 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. Today's webinar is Collaborate with Wikis. My name is Kamie Griffiths, and I'd like to welcome presenters who have agreed to help make this webinar possible. We've got three folks available. We've got David Beal, Beth Dettlinger, and Sarah Cove. I'd like to have each of them introduce themselves, and then I will take a quick poll. So David, I'd like you to please tell us a little bit about your work and a little bit about your nonprofit. Sorry about that. I had to mute and unmute all the phones, so we have a little technical difficulty. Hold on one second. David Beal Okay, go ahead. David Beal Alright, sorry about that. Again, my name is David Beal. I'm the Executive Director of SF Revival and the Co-Founder of SFHomeless.net which is a Wiki based in San Francisco hosting Homeless Resources. We have lots of users in the community who are social workers, nonprofits, government who use our Wiki to help serve their clients and get all sorts of information on hundreds of Homeless Service Providers in San Francisco. Kami Great, thank you David. And Beth, can you introduce yourself please? Sorry, we can't hear you. Can you try that again? Beth Do you hear me now? Kami Yes, perfect. Sorry about that. Go ahead. Beth That's okay. My name is Beth Dettlinger, and I'm a Library Development Consultant at the Alliance Library System in East Peoria, Illinois. And I'm very interested in Web 2.0 technology and the use of these tools to support instruction. So I'm very happy to be having this opportunity to talk a little bit about our Wiki which is called Technology Training Wheel. Thank you. Kami Great, thanks Beth. And Sarah Cove, can you please introduce yourself? Sarah Cove Hi, can you hear me? Kami Yes. Sarah Cove Okay, great. I'm Sarah from Wiki Spaces. We are a Wiki hosting company that serves education, nonprofits, and businesses. And I am Marketing Manager at Wiki Spaces which means that I spend a lot of time in contact with the Wiki Spaces community and trying to help people build simpler, more useful wikis for their organizations. So I'm here and set it to help out. Kami Fantastic. So thank you all for presenting today. And I also want to give a little shout out to my co-worker Becky Weekend who is answering questions about ReadyTalk and TechSoup, and also Sarah Manley who is from Wiki. She is also answering any specific Wiki questions that you have while the presentation is going on. And before we get started with the agenda, I'd like to take a quick poll. If you all would take a second to read through this and select the one that is most applicable to you, I think you are only able to click on one. So how are you currently using wikis? I'm not sure what a wiki is. I only read Wikipedia. I contribute to other people's wikis. I am considering using one. We have one. I don't know how it works. I created one but it's not active. We have one and use it every day. So I'm going to give you guys a few more seconds to submit. I see there's about 50 more people to submit. This is kind of fun. All right, so I'm going to skip to results and look. I'm considering using one, nearly half of the group. So thank you all for submitting that. It's nice for us to see who is in the audience and where people are at. We've got a lot of a range of folks out there. So thanks again for attending. So here is the agenda. We are going to talk quickly about what a wiki is, how they are being used, some of the different tools available, what you need to go through to create and maintain a wiki, talk about training, and then share some resources with you. So the first question goes out to Sarah. Let's start by defining what a wiki is and what the benefits are, and how it differs from other online collaborative tools. Sure, so a wiki in very simple terms is a webpage with an edit button. So previously what would happen on the web is if you went to a webpage, you could read the content, but you couldn't actually add to it easily. You'd have to know HTML and CSS, or you'd have to have access to the website servers to add content. What a wiki did was it broke down this technical barrier and allowed anyone regardless of their technical background to edit and add content to the wiki. And a wiki is very simple to use. All you have to do is go to the wiki and go up to this edit button right up here. And when you click on it, the wiki is turned into something that looks very similar to a Word document. Here you can add text right here just by typing in text. You can format the text. You can add links, add images and files, add videos and other media onto your site and more. And as soon as you add what you said, you've typed it here. All you have to do is click Save and the wiki is turned back again into a website that anyone can view. So because of this, a wiki is a really great tool for collaboration. A lot of people can come to your wiki, they can edit pages, and they can help build content together with others. So imagine using it for planning a conference. You can all post different, the agenda of the conference, keynote speakers can type what they are going to be talking about, etc. You can also use a wiki to share best practices with colleagues from around the world. Another benefit to using a wiki is that it allows anyone to bring together resources from all over the world and compile them in a central place. So this would include images, files, and widgets. Now widgets are really pretty cool. And I definitely encourage you to check them out if you set up your own wiki. What a widget is, is it's a piece of code that allows you to take an application that's out there on the Internet such as YouTube or Flickr, and it then embed it directly into your wiki. So you would go to your wiki and you can actually watch the videos, you can hear podcasts, you can chat with others, you can scroll through documents, and more directly on your wiki. There are thousands, not hundreds of thousands of widgets out there on the Internet, and a wiki is a really great place to bring them all together in one place. So to recap, some of the benefits of using a wiki are that it's simple to publish to the web. You can easily edit, type, and save. You can bring together a lot of different people to collaborate on documents, events, etc. And you can bring together all these different resources and tools from across the Internet. These are sort of the main things that set it apart from other tools out there that are out there. You can store this information over time. So over time people can actually see this conference. All of this material is brought together through this collaborative process and the wiki will be there for people to refer to. So that's something a little bit about wikis to get you started. Great, thanks Sarah. Now we're going to move to David. David, can you tell us about your wiki and how it's being used? Can you hear me? Good. This first slide you can see the main page of SFHomeless.net. And like I said before, it's a wiki of homeless resources, serving the population of San Francisco. This is just the top of the page, but the page continues on for quite a bit, providing all sorts of general information for the community which I'll talk about later. In the next slide, I've also included a slide for LA's Homeless wiki, LAHomeless.org. You can see the style differences from San Francisco. They pretty much serve the same purpose however. In the next slide, SFHomeless.net was originally formed to store a large homeless service resource manual on the Internet. The manual came from the San Francisco Bar Association's Volunteer Legal Service Program Homeless Advocacy Project. It's a mouthful but they call it HAP, H-A-P, the HAP manual. The manual is a large binder with 600 pages, 700 agencies, and 45 chapters of categories of service. Before the wiki, people would just have to buy yearly editions of the HAP manual and make notes whenever there were changes to agencies or services. Looking at bullet number one there, converting the manual. We followed the same process in LA as we did for San Francisco. We took existing resource manuals and turned the agencies listed in the manuals, turned them into wiki pages, and then we took the services and assigned those as categories. And I'll talk more about categories later on. But any person with Internet access can search our wiki by agency or category and also use several helpful menus or templates and find services for whatever they're looking for. The next couple of bullets on this slide, even though the name of the wiki sounds like only the homeless are using it, we believe the wiki is actually being used mostly by caseworkers serving the homeless population in San Francisco. We get over 1,000 hits a day and those hits are much more popular during the weekday which leads us to think that professional people are using it. That plus the testimonies from caseworkers saying they use it all the time as their resource. When designing the main page, I decided to post information that I found from different major stakeholders and create community boxes. You can see on the slide the little green box there. That's one of the community agencies that participates the San Francisco homeless service provider network. And by creating all these different boxes on the main page, we would update those boxes with meeting dates and other news that people would be interested in. And that's a tangible sense of the community was formed just by the inclusion of all the major stakeholders in their news. That was something that was kind of unexpected from just having a manual to actually creating a sense of community by this website. And if you look in the next slide here, this is still on the main page of SFHomeless.net. Each of these colored boxes represents a different major stakeholder. So each of these boxes has meeting information and links to their main webpage or news. And as I mentioned in the introduction, we have a large variety of stakeholders using the Wiki, nonprofits, social workers, government employees, and members of the public just trying to learn about homeless resources. And the last slide for category, I just want to quickly go over this very fast because it's something very important about the power of Wiki. And it's also something that people may not grasp by the way. Whenever I do my trainings, I like to use an example from Wikipedia. I think a lot of people have used Wikipedia. And if you ever look at the bottom of Wikipedia, they always have different categories that they use to associate that. And the example I use in my training is the Wizard of Oz. If you ever look at the Wizard of Oz on Wikipedia and you look down at the bottom of the page, you'll see the category that is a 1939 film. It's a film set in Kansas. It's a Judy Garland film. But if you click on the category 1939 film, you get to see a list of all the other movies made in that year and not just the Wizard of Oz. So those different film pages would have their own unique set of categories that include 1939 film, but not necessarily film set in Kansas. So bringing that back to SFMOS.net, when we create a page for each agency providing any kind of service for the homeless, we then look at what kind of service that agency provides and then add that service as a category to their agency page such as dental services or food or veterans or housing. So when someone is looking for a service, they can click on that category and see all the agencies that provide that service. And so when new agencies are discovered or when established agencies cut their services or close, the Wiki then can reflect the change the second someone takes the time to update it. And that's all I have for that. Excellent. Thanks, David. Now I'd like to shoot this question over to Beth. Can you tell us about Technology Training Wheels? Yes. We created Technology Training Wheels which is our Wiki and we also call it TTW to meet the needs of our library system. And I know there are people attending the session from all over the country, so I just wanted to give a little information first about the Alliance Library System. ALS is an East Peoria and is one of nine regional library systems in the state of Illinois. We provide services for over 250 libraries of all types. And you'll notice in the map it is a very large area. We cover parts of 31 counties over 14,000 square miles. The majority of our membership is made up of public libraries. We have over 100 public libraries. And then we also have over 100 school libraries. But we also include special libraries and academic libraries to complete those multi-type categories. In 2008 we did a survey of our membership which identified technology as the number one training need of the system. So this led to the development of Technology Training Wheels. And you'll notice, let me see if I can do this. Yeah, here we go. I do have the address just right up here at the top of the page. So it's technologytrainingwheels.tvworks.com. And it's a web-based pathfinder that focuses on new technologies, things like social bookmarking sites, Twitter, blogs, wikis, those kinds of newer technologies. But we really focused on how these are applicable in libraries. And we modeled our technology training wheels after Learning 2.0. Learning 2.0 was created in 2006 as an exploration and discovery tool by Helen Blowers of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County where participants completed 23 things to learn about technology. She used Blogger to get the information out there. And Learning 2.0 is often referred to as 23 things because that was the key component of it. And it's been adapted by over 400 libraries since that time. But we chose to use wiki rather than a blog for a variety of different reasons. For one, the wiki is very easy to use. It didn't require any kind of work around that we felt that we needed to do with a blog. Blogs are very customizable, but we felt like we were having to do so much that we just wanted something that we could get out of the box and ready to go. Wiki seemed better suited for our goals of building that body of knowledge. We didn't want to do the play and discover like in 23 things and just have brief entries which is good for a blog. We wanted to have assistive exploration that was heavy on content. And because of the collaborative nature of our project, we allow only the five members of the consulting team to create the modules. We like that wiki format. So it allowed us to collaborate, but we also had control over other people who wanted to add to that. We could block that off. We wanted technology training to be modular and internet accessible because we had problems with travel and staffing issues that many of our members face. We didn't want to have to come to the system. We wanted to be able to have them do this anywhere at any time. And we also needed to be able to design it to accommodate short time commitments. And with all those, as Sarah was talking about, all of the widgets that are available in a wiki, it just worked very well with that format. And finally, we needed to be able to accommodate easy edits. Blog posts are traditionally, the edit kit is that you don't edit the posts once they are placed. So we needed to be able to update and add to the modules as information changes so that wiki format worked very well for us and was very conducive to this style. So in January of 2009, we launched technology training wheels, our wiki, and since then we've added a new module every month. So we have about 16 modules that are now available. Fantastic. Thanks for giving us an overview. And I've checked out their site and it's really great. So much really great information for technology training. I want to turn this over to Sarah. We've heard from David his wiki is on wikia and best, which is using PB Works. So can you tell us about wiki spaces and give an overview of the different tools available? Sure. But first I want to say that if you all are looking at wikis and you'll see from this presentation, there are a lot of wiki companies out there and some of them might suit your needs better than others. So I encourage you to test out a few before settling on one. In terms of wiki spaces, our wiki is designed with those who have little or no technical experience in mind. We try to make it as simple as possible so that people can spend more time actually doing their work in less time trying to figure out and use a tool. We also work to provide excellent customer support for our users. We're available if you have any questions. And we tend to respond to emails within 24 hours or less. Again this is so that you can spend less time struggling with a tool and more time actually getting work done. So we're available for that. The other thing that sets us apart from some wiki companies is our private label service organizations. With a private label, you get a completely separate wiki environment for your nonprofit in which you can create an unlimited number of users and wikis for all your different working groups. So let's say you're a global nonprofit and you want to create a wiki for each regional office. You can do that. You can also have a wiki for the headquarters where they share information. Then you can also have best practices wikis where everyone collaborates and learns from one another. And then all of these wikis would be on your own controlled site and you would be able to administer them centrally. So if you want to learn more information about that service, you can visit the link on this page. In terms of features, wiki has a wiki-wiki editor. This is the editor that allows you to, when you edit a page, the wiki appears like a Word document. We also allow you to customize your site and we allow for easy wiki management so you can easily seek pages and add members, remove members, etc. Finally, I wanted to mention the wiki space's TechSoup discount. We offer a discount through TechSoup for nonprofit organizations. What we do is we give away a year subscription on our Plus plan which is usually $50 a year for free to anyone who signs up through TechSoup. I believe that there is a $10 administration fee but if you are interested you can sign up at the link on the page. So that is a little bit about wiki spaces for nonprofits. We've also created this chart and I apologize for the text being so small but you will be getting a copy of the PowerPoint after this and you can look into this further. But this is some of the more commonly used wikis that are out there and some of the prices and features. Up at the top of the slide you can see there is a link to some articles that have more information. There are quite a few options out there so try not to take it easy as you start to do your research. I want to now talk to David. What was your process for setting up your wiki and how many hours and months does it take to maintain? Thank you. Well, I will get to that. The number of hours depends on how many users and administrators are actually active on the site and like how many changes so it really varies. My own personal involvement is maybe 5 hours a week but everybody else's involvement in administering the site is probably about the same. But on the slide here that we are looking at right here, the main page again I wanted to bring people's attention to the ads that are on here. When I decided to pick wikiya as the hosting it was very important that there not be any cost involved because I wasn't sure how successful the wiki would be and I didn't have a lot of money. So they had a hosting where they would actually give you all the services for free and then run the little Google ads. So I don't have the cursor, the little green thing. But if you kind of look at the little rainbow, there you go, perfect. The arrow is now pointing at the little text ads. Those don't appear on every page just on some of the pages but that's how the wiki is actually being paid for. Going to the next slide here, there we go. Back in 2006 when I said that's at FOMOS.net I was looking at other wiki hosts. Again some were charging money and some weren't charging money. And it was a concern of mine that I had better build the wiki on a network where I can be sure all the effort by the people in the thousands of hours of input that possibly could be going into this weren't going to be deleted should the company go out of business. And so again Sarah was saying you have to do your research to make sure that if you do pick a host, don't pick the one with the best price or the one with the flashiest offer. You need to make sure that it's a reputable company because you are sort of putting your reputation out there saying, hey everybody if you contribute to this it's going to be around one year, two years, or five years from now. So that was some research that I did. That's also going there on the second bullet there is the host going to be around two years or five years from now. Another important consideration when you're picking a wiki host is the community services and wiki ownership. The actual content of the wiki is determined by something called a creative common license. I won't go into all the details about that, but there is an entire open source, open content philosophy. Flickr has some of these licenses and you have to decide what kind of license is your information going to be operating under. At wikia, I believe that the ownership is kind of under a creative common license where nobody really owned it, but wikia is responsible for the site. And I personally didn't want to be the owner of the site for various reasons because ffamos.net is a public wiki and I'm trying to encourage the community to express an ownership. So if I get in there and I'm the owner saying do this, do that, delete that, then it could discourage people from the community ownership aspect. So let's see. The community services are also important because you might be familiar with in the news every now and then something comes up where somebody writes something on a Wikipedia page. They say that some famous person has some sort of alleged problem and then somebody comes on there and deletes it and then they say, oh, but it's true, but it's not true. That has the potential of coming up in a public wiki. We haven't had that problem really with ffamos.net but the problem exists. And so at our host, wikia, they have community managers. In fact, Sarah Manly, who is on the phone right now, is one of those managers. And they will take the ultimate responsibility and sort of helping to negotiate what is the best way to post information. And there is like I said, an entire philosophy behind what is open knowledge and open content. And it was important for us at ffamos.net that we sort of attach ourselves to that philosophy in order to give credibility to the site. And again, selfishly I wanted to sort of take away anything you're pointing at me. And let's see, on the next slide, the maintenance just really quickly. I just wanted to bring up some of the maintenance issues. There are three basic users on a wiki. The bureaucrat is usually one of the founders. It's somebody who can turn other users into administrators. An administrator is somebody who can revert pages back to a previous version in case of error or vandalism. An administrator can also block users or block IP addresses. And the basic user, that's kind of a misleading name because the basic user has a lot of power. In the wiki world, users can go in there, create pages, edit pages. They don't really delete pages, but they can delete content off of pages. And if you look at this slide, you'll see the history of a page. This is really important in understanding wiki is that when a page is changed, a page is not deleted. It's just a new version is created based on the recent changes. So this allows anyone to compare versions to each other or roll back a page to a previous configuration whether it's one edit ago or 20 edits ago. So you can actually say, hey, hopefully the print isn't too small. But if you wanted to see the change that I made on May 3rd to this particular page, you just sort of select the bullet and then compare it to whatever. And then by seeing compare the selected revision, you'll actually see that part of the page that was changed. That's a really great thing when you're doing either security or just tracking the history of a page. And the system keeps track of who made that change based on either your user ID when you're logged in, or an IP address if it's done anonymously. So whenever there's widespread vandalism, which again I said has never been a problem on sfamos.net, but if there ever was a problem, you could back out those changes like in a matter of seconds like it took the vandal like 20 minutes to like vandalize 50 pages, but then you could like back them all out in like 10 seconds based on their IP address which has been tracked system-wide. And that's it. Excellent. Thank you, David, for going over that. I know there's been quite a few questions in the chat specifically about this topic. So to quickly reiterate before going on to the next question, this shows you all the edits. You can see the current in the previous view, and you can undo it. You can leave messages for the person who submitted that. So if we don't have time to address all the questions related to this, know that we are already thinking about a next level webinar to go in deeper into kind of the administrative rights. On to Beth. Your wiki is different than David's since you don't allow others to contribute. You have five total contributors. So in a way you are using it like a website, can you tell us about the development process? Sure. And I do want to talk a little bit about why we chose PBWorx because I know David was talking about why he had chosen the wiki product that they had done. We had chosen PBWorx, and it used to be called PBWiki, was because of the educational slant of it. We do a lot of continuing education in our department. We do a lot of training, and this is technology training wheels, so we wanted to keep that educational feel to it. Also, it's free. PBWorx gives out, allows a very large capacity of free wikis out there, and there are no ads, which we also like. And it had been around as PBWiki before for a long time, I mean several years I had used it at my previous position which was over two years ago. So it had been around for a while. It's very easy to use, free no ads. That's why we had chosen PBWorx. And to talk a little bit about that developmental process, because of the collaborative nature of technology training wheels, we have those five consultant members who have, we've granted them all the administrative access. So someone had mentioned something about can you grant them administrative rights like you do on Facebook? Yes, it's very easy to do. It's pretty much the same thing. You just kind of click, click, and they have those rights. Whenever anybody requests rights, I get an email notice so I can go in and then see is this somebody that is just trying to find information about it, or is this somebody that I can identify from one of our member libraries or where that information is? And then I respond to that person individually. So it's nice to be able to get those monitoring. You'll notice that our technology training wheels were constantly updating it. And we had really, because the five consultants are the ones who are putting out that content, there's a reason for that. We wanted control of the content and we wanted consistency of the modules. And especially with we offer CTDU units which are continuing development units for our teachers and academics in the state of Illinois, or schools in the state of Illinois, and they have learning objectives. And there's this process that goes along with it. So we wanted a certain kind of a template for our modules to follow, and that's why it's closed to other people. We also like the idea of the Wiki versus a website. I know that was a question that somebody else had had because of that aspect of control. At some institutions getting permission to edit the website can be more difficult than obtaining top level government security clearance. In some places there's chains of commands that you have to go through, delays, training, and then if something changes during the process you might have to start all over again. So once you have your Wiki, what you can do is work with the person who is doing the website or while you're in the whole process so that the website controls are still with the webmaster and they don't have to worry about you wrecking havoc on their cascading style sheets, but you still have the ability to add, refine, and redesign your Wiki content in a very short timeframe. We started to work more collaboratively with our membership on the modules, but as of yet the Wiki is not more open, but as we continue to innovate and try new things like I mentioned it's only been around for a little over a year. We may for the sustainability open it up to other people, but we'll see as we get there. It might be more of a limited thing and not just somebody who requests to put that information. It might be just we're working with certain librarians to build content. Great, thank you Beth. Now this question goes to Sarah. What guidance would you give someone interested in starting to use a Wiki? So to begin there are a lot of different organizations out there, different types of organizations, and some things will work better for some than others. But just some general tips that might work in general is I'm trying to be saying that you should really start small. Begin with a small event or small project that you need to organize. Don't begin with the goal of we're going to now do everything in our organization on Wikis. Instead plan a concrete event or project such as an annual conference or a holiday party, and then use that event as a way to post information about the event on it. So if you're planning a conference, set up the registration, set up the lodging, set up the keynote speakers, all the information on your Wiki, and make the Wiki the central resource for that event. So it becomes a very concrete thing that people can go to. Another thing is to have a Wiki evangelizer in your organization. So you want to make sure that there's someone there who's going to manage the Wiki, who's going to monitor any of the content that's being added, and who's going to encourage people to actually use the Wiki. Another thing that I've found is I've looked at people using Wikis is it's important to let people make mistakes and to let them correct each other. So an advantage to a Wiki is that anything that is done on the Wiki can be undone. As David was saying, you can revert changes very easily on the Wiki. So if someone deletes all of the content of the page and then types something incorrect, you can go in and invert the page to a previous version, or you can actually go in and edit the content yourself. So if people know that they can actually go in and aren't afraid to make mistakes because they know that they can't actually destroy anything, then they're less timid to get involved. So that's one thing. Another thing is to make sure that as you begin to give people concrete tasks on the Wiki. So if a thing that they can easily do and complete, such as if you're planning the conference, you want everyone who's going to be a part of the conference to update their profile information on the Wiki. So have them go into their page, give them specific instructions about what they should do and what they should fill in. And once they are able to complete that, it's a more rewarding experience. I found that it's harder for people if you just say, here's our Wiki. Go ahead and jump in and begin working on it. People don't know where to begin. They don't know what they can do or what they should do on the Wiki. But if you have a concrete task, you can give them a sense of accomplishment and success when they first begin, and then they're more likely to come back. So those are some general tips for getting started with the Wiki. Thank you. And I know that our other two presenters have some things they'd like to add. So I'd like to start with David, if you have some things you'd like to add about what advice you'd give to Wiki newbies. Well, our particular founding of SFHomeless.net was really based upon necessity, necessity being the mother of invention. And we founded it three and a half years ago. And I think they were only just a handful of Wiki hosts even at that time. So it was very new to us. And we were thinking like we want to put this manual on the Internet that everyone is using. I'm sure there are situations like that all over the world where everybody is sort of dealing with these early additions of this voluminous thing that they have to deal with. And everyone has had to thought, oh, we should put this on the Internet. And then you start to think, okay, is it going to be an access database? How are the changes going to be done? And I really believe that Wiki is a really great technology for this generation because the more we thought about, okay, if we have a database, then we have to have a database programmer, and then there are going to be changes. And then there's that whole hierarchy of how do changes get made. And even in the homeless resource field, there are a lot of databases out there that are kind of using that format. And I just look at them and I think, okay, time to get on the Wiki bandwagon. So I think for newbies you have to start kind of thinking ahead and thinking don't feel that you're tied down to old technologies. You have to do the research. You have to sort of do the kind of like listen to people, attend webinars like this, read up on it, talk to people, and just jump right in. And it's tough at first. People have a learning curve. Whenever I go to training, you probably even online, there are people who have never heard of Wikipedia or used Wikipedia. I mean, there are people out there like that. And I get on there. It's like the sixth most popular website in the world, and people love it. And once you expose yourself to the new technology, you may find that it's indispensable. It's going to be part of your life. Great. Thank you so much. And Beth, did you have anything you'd like to add? Yes, actually I'd like to add a little bit to that first point that Sarah had made about starting small. But even starting small, be sure that you're articulating the purpose and the goals in that development stage before you actually use it. Technology is a tool. And keeping that in mind, don't use technology for technology's sake, but have good ideas of what you want to use it for. And by starting small, we had started with technology training wheels, and we had gradually built the body of knowledge. You don't have to create Rome in a day. It can work over time and having that content and going back. And having a project manager when she was talking about evangelizing is also important. To have someone who is responsible for monitoring or initiating or innovating to keep that very active is also important. You don't want to languish in some kind of witty dead zone. You want to keep making it better to meet the needs of your audience. Fantastic. We have a large quantity of questions. So I'm going to launch right into questions. I'm going to send this one first to Sarah. And then if other presenters have anything to add, please let me know after she's done speaking. And lots of people wondering about security. And if Wikis are secure and HIPAA compliant? Yes. So probably the variety, most of the Wiki services you have out there will be secure. They are going to be following the Internet standards of the time. You'll be able to, if you have SSL, you'll be able to send the information securely to and from your computer to the servers. So I think a lot of Wiki companies right now do have very secure services. If you host your Wiki in-house, you can also host on your own server. So I think both hosted Wikis and in-house Wikis are secure. And if you have questions, you can always check with the specific Wiki company you're looking at and ask about their security options. Great. And other questions had to do with are there plugins that people can use on their sites that can drive them to the Wiki or to their Facebook? And I'm not sure who to send this out to. So maybe I'll just start with Beth. Is this something that you've used, any kind of plugins to drive people to different parts of your website or your Facebook page? We direct them to a lot of different pages. Is that what you mean? I guess I'm not clear of the question that you're asking. I think people are looking for, Sarah had mentioned earlier the widgets that you can bring in applications to do different things. And if there are some things similar that you can place like a badge on your website that can draw people to your Wiki. We use a lot of embedded videos. It's very easy to do. We use a lot of illustrations. We do a lot of PDF files that we link to that we've created, just lots of content. I'm surprised at how easy it is to drop them in. So the widgets are very easy to use in PBWorks. I've also done some things with, we have several different wikis and blogs that we have through the Alliance Library System. And if people are interested, it's www.alliancelibrarysystem.com. And we've used wet paint and wiki spaces and wiki dot. And most of them seem very easy. Some of the wet paint things, because it's more of a combination of a blog, it's not as I think is easy to embed things as the one that I use most often which is wiki PBWorks, sorry. Sarah, did you have anything that you know of like any widgets or plugins that people can use on their sites? Is that a vendor specific thing? It may be vendor specific. If you're looking to, let's say you have a Facebook page or you have a website and you want to link people to your wiki, you can do that fairly easily. I know wiki spaces have badges you can put on those things and drop people in. And you also should be able to add widgets fairly easily. I mean it will depend on the vendor, but I think I'd imagine that most wiki companies realize the importance of this for people and will have some sort of tool to make this available for them. One of the things that I did mention in my setup issue was that when I first got started and I knew a little HTML, but I certainly didn't know how to set up the wiki or set up those colored boxes. And what I did was I actually went and I looked at dozens and dozens of wikis. I actually went on to wiki as a directory and just kind of found out who was the most popular wiki. They were probably spending the time to fancy up their site. There's something where you can actually edit this page or it will actually say view source code if the page is protected. So that way you can actually look at the code behind the actual front of the page. And if you see something under that you like, you can just view the source and then copy it into your own site. And they even have something called a sandbox. I think that's a term that's used across all wiki hosts, but it's a place where it's kind of assumed that people are always going to be experimenting with code, playing with stuff, trying out different colors, whatever. And that's how programmers get by. It's like one of the secrets of programming is you can actually go and steal code from a stealing, but it's like everybody does it. You just kind of look to see what you like and then incorporate it into your own site. Yeah, and David, I like the fact that you brought up that you can see code because that's one of the things that I liked about PB Works is people who don't know HTML, they don't have to worry about it. It looks like a document that's just a Word document. But if you can click on the source and you can see the HTML, so it's very easy then to change the code for people who do have those skills. Thank you. And I'm going to move on to a different question and point this one to David because he talked about being sensitive to the longevity of the tool. How is it easy to export the content in order to import it into another tool? How can you move your data around if you need to? You know, I know that exists. I mean I've heard about it. I've sort of asked about it trying just to see an emergency backup plan. And it is possible to download your site into some sort of format. It might just be some sort of like comma, space, tab format. I don't know because there are lots of categories and things. It is possible. I've never done it. I've heard of it being done. It's the kind of thing where you would just have to research that. But then one of the things that you have to do, if you're going to start a site. And Sarah, with your experience with WikiSpaces, what is your policy on exporting people's data? At WikiSpaces we allow you to back up all your data. You can back it up in WikiText which is sort of the underlying code for the Wiki. You can also back it up as HTML pages. And back it up as PDF. You can convert your content to PDF. So we do have an easy way for you to back up your data and move it if you need to do that. If you're migrating over into WikiSpaces there are different things you can do. But if you can convert your content into HTML we can get that fairly easily up onto a new Wiki. So I also, Sarah, like to ask if you could explain briefly how it works with logging in. Do people have to log in in order to change things? And can an administrator have rights? What are the administrator rights? And lastly, can you give one person rights to change one page but not another page? Is that for me, Sarah? Yes, Sarah, please. So, Sam, at WikiSpaces it depends on the Wiki company but I think a lot of them if they have different permission levels for your Wiki you can give people, they need to log in. If you have a private Wiki they would need to log in in order to edit content. If you have a public Wiki they can just edit it without actually being a member of that Wiki. And then an administrator on the Wiki will be able to either invite people in or grant them access in some way. At WikiSpaces we have ability to, in terms of page permissions, ability to grant people, different levels of users access to different pages. So you have, let's say, all your organizers, you want them to be able to edit a certain page but you don't want members or the public to edit pages. You can grant that to them. And then with a private label service you can get into a very granular permission level so you can have different pages, different Wiki's for group A to work on and then group B would have a different Wiki and all of that would be private. So there's, I think a lot of Wiki companies, there's a way to handle the different levels of users you have, the different levels of access you want to have. Great. And we weren't able to spend too much time or we haven't yet touched on this topic and it is a big one which is Carol's question, how difficult was it to convince non-tech folks on the team to participate in the Wiki? We could dedicate a whole hour just to that topic but I do want to hear from the presenters on their experiences and I'd like to start with David and then move to Beth. So David if you could tell us how you were able to get people to start contributing and what challenges you had around non-technical people? Yeah, like I said, the non-technical people ranged from people who had never heard of Wikipedia to people who thought the Internet was just a fad to people who were just like, just go, go, go. And I pretty much had to convince people that one, if the agency involved was like their own agency that it served their purpose of like updating it like, you know, or the phone number or change of hours, there's these people who are getting these phone calls like all day long anyway. I mean, why would you want to answer the same question over and over and over again if you can answer that question on a website that people are visiting quite a bit and then, you know, save yourself time? I mean, that's one of my arguments to government. I'm always trying to get government more involved and I happen to know for a fact that a lot of government people spend a lot of their time answering the same questions over and over again. And we've tried to develop these frequently asked question pages, like how do you get into a shelter? How do you get aid for veterans, things like that? And so the people who are the experts in that knowledge, I've tried to get them to sort of just like give me something that I can like throw up there and it will save them time. So it's that kind of major addition to the site, but then there's also like the little stuff like, look, you're a social worker among a thousand social workers in San Francisco. If you see something on the site that you know is different or updated, please just click on the edit button. It takes five seconds. It's just like editing a Word document. Just click edit, make the change, it's saved. It's done and everybody benefits from it. And Beth, do you have something you'd like to add? We can't hear you if you're muted. Okay, so I don't have Beth. A lot of folks are asking about cost of starting and maintaining and we've been talking a little bit about that. So Sarah, could you give us a range from your experience and the different tools, like what's the range of cost for starting and maintaining a wiki? It depends obviously on the vendor you use and what you'd like to do with a wiki. I think most, I'd imagine most wiki companies have a free version that you can check out if you get started. wiki spaces, we range from free to $50 a year if you want a private and customizable site to $200 a year if you want custom permissions and more features. We also have our private service is $1,000 a year per 100 users. So if you want unlimited wikis in an organization, there's that. So we have a range from free up to an organization level. And I believe that different companies, obviously different companies will have different price ranges. Thank you. And I wanted to check if Beth had gotten her phone unmuted. Can you do a quick check, Beth? Yes, I think it's working now. I just asked for some reason. It wouldn't let me unmute. So sorry about that. Okay, I just wanted to see if you had anything to add to the question about training and getting people to use the tool. And our consulting staff, even though we're a mixer of boomers and Xers, and though some people are better with technology than others, we all value the use as a tool. So we were very fortunate that the five consultants were really big into, this is a tool that will help our membership. So they were all buying in right from that first part of it. So it just made it a lot easier to get everybody on board. And it also helps that wikis are very easy to use. There's no code that you have to learn. It's very easily editable as we've talked about already. And it seems very intuitive. We didn't have to have any special training for us. So our training issues just weren't there for our consultants. Okay, great. And one last question, and this is, again, could be talked about for a long time, but Richard is wondering, interested in tips for maintaining a logical structure and formatting while allowing large numbers of external contributors. And that's a question that I have as well, is that how do you maintain a structure when people are adding in? And I'd like to have David answer this question. Well, something I haven't mentioned yet is the ability to protect pages. There's a really tough decision that people have to make. Do you protect like your main page? For example, you'll notice that in the larger public wikis the main page is protected. And what that means is only administrators can alter that page. I think there may be some other options where you have to be at least a registered user to make a change to that page. And that's the only page that we were really concerned about. As far as keeping integrity intact because theoretically somebody could come along and say, hey, I don't like these community boxes anyway. Let's try circles. I don't know. It would just be too confusing for people. We're still trying to sell this whole concept to the community. And I don't want people to all of a sudden to change it and frighten people. It's been hard work just to get people just to accept the wiki that I don't want there to be major changes. But I mean, whenever people have said like, hey, let's add this, I'll be like super quick to add it. And then as far as all the other pages, we have about a thousand pages on SFOMOS.net. And most of those pages are agency pages. And some people add pictures. Some people add all sorts of like little menus. You can do whatever you want to those pages. I mean, as far as like making it look nicer, it's just that main page that again, it was a tough decision. And it kind of goes against the grain of that whole wiki philosophy I was talking about before, and it's frowned upon. But again, there was sort of a higher purpose. We are trying to again sell the community on something that's really SFOMOS.net is a really special wiki in the sense that it's really going into like unknown territory and trying to bridge government and nonprofits in the public together to kind of get out of that whole database mentality. So again, we decided to make an exception on that. Great. Thank you, David, and to Beth and Sarah for presenting. That's all the time we have. I want to let you know I've got some links to resources in the PowerPoint that you'll get. And you'll also get these in the post event message that I'll send out. There were way more questions that we didn't have time to answer. So please post those to our community forums and we have volunteers watching to answer those questions. If you're new to TechSoup, we have more than just webinars. We have donated software, a lively community forum where you can post your questions, articles, and blog posts about technology-related topics. So please check out TechSoup.org and find out what we have to offer. We've got a couple great webinars coming up next week. We'll be talking about Second Life and how nonprofits and libraries are using it to collaborate and connect. And the week following, making it easy to give, taking our mind donations. So a broad overview of the different ways that you can take online donations. And we'd like to thank ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio-conferencing and web-conferencing services. So we want to thank them. And thank everyone for attending today and hope you got some good information. Please take a minute to fill out our post-event survey. I want to thank Becky and Sarah for answering chat questions and the presenters again. Thank you for all the time that you took to put this presentation together. It's really great. So thanks again everyone. Have a wonderful day. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.