DGC VI: Wiki Organization and Working with the Community

This blog post is part of the DevOps Guide to Confluence series. In this chapter of the guide, we’ll have a look at wiki organization and working with the user community. This post is going to be more subjective than the others, because the recommendation I'm going to make apply to a wiki site with similar goals and purpose as ours. I'm just going to share our experience and hopefully some of it will be useful for others.

The Purpose

First thing that should be clear for you when building a wiki site is what is the purpose that it's going to serve. Confluence has been successfully used for many purposes ranging from team collaboration, documentation writing, to website CMS system just to mention a few. When our team set out to build a wiki site, the goal was to create a wiki platform that could be used by anyone in our company to publicly collaborate with external parties without having to deploy and maintain their own wiki.

It was a pleasant surprise when one of the first groups of users who joined our pilot three years ago were technical writers eager to drop their heavy-weight tools with lots of fancy features in exchange for lightweight and more importantly inclusive collaboration tool. The main issue they were facing was that their processes and tools were very exclusive, and next to impossible for a non-writer to quickly join in order to make small edits. This resulted in lots of proxying of engineering feedback, and inevitable delays. With a wiki, the barrier for entry is very low for almost everyone. There is nothing to install or configure, a browser is all one needs. A wiki allowed a relatively small and overloaded team of technical writers to more efficiently gather and more importantly incorporate feedback from subject matter experts into the documentation. Of course there were trade-offs, mainly in the area of post processing the content for printable documentation (i.e. generating PDFs), but I'm hopeful that as the wiki system matures, more attention will be paid to make this area stronger (Atlassian: hint hint).

Anyway, with the tech writers on board, the purpose, goals and evolution of our site got heavily influenced by their feedback. In exchange we received a lot of high quality content that attracted new users who started using the wiki. This kind of bootstrap of the site greatly helped to speed up the viral adoption across our thirty-thousand-employee company.

Wiki Organization

When we launched our site three years ago, there were no other big corporations with a public facing wiki site (many corporations didn't even have an internal wiki yet, boy that has all changed since then), this put us into a position where we had to be the first explorers in search of best practices as well as things that didn't work at all.

Fortunately, since our team successfully pioneered the area of corporate blogging before the wikis launch, we had some experience with building communities that we could leverage.

Some of the main principles that we reused from our blogs site were:

• Make the rules and policies as simple as possible
• It is a goal shared by all employees to create a good image of the company and make the company succesful. We should trust their judgement and empower them to be able to do the right thing.
• The team running the site is small, so the employees should be able to do as much as possible on their own (self-provisioning FTW!)
• Since we trust our employees, we should delegate as much decision making and as many responsibilities as possible, and let them delegate some to others, otherwise we won't be able to scale.
• There should be very little (close to none) policing or content organization done by the core team. We don't have the man-power for that. Besides, the Internet is not being policed by anyone and things tend to just work out. The popular, well organized and valuable content bubbles up, in one way or another.

Implemented Actions

With our principles laid out, we took these actions:

• We integrated Confluence with our single sign-on and user provisioning system, which made it super easy for employees and external users to log in using their existing accounts.
• Based on the information in our identity systems, we enrolled accounts of all of our employees into an employee-specific Confluence group, which we utilized when setting up global permissions.
• The global permissions were set up so that employees (and only employees) could create new wiki spaces on their own, whenever they had the need, for whatever purpose
• We also opened up all wiki spaces to be viewable by anyone on the Internet, but we left it up to the space admins to restrict permissions if they felt like it was necessary.
• In order to mitigate spam issues, we made it impossible for anonymous users to obtain any write permissions either on the global or space level
• We created a single Confluence theme that was applied to all wiki spaces by default and disabled all the other themes. This was done mainly for technical reasons — the Confluence UI has been changing dramatically over the last few years and these changes often resulted in a need to modify a custom theme to make it compatible with these changes. If we allowed anyone to create their own theme, we'd never be able to upgrade, because of a fear that we'd break someone's theme or alternatively we would have to coordinate our updates with all the maintainers of custom themes
• We created an internal mailing list where space admins and other wiki users could share their experience, ask questions, and report issues.

Things We Need to Work on

Nobody's perfect and neither are we, let's look at what could we improve.

I know I just said that popular content always bubbles up, but considering how hideous the default Confluence front page is, I'd much prefer to utilize that real estate better and highlight popular or interesting content there.

I also think that we could do a better job at highlighting hardworking community members. There were some elaborate attempts to do this, but in my opinion a more lightweight approach could be more suitable for most of the sites.

Lastly, I think that staying in touch with our community is very important, and we could have done a better job at it if we had e.g. quarterly internal mini-conferences on various topics during which we could better gather their feedback. Also some better organized training sessions for our novice users could help boost our growth even further.

Conclusion

The recommendations and practices that worked for us might not be suitable for all Confluence deployments, but in our case things have worked out. There are still many areas where we could have done a better job, but I guess it's good to always have some space for improvements.

In the next chapter of my guide, we'll discuss issues and solutions that are specific for Internet-facing Confluence deployments.