CBC goes wiki for its Spark community

By Todd Mundt • January 25, 2008

“Spark,” the CBC Radio One show that focuses on technology and trends, has the obligatory blog, but it now also has a wiki.

The Spark wiki is in the early stages, but host Nora Young tells the Globe and Mail she hopes listeners will use it

to offer thoughts about show topics, to contribute questions for guests who might be coming up on the program, and generally to interact with her and the rest of the show staff.

The newspaper reports Spark is planning to do its entire show on February 6 using ideas generated by listeners.

Spark is using the Socialtext platform for its wiki. I don’t know a lot about Socialtext, except that I’ve heard good things about its ease of use. Wiki ease of use has always been a speedbump for me - a number of wiki platforms require the use of markup language. It’s certainly something you can learn, as evidenced by the thousands of Wikipedia contributors, but for internal station projects and such, I’ve set up wikis on Zoho and Jot for staff use because the WYSIWYG interface is less daunting. Socialtext is also in this category of products.

What’s a wiki good for? Internally, it’s an excellent place to maintain operations manuals, checklists, policies, etc. It’s an excellent collaborative space to discuss and co-create content. At Iowa Public Radio, our classical music team uses a wiki to share and discuss music programming; I use it as the official location for documents like our local/network break schedule, etc. If anyone on staff spots an error or needs to add new information, she can do it herself.

Externally, wikis can be a fun way to aggregate information. Probably the best-known example is Minnesota Public Radio’s Minnewiki, which is a truly encyclopedic exploration of music in Minnesota.

Wikis are a space where your audience becomes a true partner with you in creating something that’s useful to all. I think it’s one of those level playing fields where we can engage and really interact with our audience.

Not to oversimplify, but if you have information to share, and you know your listeners or viewers have even more information that they’d like to share… a wiki is a way to easily bring everyone together.

What is a wiki?
Wikipedia: Wiki
Some free or low cost wiki platforms: Mediawiki, Socialtext, Jot, Zoho, Wetpaint, Wikispaces

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: cbc, mpr, publicengagement, wiki

Viewing 4 Comments

Dan Misener 9 months ago 1 point
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Todd: Dan from Spark here. Thanks so much for the mention. Here at Spark, we're all very keen to hear what fruit our little wiki experiment will bear.

We're discovering some useful things along the way, like how far in advance to ask for help on a story, how much guidance to give to our listeners... that sort of thing. And we're encountering some interesting questions, too. For example, how can we crowdsource interview questions on a public wiki, but still adhere to the CBC's journalistic policies on providing interview questions in advance?

One of the goals of the wiki experiment is to take the back off the process of making radio. With this comes the question of, "how far out in the open should we work?" Since the show's launch this past fall, we've used an internal wiki for things like contact information, and scripts, and chase lists. But where do you draw the line between private and public information on the wiki?

Clearly, the relationship between radio producers and "the people formerly known as the audience" is changing. Exciting times.

Thanks again for mentioning us.

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http://www.cbc.ca/spark

Josh 9 months ago 1 point
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You might also include TiddlyWiki - http://www.tiddlywiki.com - as a choice. A couple of us are using it for internal collaborations here at WBGO.

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Todd 9 months ago 1 point
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Dan - I'll make a note to check in with you in a couple months for an update on the project and what you're learning from it.

thanks!

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Todd 9 months ago 1 point
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Josh - much love for TiddlyWiki! I've used versions of the software for GTD and for note-taking. It's a slick system and highly portable. Thanks for the note!

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