Collective Impact is a long-play on community change. Large scale community change takes time and over the life of a Collective Impact initiative, there will be many documents and lists produced and people will come and go as well. Keeping track of the important reports and data can be time-consuming. And imagine coming into the work a year or so in. How would you get up to speed?
A “wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick.” They are relatively easy to build and use and can be used for a project or as a website. There are many options for building a wiki site. The tool I am showcasing is Google Sites, which is free to use and allows for integration with Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Groups.
Features of a wiki site include:
• Collaboration among users no matter where they are located. For example, you can edit documents collaboratively and users can be notified whenever a document is updated.
• Creating or co—creating a Common Calendar that can be embedded in the wiki site.
• Creating and managing a Clearing House of documents, images and other files by theme or topic area that users can view or download. This allows you to have all pertinent documents stored in one place, which provides a historical view of your initiative as well as provides newcomers to your initiative an efficient way to be oriented.
• Create sign up forms for registrations that are automatically displayed
as well on the site.
• Create a survey that automatically populates the results of on the wiki site.
• Link to or embed a Google Group to foster discussion on the site among participants.
• Create static webpages and navigation to other wiki pages.
• Display a plan as well as a link to it for downloading.
• Widgets can be used to automatically display recent news that users should know about.
This tool download goes deeper into the pros and cons of a wiki platform and includes some examples of wiki sites I have built for collaborative groups.
Mark Holmgren 