As organisations increasingly rely on geographically dispersed workforces there is an emerging need to collaborate on projects that span distributed teams and different time frames. This includes a need for collaboration in the form of brainstorming. Wiki may provide a powerful medium for asynchronous distributed collaboration in such situations. A design for evaluating the use of wiki as a shared workspace for asynchronous distributed brainstorming is described. Implementation of this design was unsuccessful and it was considered that failure may be the result of fundamental problems with wiki as a collaborative technology. A revised design is presented for the evaluation of problems with wiki-based collaboration and the factors affecting such collaboration, based on hypotheses derived in part from traditional brainstorming research. A natural structure of factors affecting wiki-based collaboration emerged from the results which are discussed. Study conclusion presents ‘The Wiki Cycle’, a diagrammatic representation that highlights the process factors that affect the success or failure of wiki-based collaboration and which shows the interaction of these factors by way of a series of feedback cycles. This provides a framework for future work by making explicit some of the process factors and dynamics that affect wiki-bases collaboration.

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