNDPWIKIHow It Works
Profile pages:
optional picture and professional/contact detailslist of queries asked by member
list of CRs contributed by member
UNDPWIKIS.ORGHow It Works
Country Office pages:
list of queries asked by members of CO
list of CRs contributed by members of CO
list of profiles from the country office
UNDPWIKIS.ORGHow It Works
Region pages:
graph displaying distribution of CRs within the region's countries
automatic list of most recently posted CRs related to region
UNDPWIKIS.ORGHow It Works
Topic pages:
list of CRs related to specific topic
UNDPWIKIS.ORGHow It Works
Country pages:
list of CRs related to the country
list of Country Experiences on the country
UNDPWIKIS.ORGHow It Works
Profile pages:
optional picture and professional/contact detailslist of queries asked by member
list of CRs contributed by member
UNDPWIKIExtra Features
Maps: pages can be geographically tagged and a map with placemarks representing the tagged pages gets automatically created
UNDPWIKIExtra Features
Forms: users can create pages using user-friendly forms instead of using the wiki markup, for an easier editing experience
UNDPWIKIExtra Features
Tag Clouds + Multicategory Search: users can browse the wiki filtering by one or more categories at a time
UNDPWIKIExtra Features
Offline Edition: an offline edition of UNDPWiki is automatically created, updated and made available for download, to allow users to access the content of UNDPWiki from DVD / USB key or any computer without the need of Internet access.
Single networks can have their own customized offline editions including just Consolidated Replies relevant to their own community of practice.
UNDPWIKIS.ORGExtra Features
Maps: pages can be geographically tagged and a map with placemarks representing the tagged pages gets automatically created
UNDPWIKIS.ORGExtra Features
Forms: users can create pages using user-friendly forms instead of using the wiki markup, for an easier editing experience
UNDPWIKIS.ORGExtra Features
Tag Clouds + Multicategory Search: users can browse the wiki filtering by one or more categories at a time
UNDPWIKIS.ORGExtra Features
Offline Edition: an offline edition of UNDPWikis is automatically created, updated and made available for download, to allow people to access the content of UNDPWikis from DVD / USB key or any computer without the need of Internet access.
Single networks can have their own customized offline editions including just Consolidated Replies relevant to their community of practice.
1. Adopted web 2.0 platform for online collaboration as a basis that enables further development and extension in terms of both reach and features
2. Increased visibility and therefore extended benefit from old Consolidated Replies
3. Added a social element to the CR system: benefit extended from access to information (CRs) to access to knowledge (people)
4. Knowledge capture and mapping:Enabled visualization of geographic and thematic distribution of knowledge exchanges
Enabled automatic highlights of most active contributors
Achievements
Possible implementations for future development:
page ratings
upgrades to profiles: making them searchable by skills and other criteria (LinkedIn)
pdf export of wiki pages
internationalization
google-like search engine
integration of new kinds of contents (research papers, reports...)
Next Steps
Credits
undpwiki has been designed and developed by:
Davide Piga: knowledge management specialist
Giovanni Savastano: it manager and web-designer
www.undpwiki.pdavide.me