Wondering about what my next post would be about, I realized that I was using my wiki in a way that could be worth testing by some other people. Basically, it is about gathering all my sources of information in one place, creating links between them and tagging pages, too. There is a blog to keep my customers up-to-date about market news. Add the fact that I can access my hosted wiki from anywhere and it looks pretty much like the perfect solution for a consultant.
Gathering Information
On of the most important aspects when you are an independant consultant is to be able to process loads of information coming from a great number of places and transform it into valuable pieces of advice. In order to do so, I use a RSS feed reader embedded in one of the pages of my wiki. My three other e-mail accounts have their pages, too and I can access them directly through wiki pages. Whenever I find something interesting, I can add it to an existing page or create a page specifically for it (eg, I have a specific page for every key corporate wiki company). Somewhat like a private Wikipedia...
Creating Relationships
Then the next step is all about creating relevant links between the various topics I may have encountered. I link people to the companies they work for, I assess trends on pages and link to the individuals that took a prominent part in them. I create tags to label all the pieces of information I will have to use in order to carry out one of my projects properly. The wiki backlinks feature always lets me know where I come from while the integrated search engine makes the retrieval of information obvious. Then, once information is stored, broken in manageable chunks and classified, I use the calendar to keep a track of what I have to do and whether I made progress.
Communicating With My Partners
While I am working on a given project, I open its dedicated space to my clients so that we can work collaboratively and exchange information easily through attached files. I discovered recently that I could display MS Office documents (such as PowerPoint Presentations) directly in wiki pages after saving them in html, and this is simply great. My clients do not have to open attached files any longer to find out what they deal with since their contents are displayed direclty on the page. I can export wiki pages in PDF too, and this is often useful to send bits of data in e-mails. Last but not least: I get a RSS feed from any tag I want, which is quite useful when it comes to following specific projects.
Basically, I can get all my information from wherever I am, provided an internet access is available. And guess what? I have not forgotten a file for a long time by now...
Want more ? Stay tuned.
© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC
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