Stewart Mader Launches a New Venture

I had the chance to sit down with Stewart Mader and Matt Moore to talk about Enterprise 2.0 and wikis in particular: Enterprise 2.0 Discussion with Stewart Mader, Matt Moore and Doug Cornelius.   There was also bit of discussion of location based social computing (is it as good as dog urine?) and bit more in a separate podcast on social bonds and salty language.

Stewart just let me know he is branching out in a new venture and sent me this information:

"Grow Your Wiki" Grows into Specialist Consultancy

Today, I'm taking the wraps off something I've been working on for a long time.Grow Your Wiki is growing - into a specialist consultancy focused on organizational wiki adoption.

This is as much a launch of something new, as the continuation of something I've been doing for a long time. I built my first wiki in 2003, for science curriculum, and building The Science of Spectroscopy showed me the amazing capability of a wiki to bring information to life, and get people more deeply involved in its creation, growth, and use.

Since then, I've been working with organizations to introduce wikis for internal collaboration, knowledge sharing, and project management. I've done it both as a full-time job, at Emerson College and Brown University, and as a consultant for a number of other organizations. In late 2006,Atlassian (makers of the Confluence wiki) as their Wiki Evangelist, and have continued to evangelize the benefits of wiki use in an organizational context at conferences, on blogs, and in my latest bookWikipatterns. I've also continued to work with an even broader range of organizations on their wiki adoption efforts.

In the past several months, I've been fielding more and more questions from organizations that want to know how to get wiki adoption going the right way. I believe that to make wiki adoption successful and fully realize its benefits, they really need a good plan for managed growth that takes into account their size, history of enterprise software use (or misuse!), ensures people get the most out of their wiki use, and helps minimize performance and efficiency issues related to too-rapid growth.

So, I'm launching this new venture to focus all my energy on helping organizations get the most out of their investment in wikis as a collaboration, knowledge sharing, project & meeting management, and communication platform.

To that end, I'll be leaving the full-time employ of Atlassian as of this Friday, August 15th. I'll continue to work part-time on some special projects for the company until the end of September.

If you're looking to grow wiki use in your organization, I'd love to help you plan a strategy for managed growth. You can use the contact form to get in touch, and I'll get back to you within two business days.

--
Stewart Mader
Grow Your Wiki - www.ikiw.org

Stewart also sent along this tidbit on his four steps to successful wiki adoption (.pdf).