We’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to drive adoption of your PBwiki in your organization.

Below, I’m including a 5-minute video on tips for successful adoption, plus some new tools we’ve created to make it easy for you to share PBwiki with your co-workers, students, or friends.

Wiki Adoption from PBwikiWebinars on Vimeo.

Video Shortcuts

0:22 — What to expect when you deploy your wiki

0:58 — Three Steps to Success
- Starting with a core team
- Put yourself in your users’ shoes
- Weave your wiki into others’ workflow

1:14 — Go bottom up and horizontal!

1:26 — Wiki adoption patterns: Top down, bottom-up, sideways

1:38 — Avoid Blank Page Syndrome

1:44 — The biggest determinant of wiki Success

2:00 — Make logging in easier

2:16 — Keep using your wiki for various purposes (not just a one-time event)

2:45 — Gentle onboarding: How to help new users get used to your wiki

3:20 — Weave wikis into workflow

4:16 — Other tactics to drive adoption of your wiki (include your wiki in your signature, “This should be on our PBwiki” stickers)

5:00 — Create editing cycles so users don’t hit a brick wall

Need more resources? The best place to learn more about driving adoption is our Driving Adoption wiki, which includes detailed tips and tricks, presentations, and case studies for integrating PBwiki into your organization.

Are you a cloud computing user?  If you use PBwiki, you are.

Not only is PBwiki a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, but we also run significant portions of our infrastructure “in the cloud.”

If you’re interested in cloud computing, or in how PBwiki uses cloud computing to lower its costs and deliver better service, check out David’s panel at 10 AM on Wednesday, October 1.

While you’re there, you should probably check out the rest of the conference as well.  Here’s how SDForum describes it:

The burgeoning availability of computing resources “in the cloud”, while still something that’s only being utilized by early adopters and for small projects, is going to transform software development as much as any of the revolutions mentioned above.

Join SDForum as we present our first-ever Cloud Computing conference. This daylong event will address the issues and controversies surrounding cloud computing help you to understand the technologies and risks involved, and enable you to figure out what, exactly, your company should do to take advantage of the ongoing revolution.

Click here for more information about the conference.

Click here to register for the conference.

We’ve just announced two new back to school programs for educators that will let them get free Gold upgrades and other gifts like LEGO sets and up to $1,000 for buying school supplies. Here are the details:

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Program for Teachers and Librarians

PBwiki’s Back To School Challenge
(http://www.backtoschoolchallenge.com) allows up to 100,000 individual
teachers and librarians to sign up and earn a free one-year Gold Upgrade
(regular price $250) by using, blogging about, and referring others to
PBwiki. In addition, top performers in the challenge will receive donations
such as a $1,000 gift certificate from PBwiki for purchasing school
supplies, educational products from LEGO(R) Education (The LEGO Group’s
educational division), autographed books from award-winning science author
Janice Van Cleave, and the bilingual board game GiftTRAP (named “Best Party
Game” by both Games Magazine and Creative Child Magazine). “With sales of
more than two million copies, and translations in fifteen languages, my
books are tools used by educators around the world to expand science
education beyond the textbook,” said Van Cleave, the author of popular
books such as Janice VanCleave’s Teaching the Fun of Science. “By enabling
collaboration, wikis can add binomial expansion to the educational value in
my books.” For a list of these donations, visit the PBwiki web site
(http://pbwiki.com/content/btsc-sponsors).

Program for School Districts and Educational Organizations

PBwiki’s Partner Program for Education allows school districts and
organizations that standardize on PBwiki to offer free one-year Gold
Upgrades (regular price $250) as an exclusive membership benefit. Already,
organizations such as the Mathematical Association of America, and the
Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers have signed up to offer PBwiki to the
individual educators they serve. “We use PBwiki to help promote our annual
meetings, and as a collaborative tool for a variety of special projects,”
said Michael Pearson, Associate Executive Director of the Mathematical
Association of America. “There is growing interest in the use of wikis and
other interactive, web-based tools for the classroom. Providing a free
trial of PBwiki will allow our members to experiment and learn how to use
wikis to benefit their students.” School districts and organizations
interested in joining the program should visit the Partner Program page
(http://pbwiki.com/content/edupartners).

The Back To School Challenge and Partner Program for Education run
through October 31, 2008.

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But don’t take our word for how cool this is…here’s what CMSWire had to say:

“These applications and services will allow teachers and students to collaborate in ways that students have never imagined. The uses are virtually unlimited.

Most of us here at CMSWire probably can’t even count the ways we could have utilized such technologies back when we were in school.

The effects of this could inspire students and teachers to familiarize themselves with technology, Web 2.0, and collaboration. This won’t keep students out of the principal’s office for using their cell phone during class, but it is nice to see companies like PBwiki giving back to the educational system. More companies should have similar programs.”

eWeek suggests that publishing information on your wiki may help techies in the job search:

Like the Academia from which the industry sprung, career Techies have long sought publishing – professional journals, trade publications, books – as a means to push their process, tout their technique and promote their name.

The concept has never been easier thanks to the Wiki and it’s the first place a Web 2.0-phobe should turn to self-promote “add business value to your career,” said Joe Gentry, CTO and Senior VP of Software AG, who fancies himself knowledgeable in the matters of IT career navigation.

“If you are a developer, analyst or administrator with a couple of decades under your belt, you’ll probably concede (as a good corporate citizen) that there’s a bunch of business domain knowledge stored inside your head that ought to be passed along to others in the organization before you call it a career,” Gentry said. “But writing a stack of traditional user manuals is like eating dirt, right?”

The author is kind enough to then link to PBwiki (along with two other companies who shall remain nameless) as a great tool to create and share your knowledge.

If you go down this path, don’t forget to share your knowledge with others by submitting your site to the Public PBwiki Directory.

We’ve got a couple more PBwiki stories to share…

We’re #1!  We’re #1! We’re #1!

SEOmoz gave PBwiki 1st Prize in the “Hosted Wikis” category of the annual Web 2.0 Awards.  We’d like to thank the Academy, our director, our co-stars…but now they’re cueing the music and shooing us off the stage.

Wikis at War

Over on the Wikinomics Blog, we’ve got a guest post up about how the University of Wisconsin is using PBwiki for a research project to help protect troops in Iraq from attacks by equipping Hummers with airless tires that are harder to disable.

I’ll Finish Remodeling The Kitchen After I Check My Wiki

PBwiki reaches out to contractors with an appearance in the LowesForPros newsletter from the popular home improvement superstore.  We talk about how PBwiki makes creating your own company intranet a lot easier than you might think.  Now if only you could use your walkie-talkie to post edits….

Now this is one of those things that makes us feel good.

Architecture students from the University of Kansas and Tulane University are working together to help rebuild New Orleans’ 7th Ward.

One one year, the project, called “Rebuilding the Seventh” has already grown to encompass nearly 1,000 documents.

The professor leading the project, Nils Gore of Kansas, had this to say about PBwiki:

“It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it works.  When you’re looking for a tool to enhance collaboration, what more could you possibly want?”

InformationWeek just came out with a great article on the impact of Web 2.0 collaboration tools like PBwiki on the role of IT.  Web 2.0 and Software-as-a-Service represent a major paradigm shift for IT managers, but as InformationWeek puts it:

“You can ignore Web 2.0 tools, or try to shoo users away. If you take one of these approaches, let us know how it works out for you. A better approach is to embrace new collaboration methods, whether through an in-house deployment, a software-as-a-service option, or both.”

Longtime customer and FOP (friend-of-PBwiki) Doug Cornelius also had some nice quotes about PBwiki versus SharePoint:

“It’s a classic story of enterprise 2.0,” says Goodwin Procter’s Cornelius. “We’re up and running with PBwiki in 30 seconds, and SharePoint is taking a year.” Fact is, users will find ways to make their working lives more convenient–with or without the input of IT. This is particularly true when it comes to Web collaboration tools.

Music to our ears. 

When I was putting together PBwiki’s Terms of Service a few years ago, I spent extra time with our lawyers to make sure that it was as pro-user as possible. The first few versions I got back weren’t good enough and I pressed them to make it shorter, simpler, and to put more rights in the hands of users. I eventually ended up with something I felt good about. Something that made it clear that we weren’t going try and take ownership of user’s content and that we took their privacy seriously.

That hard work has been paying off, with many enterprise customers praising our confidentiality clause for private wikis and our lack of authoritarian clauses. Today, Joshua Greenbaum at ZDNet published an article called Making Web 2.0 Safe for the Enterprise: TOS à la PBwiki that did a great job showing how important terms are for an enterprise service. So hurrah! We’ve got your back.

David E. Weekly
Founder & CEO

That’s geek code for “PBwiki loves South by Southwest!” One of the advantages of a tool that’s simple to get set up and running with like PBwiki is that you can use it to make quick, ad-hoc workgroups at conferences like South by Southwest. If you’re looking to post your own itinerary or put together a spontaneous birds-of-a-feather session, come set up a new wiki with us and email david+sxsw@pbwiki.com with the address and I’ll add it to the official PBwiki SXSW page.

Cheers,
David Weekly
Founder & CEO

Uber-blogger Henry Abbott of TrueHoop (now part of ESPN) is heading to the NBA All-Star Game, and he’s taking PBwiki with him.

Henry has asked TrueHoop’s tens of thousands of readers to join with him in creating a wiki for the All-Star Game which will include articles, posts, videos, and other original content.  And he’s chosen PBwiki.  Here’s what Henry had to say:

Let’s use that wiki to assemble, starting now and running all weekend, all of the best articles, blog posts, video, and original anecdotes about what’s happening all over the city. Not just the stuff that’s in press releases, but what’s really happening on the ground.

If you’re from New Orleans, and have a story to tell about having the All-Star game in your city, please share it here. If you find a great article or video about New Orleans, this is the place for it.

Basically, I am hoping that with your help this can become a go-to resource of the best real New Orleans information as All-Star Weekend rolls on. It’ll take a lot of you pitching in with thougtful contributions. But if you do, this’ll really be something.

Also, I’ll be honest, in the past I have found wikis kind of hard to operate. Not this one. It’s really simple. Try it. (emphasis added) Here’s the link again. Thanks.

Credit the assist to David Cohn of DigiDave fame for setting up the wiki.  Big thanks to both Henry and Dave for introducing PBwiki to such a broad audience.

If you want to visit the wiki, just go to http://truehoop.pbwiki.com.