When: 15th May 2017
Where: Rix Inclusive Research, University of East London
Who: It’s an open invitation to our Innovation Lab, so if you use Wikis you are welcome! We send out information about our events but contact us if you want to make sure you’re in on the next one.
What’s it all about?
The purpose of the Rix Wiki Innovation Lab is to share future developments and improvements planned for Rix Wikis. As well as us sharing our progress with you, we heard from our Wiki users and shared ideas to help inform the next stage of development for the Wikis. Basically, how can we make them better!
The day is really informal and fun (we hope!). It is a chance for us to share and discuss together new ideas about the Wikis. We use lots of post it notes and drawings to record our thoughts so we can reflect on them. In each innovation lab we cover slightly different themes, in this lab we discussed the following:
- Your ideas for Wiki tweaks
- What’s new from us
- Sharing a Wiki – How and Why?
- Sharing Wiki data with other softwares – What are the benefits and for who?
Report from the Day
We started things off by adding to our Wiki tweaks ideas board and thinking about anything that could improve the Wiki. In this lab we had suggestions about events we could run to spread the word about Wikis, as well as using a messaging feature within the wiki and linking to Google Translate.
We then gave your our news. We shared with you the improvements we’d made to adding videos to a Wiki (they now process much faster!) and demonstrated the download an offline version of the Wiki as a PDF document in which we had some really useful feedback.
The theme of the day was sharing a Wiki, so we asked everyone how Wikis were being shared with them, or how they were sharing their own Wikis and who with. Did they share with people in person? Did they use the invite feature? Who is sharing with you?
We explored the current Rix Wiki invite feature and how we could help users make ‘informed’ sharing decisions and help them to understand how professionals are engaging with a young person’s Wiki.
We had great insights on this from people who were sharing Wikis and those who were having Wikis shared with them.
We then started to think about sharing Wikis and their content in a wider context. An expert in this kind of sharing, Paul Downton, shared with us a future roadmap where Wikis are central to other systems and data. This would mean that Wiki users have more choice of what information they can import to their Wiki and also different ways they can share or export things from their Wiki to other people. The response to this presentation was really positive, and people clearly resonated with some of the problems Paul described about sharing data in the place that you work. We think it will make a great addition to our next innovation lab to explore this in more depth.
As always, this innovation lab was a very interesting session and we left with some key insights in where we are going next and some further plans for our next lab. We will be releasing details of the next event soon – we hope to see you there! In the meantime, if you do have any suggestions for the Rix Wiki we are always happy to take note – just drop us an e-mail at: support@rixhelp.org