You’ve gotta check out Rick Klau’s recent post called “Resume as a wiki.”
Rick has found a great way to use wikis to solve one of the most nagging problems anyone who has a blog or website has – how to keep your bio up-to-date in an easy way.
I must admit that I’ve long been interested in the concept of wikis (and odds are that I probably initially learned about them through Rick). However, concept and reality are two very different things, especially with wikis, and, despite many different efforts, I’ve never been involved in a wiki project that actually “stuck” for me. All of them got abandoned, usually in short order.
But the concept continues to intrigue me.
And, even though this goes against the grain of the “collaborativeness” associated with wikis, I’ve long been interested in personal wikis. They seem that they could be a tool for personal knowledge management.
My sense for wikis is that you need an “easy enough” wiki tool and, most important, a project about which you are motivated or which gives you a clear personal benefit for which a wiki makes sense. Ideally, this would be a small and simple project where ongoing changes are required. I could see doing a book project, certain research projects or even a set of common legal forms by means of a wiki (although any number of other tools would also work).
The problem, at least for me, is that I tend to think of wikis in an abstrat sense that is neither small nor simple. For example, “hey, I could create a wiki that is a personal management tool for all my collected research.”
It’s too big, too vague, too daunting. At the same time, we see the benefit of Wikipedia and how it’s a wiki that really works. We forget that it is now the end product of a ton of work that started from modest beginnings.
I think personal Wikipedia – and the result is that nothing gets done. It’s too big and abstract. There’s also little motivation to keep tweaking it and adding to it over time. The goals are too vague.
That’s why Rick’s idea is so fascinating and may get me off the mark on wikis.
Here’s his notion, even though it’s best to read his post in its entirety. We all have “About” pages on our websites and blogs. They are often some of the most visited pages.
On blogs, it’s hard enough to write a steady stream of posts, let alone revise standalone content like bios. As a result, our bios are often out of date and don’t include the most recent stuff. How many of you have “about” pages that list your last article as being a year or two ago or have an “upcoming presentation” from six months ago?
Rick’s great insight is that a wiki is a great tool to allow you to simply and easily make changes and add links to your bio and other “about” information.
Why do I think this a great insight? Yeah, you can use Word or anything else to do this, but the wiki gives you the sense of a living, often-revised document that is easy to change, add links and update.
It’s also simple, precise, concrete and reasonable in scope – everything the “my personal KM wiki” is not.
And,using a wiki as a tool in this context makes great sense. It fits the wiki concept really well.
Check out what Rick has done with his “About me” page and see what you think.
I like the approach. I also realized that I’ve been a fan of Rick and his work on use of the Internet for a long time – Red Street and Inherent (you’ll learn more when you look at Rick’s “About me” page) were pioneering efforts in the use of Internet by lawyers and I learned much in my early Internet days from both of them.
Rick’s post does a nice job of laying out the specifics of what he did and mentions tools and approaches. By the way, this is the type of useful, practical information for which Rick is well known.
The money quote:

Now that it’s easy to update, I can keep the CV up to date with a minimum of effort. And I can easily capture additional content that I hadn’t done in the past, like links to blog posts made by people who wrote about my presentations.

If you are looking to dabble with wikis, Rick has provided a great idea. I want to try this idea out. As the song says, “from small things one day big things come.”
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
Learn more about legal technology at Dennis Kennedy’s Legal Technology Central page.
Technorati tags: legal technology wiki resume!