A wiki is the online version of a whiteboard. It will help you avoid sending emails left right and centre and will save about 10h of your time.

Imagine you are in a meeting with your colleagues, peers and managers. Can you see that whiteboard everyone scribbles on? Right. Now take this whiteboard online (set up a wiki), let your peers know what the address is and voila. Everyone is now able to remotely contribute, and changes are tracked.

Use of a wiki in the tourism industry

Wikis are very useful when you need to coordinate an event, or anything that requires planning and input of stakeholders that you can’t meet live or in person. Forget the exchange of emails - and centralise everything on the wiki.

Imagine you are working with a few other tourism operators to try and put together a new tourism package for instance and need a central location to coordinate who does what. A private wiki (which requires a login) is what you require. There are no technical skils required, just an internet connection.

How a wiki saved us a lot of headaches

My partner and I are spend most of our weekends of the boat, skyskiing (a sort of hydrofoil on which you sit towed behind a boat). Warrick has put his hand up to organise the annual skyski meetup and we needed a free, easy tool to:

• Manage who brings which boat
• Allow skyskiiers to sign up to attend the event
• Collect registration money

You can see the Flyin 09 skyski wiki in action: it has a few pages such as home/accommodation/attendees/tshirt.

Warrick and I decided to use Wikispaces, a wiki provider that offers a free (public wiki). If you are after a free private wiki, my friend Adam Wallace recommends Wiki Zoho. There are literally tons of wiki providers. It is now not uncommon for people to use wikis as websites as well.

Huge time saving

We currently have more than 30 attendees registered to attend the Skyski gathering. Without the wiki that would have required Warrick to send out:

• 30 confirmation emails for the registration
• 30 confirmation emails for the purchase of t-shirts
• times this by the number of updates re: the prices of the t-shirts that changed 3 times

We estimate to have saved about 10 hours in total with the wiki. Plus, everyone uses it as a reference tool, and we will be able to use it for next year!

How do you use wikis to save time? Let us know, you might help us spend more time on the water and less in the office!