PIUG Wiki: Communication and Collaboration Par Excellence, The

Searcher, Sep 2009 by Wolff, Thomas E

Between the 2008 and 2009 Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) annual conferences, I developed the PIUG wiki, including the PIUG Discussion Forum (PIUG-DF), to support PIUG and its membership. This paper describes the status of our electronic communications in 2008, the process of developing the new tools, and the benefits that have accrued to PIUG members and others interested in patent information.

Where We Were in Electronic Media

In mid-2008, PIUG [http:// www.piug.org] still worked with a balky email-based discussion list and archives; committees and teams generally relied on email for group interactions. Some prototypes for committee interactions were already in place. The board of directors used a minimally functional discussion list on the piug.org hosting site. In previous years, the annual conference sponsorship committee used a wiki to share documents, but its members found the process difficult and failed to take advantage of other wiki functionality.

The growth of PIUG activities suggested that matters were only going to get worse. Several new task forces and other recently formed conference committees were likely to ask for improved communication tools. Some were independently setting up their own wikis. Nothing that currently existed was going to be acceptable. The PIUG Discussion List (PIUG-L) was an administrative headache, and its functional limitations, such as the inability to attach documents, cried out for an alternative. So I began searching for new applications that would satisfy all pending needs. I saw the SLAwM site [http:// wiki.sla.org] with its vast content and clean interface and recognized that its wiki application could work effectively for PIUG. However, at that point, I did think we would need to keep the discussion forum separate from the wiki.

What We Developed

The PIUG wiki [http://wiki.piug.org] was designed to further the PIUG mission "to support, assist, improve and enhance the success of patent information professionals through leadership, education, communication, advocacy and networking." It was announced at the PIUG Northeast Conference in October 2008 and opened for committee and task force use in November of that year. The wiki complements the current PIUG website, which is reserved for generally static official content, membership management, and commercial transactions. The wikibased PIUG-DF officially replaced the PIUG-L on Feb. 1, 2009.

The Confluence application from Atlassian Pty Ltd. [http:// www.atlassian.com] runs the PIUG wiki; it is the same program the SLA wiki uses. PIUG runs Confluence through a generous nonprofit license from Atlassian. The wiki site is hosted byAdaptavist.com Ltd. [http: I iwww. adaptavist.com], which offers many useful plug-ins critical to the success of the wiki. Integration of the discussion forum with the wiki was made possible by the forum macro in the Community Bubbles plug -in as well as the Descendent Notification that sends out email notifications with each new forum topic or comment. Other critical Adaptavist plug- ins include Theme Builder, for wiki interface design, and User Management, to handle user sign- up requests. Other sources provide plug-ins on attachment checkout/ check-in and web DAV, an administrative tool for treating Confluence like a network drive with drag-and-drop file operations. Confluence and the plug-ins provide extensive administrative control over user access and operations. Site administrators manage global functionality and designate "space administrators" to manage specific areas of interest.

The PIUG wiki is divided into different "spaces" according to content and target community (team or committee) interest. Spaces are accessible from the common Dashboard. Users see links to spaces and content to which they have access rights. The primary space is the PIUG Space shown in the figure below. It has open access that allows anonymous viewing but requires registration for edit rights and access to certain pages and features. The PIUG wiki also contains numerous closed team spaces for the board of directors and various committees and task forces. Space administrators establish membership for their spaces as well as manage content and functionality within their spaces. The PIUG Space and each team space contain at least one discussion forum and numerous content pages, such as knowledge, organizational, and resource pages. Finally, PIUG members may create personal spaces that may be as simple as listing contact information or as complicated and extensive as the user wants. Users may set up multipage personal spaces in lieu of or in addition to professional websites, Linkedln profiles, Facebook pages, and the like. We see personal spaces as a way to improve networking for PIUG members as well as a means of recruiting new members.

At the simplest level, people may view and search the entire PIUG Space, other than members- only content, without logging in. As a result, almost all PIUG Space content is indexed by search engines and accessible to all on the World Wide Web. However, users must sign up and login to the wiki to take advantage of additional functionality, such as adding pages or attachments, posting discussion forum topics, replying to or commenting on pages, or gaining access to restricted spaces and pages. As of May 2009, the PIUG wiki had more than 760 registrants and more than 140 individual contributors of wiki content. Current PIUG membership is not required for registration on the wiki, but users gain additional access and functionality rights on the wiki by becoming PIUG members.