Social Media @ Work - Using a wiki for presentations

By Jeff Moriarty (Intel) (16 posts) on May 1, 2008 at 5:07 pm

It's a little known fact, but Intel doesn't really like to build processors. We only make them to fund our ability to go make PowerPoint presentations (PPTs). We've got PPTs that cover everything from org charts to corporate branding to project status to technical architectural roadmaps. It's a rough road to recovery, but today my team decided to hit the methadone and tried presenting using a wiki instead.

Now I think PowerPoint is a fine tool, we just use and abuse it beyond its intended function. For example, sometimes a discussion is just better served with visual cues, whether charts, pictures, or even (I suppose) those stick figure clip-art people. Likewise a discussion sometimes needs to have a constrained, focused agenda, which is what I get with a series of PPT slides. PowerPoint definitely has some valuable uses.

In our case, we wanted an interactive discussion. The scenario was a presentation on the status of the mobile developer community on ISN to people two levels up the food chain. The recipients were my manager, his peers, and his boss. The outcome we wanted was to level set on the status of our community, get input into our strategy and plans, and actively discuss some of the challenges we're facing. Interactive discussion = Good. Silence while everyone does email = Bad.

Our preparation was to put all of the background material and presentation content on a page into an outline in our internal wiki. The wiki allowed for collaborative editing, and brought a lot of transparency to the discussion. We didn't want to surprise the viewers with the no-PowerPoint approach, so we sent out the wiki address two days in advance with an invitation for comments. We cautioned them that the content wasn't finalized, but welcomed input on the planned topics and outline. We incorporated several comments into the final presentation, so it worked well.

During the presentation itself, I held the page open for editing while others viewed it either projected in a conference room or on their own laptops. We explained the agenda of the presentation (Current Status, Future Plans, then Roadblocks & Challenges) and encouraged people to ask questions about anything they read - not just what I was talking about. We knew we couldn't cover every point in the wiki, but by letting people read on their own we could jump to the hottest areas of discussion for more detail.

Keeping the wiki open for editing allowed me to make changes as we talked. At one point I was able to update some metrics that were IM'd to me by someone else on the call. We added some of the follow up tasks and questions as we went, then fleshed it out in more detail afterwards. The wiki page is now the full agenda, content, notes, and meeting minutes for the entire presentation.

Specific thoughts on using a wiki for presentations:

Overall, it was a definite success and we'll be trying it again in more meetings. It helps that our team is willing to try odd things in the name of both Social Media Experimentation and Saving The World From PowerPoint Poisoning, but I can't imagine others won't be willing to give it a shot.

I hope this was of interest, and I'd love to hear any thoughts on how to improve this technique for the next time around!

Categories: Intel® Software Network 2.0, Mobility, Social Media & Virtual Worlds

Comments (9) Comments RSS Feed

By John Bell on May 2nd, 2008 at 5:15 am
This is great to hear. i am tired of the linear flow of powerpoint (although i do love its ease and flexibility as I use lots of multimedia). I guess you would just march down the wiki page to drive the conversation forward. Would it have worked if most people weren't in front of a computer?

By Jeff Moriarty (Intel) on May 2nd, 2008 at 6:57 am
@John - I think it would have worked without everyone in front of a computer, although probably not as well. The presentation became more interactive, so I think it would have been easier to follow along. It didn't rely on everyone being able to "Move to slide four" to know what we were talking about.

If we had graphs and charts to review I think it would have been much more difficult, but in that case I really don't know what you can do if someone is really not able to be in front of their computer.

By Josh Bancroft (Intel) on May 2nd, 2008 at 10:21 am
Good for you, Jeff. You can get some surprisingly great presentations done using a wiki (including images for charts and graphs). I love encouraging people to use the "discussion" tab for an article, to post questions and comments during the presentation. That way, you can use it interactively, like a LiveMeeting or whatever, but when you're done, you leave a record of the meeting/questions/answers behind in an indexed, searchable, easy-to-find place, so that the knowledge that gets exchanged during the meeting doesn't just evaporate.

I'd love to see us adopt this practice in the whole team. I hate PowerPoint. It's the most abused and mis-used piece of software out there. It has it's purposes, and strengths, but it gets SO abused at Intel that I almost feel sorry for it. I half expect Clippy to come out sometime during a particularly bad eye chart slide and start crying "Why!? Why are you doing this to me!?" ;-)

By Sharon Greenfield on May 2nd, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I'm not a powerpoint hater, per se, but I really see the advantages of using a wiki in a presentation or for general meetings. Good for you Jeff and your group, for trying this out!

My group of friends and I use a wiki for notes when we get together for meetings (let's call it a book club.) What I've noticed is that it really helps us all pay attention and contribute, because we know that what is being said is live and being formed right there. It kind of brings an accountability to the meeting, and an internal interest in being involved in what is being created.

In some ways I would call what you did a 'Meeting 2.0'. This is why-

People learn in various ways, and academics have found that it's best to layer different forms when attempting to communicate. That's why it's great to have a visual when also verbally presenting; different people with focus on a different medium depending on how they best learn. And they sink into different parts of the brain.

So when one is verbally presenting with a powerpoint you are in a Meeting 1.0 - that is you can be verbally in a two way conversation and exchange of ideas, but the visual part of the communication is still one way only. The powerpoint is passive and not, in and of itself, conducive to interaction between the creator and the viewer.

However, by using a wiki, you've basically made your meeting '2.0', that is interactive on both the verbal and visual fronts. Instead of a one way relay of information where the viewers are passive, and the relaying of visual information directionally in one way, you've created a visual interaction and conversation.

Well done! Hope it was useful and continues...

And no, I won't admit that my group where we use a wiki is a bunch of engineers playing D&D. I said 'book club'.

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) on May 2nd, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Blasphemy. How dare challenge the Doctrine of Powerpoint! It's superiority to all other media is conclusively established, as in shining examples like the well-known Powerpoint upgrade of the Gettysburg Address (http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm).

Kidding, of course. Nice work on the meeting format experiment.

By José Guimarães on May 21st, 2008 at 3:25 am
Fantastic post! I'm working at the marketing dep. of an online bank in Portugal (haven't came here yet? Gotta try us sometime), and next week i'm running a presentation based on new ways of working (peers, paris, etc), inspired by the Intel case around ideas, candidates and how it interacts with students and universities.

Somehow, me and my partner find that PowerPoint presentations are XXth century but still people can't just leave them behind, and the new age we're experiencing tends to lead us to new ways of exchanging ideas, walking towards innovation and making experiments... Meetings 2.0 is really what we're trying to make here at our company, to make a difference, more than what we're going to talk about (you guys at Intel), it's about the way we're going to make it!

Reading this post i had an epifany, and i've said to myself "this is it, look no further!"

We're launching a dicussion group at groups.google.com/group/wikicoffee (wikicoffe@googlegroups.com) at this precise moment, and we're going to invite everyone participating in this meeting to make their questions about Intel, expose their doubts and opinions, from the technician to the CEO... the way i see it, we can both be fired or we can make our point here! ;)

Surely we're not going to be able to make everyone interacting live with us (not enough computers in the room), but we're going to focus on the main questions the will come up and try to provide the audience with answers the best way we can. The better part is that, after our (simple) presentation, the Wiki Coffee group will still be up, and (i sure hope so) receiving further contents to allow full interaction of everyone in this company.

- Last but not least, my special request: is it possible for anyone there at Intel to make a small contribution to open this Wiki Coffee group the best way i can remember? ;) -

By Jeff Moriarty (Intel) on May 21st, 2008 at 10:12 am
@Jose - Thanks for the comment! I'm not sure how I could contribute to Wiki Coffee, but I'd love to hear more, especially how it goes using an open tool like a wiki to develop your content. Keep me posted!

By José Guimarães on May 21st, 2008 at 11:17 am
Hi Jeff! By answering me, you've already made your first contribution: you have proved that Wiki tools can work out just fine... or even better than the ones we are used to! With your permission, i wish to use some of your contents as subjects/material at the Wiki Coffee session i'm participating.

The presentation i'm going to do will be focused on Intel's programs with universities. To be honest, i've read about it the first time on Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott, the same time i was invited to do this presentation. My will is to present it here as a case study, where i hope i can show the advantages on extending our borders like you did, even though this company acts on a completely different market. I strongly believe that looking for new and fresh ideas outside the company walls it's simply widening our possibilities of being ahead of the competition.

Using this Wiki tool, i also wish to widen my possibilities of adding more relevant content to presentation, and make it more fun and easy for the audience to remember it! And if it's possible to interact with new posts during this session... even better! That way i'll be able to talk about the subject, and support my ideas with official contents from you.

By José Guimarães on June 24th, 2008 at 3:58 am
First of all, the presentation was a success, and i must thank you guys at Intel for the material you provide online. It's been a great surprise to search and find more and more information on every subject i wanted, and of course, a great opportunity to learn more!

However, we didn't made the persentation with a wiki tool. We developed a wiki tool in-house using a well known and easy to use technology, presented it and posted our contents online. We then made the presentation and invited everyone in the company to go and give their feedback directly on it... and it's still happening, we're starting a slow page by page process, but our goal is to have a system that is able to do the so called "Presentations 2.0"... but it's an evolution process, and we've just made our first step towards it.


What do you think?

Name (required)

Email (required; will not be displayed on this page)

Your URL (optional)

Comments (required)