(2003-09-30) Getting Intranet Written

Richard Mac Manus on the challenge of getting people to write for the Intranet. My reply:

I think the key is to focus on publishing stuff that needs to get written anyway.

• procedures, work flows, etc.

• Mission, strategy, vision (corp level, team, project)

• logs of progress

• meeting agendas and outcomes

Most of this stuff is getting written anyway (or it sure as heck should be). The key is to get it out of MsWord and MsPowerpoint and into editable and linkable HTML.

An approach I like is using team-focused wiki spaces. Because that way everyone's work comes together most directly. (Though I still do discussions of those pages via email.) (Corporate Blogging, Wiki For CollaborationWare, Email Discussion Beside Wiki)

Update: I'm smelling the need for Web Outliner. (But I want the output to be some SmartAscii, not HTML.)