Welcome back OC Report Readers! I hate to start the new year with such a cliche, but… I CAN”T believe it is 2008! The good news is, we are less than 2 months away from the Online Community Unconference East, which is going to be held February 21st at the Newman Conference Center. We are moving the big community party that is the OC Unconference to the east coast. NYC has a lot of interesting things happening in the community and social media space, a lot of smart people working in the space, and, let’s be honest, the city is just awesome. The Newman Conference Center is a great space, and we have Kaliya Hamlin as a facilitator.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of “Open Space“, the idea is to tap in to the collective knowledge of the attendees by having the Unconference attendees actually drive the agenda. We had a fantastic Unconference in June at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and I expect the OCU East event in New York to be as lively and informative.

Registration is now open, and there are a handful of “Super Early Bird” tickets left at $95. Once those are gone, we have early bird slots open for $145. I also have a handful of scholarship tickets available for students, or those in need. Please drop me a line to discuss.

For those of you who would like to know more about what happens at our Unconference events, or would like to see the variety and quality of sessions, please check out the following links:

Online Community Unconference: An initial report back
Online Community Unconference 2007 – Wiki (w/ session notes)

I hope to see you in New York!

To Wiki or Not To Wiki? Community leads across the web love wiki technology, attracted by its flexibility and low cost, but concerned about control issues and barriers to participation. When do wikis make most sense?

I recently led a session on wiki implementation at the Online Community Unconference. The collective wisdom of the group informed the following list of factors for when wikis work best:

1) Wikis work well for groups that already know each other. In fact, in the Blogs, Wikis and Workspaces study posted earlier this year, 87% of organizations reported using wikis for internal purposes, with only 27% using them externally.

2) Wikis work well for “co-assembly” in addition to “co-editing”. Projects requiring different individuals to contribute different pieces of a whole lend themselves well to wikis. Aggressive “co-editing” of content is harder to effect using wikis.

3) Wikis work well when a clear nucleus is provided. Users are more likely to “edit” than “create”, so providing an instructive starting framework offering examples (and even stubs, encouraging people to edit from there) is helpful.

4) Wikis work well with a clear final product in mind. If you are building a user manual, a notes archive, or a conference web site, having a well-defined final product is very helpful.

5) Wikis work well in documenting consensus rather than opinions. If you seek an archive of opinions tied to authorship, a message board is more effective.

6) Wikis work well with short deadlines. Wikis are easy to set up and build upon.

It is noteworthy that the best known wiki in the world, Wikipedia, breaks many of these rules (it is public, includes strangers, frequent co-editing). It is a fantastic example of the power of wikis — but is clearly an outlier with respect to how most wikis are used.

There is a terrific primer on wikis on the Common Craft site for those wanting to learn more or to educate colleagues. Other session notes from the Unconference can be found on the — you guessed it — conference wiki.