from Business Week: Anyone in a company or department can post material on these wikis, and anyone else, subject to approval by the creator, can edit or add to them. They’ve become a cheaper, more flexible collaboration alternative to both overtaxed e-mail and complex groupware such as IBM’s Lotus Notes.
Essentially, Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext wiki software allows everybody in a group or even a whole company to literally stay on the same page — that is, on their shared Web pages. That speeds up everything that involves coordination, helping to cut costs.
Mayfield, a tall, gangly Palo Alto native, stumbled onto wikis via an unlikely route. He landed in Eastern Europe in 1995 as a $300-a-month special adviser to Lennart Meri, Estonia’s first post-Soviet President. He wrote some of Meri’s speeches and ultimately developed a Web site for the President’s office, where he caught the Internet bug. “I realized I could have a greater impact being an Internet entrepreneur than as a bureaucrat,” he says.
