SlideWiki: Elicitation and sharing of corporate knowledge using presentations

Abstract

Presentations play a crucial role in knowledge management within organizations, in particular to facilitate organizational learning and innovation. Much of the corporate strategy, direction and accumulated knowledge within organizations is encapsulated in presentations. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of current presentation tools for semi-structured knowledge representation and sharing within organizations. We address challenges such as collaborative creation of presentations, tracking changes within them, sharing and reusing existing presentations. Then we present SlideWiki as a crowd-sourcing platform for the elicitation and sharing of corporate knowledge using presentations. With SlideWiki users can author, collaborate and arrange slides in organizational presentations by employing Web 2.0 strategies. Presentations can be organized hierarchically, so as to structure them reasonably according to their content. According to the wiki paradigm, all content in SlideWiki (i.e. slides, decks, themes, diagrams) are versioned and users can fork and merge presentations the same way as modern social coding platforms allow. Moreover, SlideWiki supports social networking activities such as following and discussing presentations for effective knowledge management. The article also comprises an evaluation of our SlideWiki implementation involving real users. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.