1) A Hawaiian fish that most non-natives wouldn't eat on a bet
2) A rare but curable skin problem
3) An effective way of collaborating on projects and/or documents

You've probably guessed it. A wiki is a collaboration tool that has sprung from the open-source community, and it might well be the killer app that will spur more open-source adoption in Corporate America.

Many large enterprises have viewed open source with some degree of skepticism because of intellectual-property issues, support and service questions, and so forth. And then there's the old standby, as one open-source practitioner at a global banking concern explained it to me once, of "not having anyone to blame when things go wrong."

And sure, open source has made strides in major companies, though not usually for the bet-the-business types of apps. If anything, it's been a slow, painful struggle by the techies to introduce open-source operating systems to run some of their servers (OK, we're talking mostly Linux here) or bring in software tools to do some programming and do other important but behind-the-scenes kinds of things.

That might all change, as more companies are bound to embrace the wiki.

For a great starting point, you might want to check out this article that serves as a primer to why and how businesses might use wikis.

One use is as an all-singing, all-dancing corporate content-management system. A great example here is the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia comprising almost 675,000 articles. Subjects range from science and history to society and technology. The English version--there are also versions in Dutch, French, and other languages--was started in 2001. And here's the beauty: Using simple tools, anyone, technophobe and programmer alike, can edit an article or start a new one.

A simpler, more targeted use is like what's going on at the Global IP Alliance, which has started a VoIP-related wiki.

For more corporate applications, another place to check out is SourceLabs, which recently revealed a catalog of open-source IT projects. Updates about projects can be shared via Really Simple Syndication, a language based on XML. (For more on RSS, check out InformationWeek's RSS page.)

If you're already among the wiki-converted, please visit my blog entry, drop a note, and let your IT colleagues know what you're doing and how it's going.

Johanna Ambrosio
jambrosio@cmp.com
www.informationweek.com

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