A Wiki for the New Club of Paris?

At the KnowTech 2008 conference last week in Frankfurt/Germany I talked with Leif Edvinsson about the idea of extending the "knowledge infrastructure" of the New Club of Paris with a wiki. Since the club already has a website for providing controlled content we thought it could be a good idea to provide a wiki to enable user generated content as well. I promised to think about a way we could reach that. I did that and came up with some questions we as a club have to ask ourself about OUR "NCP Wiki" (New Club of Paris Wiki):

1. Do we want to install the wiki-software on our own servers or should we choose a hosted solution?
2. Do we want to have a open (anyone can read/write), a member-write (anyone can read, members can write) or a closed wiki (members can read/write)?
3. Do we want to invest (money) or do we want to have a free wiki?
4. Which wiki-software or -service should we use?

Personally I would answer these questions like that:

1. Hosted Wiki: since we have very little time to select (see wikimatrix.org for the vast amount of available wikis), install, maintain and support a wiki I strongly recommend that we use a hosted wiki and focus our resources on communicating and collaborating instead of doing it-stuff.
2. Member-write Wiki: since we want to enable communication/collaboration among our club members and at the same time spread our message worldwide I suggest to use the member-write-aproach where everyone can read the content and all our members can read and write (another advantage of that approach would be that google indexes our wiki and people can find us).
3. Free Wiki Service: since we should have a first prototyp quickly (and don't have that much budget) I suggest to use a free wiki service.
4. Wikispaces.com: having answered the questions above my choice would be the free, hosted wiki-service wikispaces.com. It is easy to use and provides all the "2.0-gimicks" we could use in the future (integration with flickr, slideshare, facebook, youtube ...). If after a 120-days-prototyp-phase we decide to have a ad-free, closed wiki we can have it there for only $5/month (we can also think of having a public AND a private one).

If we as a community agree on that, I suggest to take the following next actions:

1. Open a wiki space called NCP Wiki on wikispaces.com (I already did that, it took 10 seconds :)
2. Find a club member that volunteers for beeing our wiki admin and administers access control for the wiki (the process will look like that: 1. a person requires to get access to the NCP Wiki by clicking the join-button 2. our wikiowner gets an email 3. the wiki admin always has a up-to-date member list of the club 4. he checks if the requesting person is a member or not 5. he accepts or rejects the request 6. end of process)
3. We offer one or two free 30-minute "wiki basics webinars" in 12/2009 and/or 01/2009 e.g. via DimDim (free web-conferencing service) where all interested club members can participate. Purpose of that webinar is to provide the members with the basic knowledge how to use the wiki.
4. We use our NCP Wiki from 02/2009 onwards to support all the processes and activities of the club.
5. We open up an area in the wiki where we can figure out what we want to use the wiki for and how the basic structure of the wiki should be.
6. We figure out how we could integrate/link/connect the wiki (with the user generated content) to the website (with the controlled content). By the way: the website will be relaunched in the next months.

When you are a member of the New Club of Paris please post your opinion on that idea as a comment below (if you are not a member, you can do so as well!).