Getting engaged

I came back from the euforic workshop feeling inspired and full of ideas for things that we ought to be doing with web2. I now have my del.icio.us account set up and am going to try to set up a shared one for all communication people at IDS. Today I tried to get a podcast on iTunes but that was less successful, I'll have to come back to that one later.

But obviously the most important thing is the Annual Report wiki. After speaking to a few people I've decided to use pbwiki and this week I bought my wiki - idsannualreport2007-08. I guess it's not the most catchy title in the world but it does what it says. I was bizarrely excited to open it and quickly loaded up the first page - my wiki Q&A (you've already seen them two postings ago).

At that point I realised what a big job lies ahead. This wiki has to be developed from one page to (hopefully) more than forty. And it's not my job to do that, it's my job to get others inspired enough to do that. I decided to turn my Q&As into a briefing document and set up meetings with our five research Team Leaders and their Team Administrative Coordinators (TACs) who I need to be my first advocates if this is going to work.

I think I was lucky that my first briefing session was with two people who've started at IDS in the past year and therefore have no prior on the annual report. Also one of them (the TAC) is really keen to learn about wikis. I did a quick demonstration and they started listing all the people in the team who I need to get involved (there's a lot) and then going through who's in the country at the moment (not many). It looks like some of my briefings will have to be by email, which is far from ideal.

Anyway they agreed to support the project and the Team Leader, Fiona, has offered to send out an email to the team encouraging them to get involved. I'm going to the team meeting on 16th to brief them more.

Next week I'm briefing three more team leaders and putting together a more comprehensive plan of attack for engaging staff...