Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Wikis (was Research database?)

[Becky Weaver (beckyweaver]

Thank you, Molly! I will pass your compliments on to the guy responsible for 
setting up & maintaining our wiki.
   
  We have not been 100% thrilled with Wikihost. After a lot of research, we 
decided we preferred Mediawiki, which is the engine behind Wikipedia. However 
by that time our wiki had gotten so big that it was going to be a major 
undertaking to migrate to Mediawiki. So to date, we've stayed with Wikihost. 
   
  But if your community is contemplating setting up a new wiki (and ours has 
made creating & sharing lots of complex information among lots of people much, 
much easier), I recommend checking into Mediawiki or one of the many other wiki 
hosts. Some are free, some cost money. 
   
  We also sprung for a calendar program, Calcium Calendar, which has made 
creating and updating our community calendar, previously a difficult & 
thankless job, a collaborative & relatively painless process. It cost about 
$100. Anybody with a login & password can update the calendar, so changes and 
additions get made by the person who knows the most about what's going on. This 
has renedered our calendar an extremely useful communication tool. It's at: 
http://www.austincohousing.org/calendar.html. 
   
  If you have few gatherings always at a regular date & time, calendars 
probably aren't a problem for you and spending $100 for one probably sounds 
crazy. But for communities in the midst of development, like we are, this has 
been very helpful. It eliminated what had been a constant aggravation - keeping 
everybody informed about what was happening when and where. 
   
  Becky Weaver
  Central Austin Cohousing/Kaleidoscope Village
   
  

Molly Lazar <mollyschaefer [at] yahoo.com> wrote:
  Central Austin Cohousing (Kaleidoscope Village) has an excellent wiki. Their 
host is free and is located at http://wikihost.org/ . It looks pretty easy to 
set up (though I haven't used it myself).

Molly Lazar
Resident, Shadowlake Village Cohousing, Blacksburg, VA
Member, Blue Ridge Cohousing, Charlottesville, VA