Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: storing your community's documents on-line

[Craig R. Wright (crw]

Old Oakland at Swans Cohousing Association is trying out XWiki 
(http://www.xwiki.org <http://www.xwiki.org/>). I can’t speak for the entire 
community, but so far I am loving it. It is like Confluence but free (open 
source, can be run for free but you can also pay them to host it for you). I am 
personally managing the installation, however if you are a non-profit (or maybe 
a not-for-profit?) you can request free hosting from the XWiki folks: 
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Hosted/ 
<http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Hosted/> (far-right, see the “Request” 
button).

IMHO wikis are the way to go for this type of information. Modern user-friendly 
wikis like Confluence and XWiki give you control over the information 
architecture, user access management, and allow for relatively risk-free 
collaborative editing (in the sense that any change can be rolled back). The 
cost is that a group of someones need to be relatively competent application 
admins to manage users, document visibility, and related issues. 

The main thing to consider with a wiki is how difficult the learning process 
will be for your community. So for example, if you tried to implement MediaWiki 
and had to explain to everyone how to edit in wiki markup language, that 
solution would have been DOA in our community. It was important to me to pick a 
solution that had a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, like you see 
in Word or Google Docs. I also ran a series of very basic trainings to get 
everyone up to speed on how a wiki works.  

FWIW we do not do any online calendaring at this time.

Be well,
Craig


> On Mar 10, 2017, at 9:26 AM, Mary Baker, Solid Communications <mary [at] 
> solid-communications.com> wrote:
> 
> Cohousing.site