Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Wiki's Again

[Don Marti (dmarti]

begin Sharon Villines quotation of Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 09:13:21PM -0400:

> The problem is we are getting information stored in too many places with too 
> many passwords and it frustrates people. Including me because i have to tell 
> people how to do things much too frequently — and they don't like having to 
> ask. We do have standard passwords but different sites require different 
> formats, lengths, etc., so best laid plans 10 years in …….

I agree.  Our group (now in site buying mode, see
http://north-oakland-cohousing.org/ for updates)
had an ongoing beef for a while over the social
software.  We're now using 37Signals.com, which is
a hosted service that's easy to use and offers email
notifications.

Most organizations seem to have both "Email people"
(if it's not in my inbox I won't check it) and "web
board people" (keep discussion threads and stuff
out of my inbox or I'll suffer email overload).
So something that can work both ways is a huge plus.

There are two simple wiki packages that I know of
that both (1) support OpenID, so you don't need to
make a separate account just for the wiki and can
use an account from another online service and (2)
don't require you to run a relational database (which
is just one more thing to set up and administer).

Ikiwiki is the one I use personally, since it's easy
to "check out" a copy onto a local system and do
major changes offline, which is faster than going
through the browser: http://ikiwiki.info/

And there's also MoinMoin, which has WYSIWYG editing
and more features: http://moinmo.in/  (probably the
easiest wiki to get running on your own Linux server)

A hosted wiki that's not part of the Google empire
is http://pbworks.com/ -- we also used that one for a
while and had a good experience with it until moving
to 37Signals for an integrated package of discussion,
project management, calendar, etc.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti [at] zgp.org