For Your Eyes Only (and Anyone with an Internet Connection)

Deep within a subterranean bunker, enclosed by massive concrete walls and iron-plated doors, resides the digital nerve center of the international antiestablishment organization WikiLeaks (Rothman 2010). The group is led by an eccentric with a mysterious past and pending felony charges. His minions, known collectively as “Anonymous,” hack into government and megacorporation networks to carry out digital attacks on those who would shut down WikiLeaks’ operation. Julian Assange has created a persona and organization rivaled only by James Bond’s most unbelievable adversaries. Along the way, he has given a bad name to wikis: websites that provide collaboration tools to capture the shared knowledge of many people.

Before anyone had heard of Julian Assange, the typical experience with wikis was via Wikipedia. This online encyclopedia works on the concept that anyone with credible knowledge of a subject can contribute. A network with enough dedicated and largely trustworthy participants ought to yield an information database that’s more up-to-date and accurate than a published encyclopedia. After many years of exponential growth on the site, the journal Nature announced in October of 2006 that Wikipedia was about as good a source of accurate information as the Encyclopedia Britannica (Giles 2005).

This success has encouraged other organizations to evaluate how wikis can be used among their user groups. Enterprise wikis are smaller collaborative environments that allow a restricted group of contributors to work together on an online platform. Self-hosted platforms like Microsoft Sharepoint and online services like Atlassian’s Confluence wiki offer a variety of features to facilitate collaboration. At a minimum, such services offer similar document editing and tracking capabilities as available on Google Docs.

Last year I was able to implement the Confluence enterprise wiki on a large litigation support project. The scope of this project involved colleagues from a half dozen offices on two continents. We additionally wanted to provide comprehensive project information to our lead expert, whose work-related responsibilities required him to fly between Chicago, London, Abu Dhabi, Mumbai, and Sydney during the investigation phase of the project. The online wiki was able to link the efforts of the team members more effectively than e-mail and conference calls alone.

I later wondered whether such wiki collaboration could be used effectively on a design project. My opportunity came in the form of a local design competition to redevelop the abandoned Chicago Spire site. This ideas competition offered no guarantees for moving site development forward and, as such, was just an opportunity for designers to express their creativity. My team of architects and engineers contributed their ideas via a wiki, and we voted on the key concepts that would define our project. The democratic process led to a very different team dynamic from a conventional top-down workflow. In the end, the team was so inspired by the process that they named their proposal “Chicago Confluence” in a nod to the Confluence enterprise wiki platform.

The wikis that my teams developed empowered and emboldened entry-level staff, who normally lack a voice in large design decisions. We felt that the information shared by staff who were doing much of the deep research greatly strengthened our litigation case. Likewise, the insights provided by team members who were not able to meet in our Chicago office were instrumental in developing the Chicago Confluence proposal. In both cases, the team leaders were open to and appreciative of the wiki concept.

If leaders are willing to open the design process to all levels of their organization to achieve a superior product, might they someday allow collaboration from the general public? Ryan Schultz is a strong advocate for completely transparent architectural design. His new website, Opening Design (http://www.openingdesign.com), seeks to create a user community for small architectural firms to share questions and design concepts for feedback from their peers. The ultimate extension of this concept would be to publish real-time model edits online and tag feedback from the public to individual design elements. It is an extension of the Wikipedia concept to architecture.

The Internet facilitates collaboration in unprecedented ways. Wikis are simply user-controlled websites with special editing tools to leverage that power. They can be used in a multitude of ways for both modest local design teams and conspicuous global information agencies.

James Bond, a champion of the clandestine arts, was a consummate hero of the 20th century. However, a decade into the 21st century, even as real organizations appear more akin to Bond’s traditional adversaries, 007’s services may no longer be wanted.