This paper reports on the effectiveness of wikis for improving collaboration in engineering. Engineering has evolved from single-site design teams to non-collocated groups of experts with active involvement from every level of product stakeholder. Collaboration tools have been developed in order to accommodate these teams and integrate work on a single platform. Wikis are one such collaborative tool. Wikis are editable websites that allow users to add, delete and change any of the content that is on the site. For engineering collaboration, wikis can be tailored to facilitate a number of different roles like project management, knowledge dump and file storage. To examine the usefulness of wikis in engineering collaboration the authors analyzed the activity on a wiki that is part of a multi-university automotive research project. The project involves multi site, multidisciplinary collaboration on the design of an urban vehicle. By using the wiki, student participants are able to provide regular updates on the progress of their particular subsystems, allowing other team members to track changes that may affect their subsystems and take measures to adapt their design. From the observations the authors hope to determine how effective wikis are as a collaborative tool in engineering design and identify how the technology can be improved. By observing the wiki as it evolves through the design process, it can be seen if it retains its usefulness since each design stage brings new communication and collaborative needs. Wikis also will be compared to conventional methods of collaborations and provide suggestions to improve wikis to make them more applicable to engineering collaboration. Even though this project has provided some insight into the collaborative nature of wikis, there are still limitations to its application to engineering design. The authors' goal is to study the usefulness of wikis to the preliminary engineering design phase of a product lifecycle. Although wikis exist specifically to promote collaboration, and continue to increase in popularity in other settings, adoption of the wiki technology for this project has been sluggish. This does not seem to be due to inherent shortcomings of the particular wiki that are used in this project; all participants have indicated satisfaction with the functionality of the TWiki. The concept of a wiki seems generally viewed as appropriate to team-based collaborative designing. Initial findings show that the participants of the project were able to outline the basis of the project and thus create an organized environment from which to advance their design. The use of the editable tables provided unique form of collaboration as it allowed the users to see the current state of affairs on one side and the discussion of those criteria on the other side. As a result, there was much more activity on these pages than on traditional forum style discussions. The authors hope that with further analysis and research over the next six months, it will be able to make a better determination as to the contribution of wiki collaboration to early engineering design. The results of this work will drive subsequent work in establishing methods and new tools to promote collaboration.
Use of wikis as an engineering collaborative tool
Verwendung von Wikis als Werkzeug der technischen Zusammenarbeit
2007
10 Seiten, 6 Bilder, 9 Quellen
Conference paper
Storage medium
English
Managing wikis: the dangers of copyright
British Library Online Contents | 2007
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|Distributed Collaborative Engineering DCE
IEEE | 1999
|Distributed Collaborative Engineering (DCE)
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1999
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