And I think Christian hits it spot on - to paraphrase someone smarter than
me, "There's always someone out there smarter than you." While everyone on
this list is smart, dedicated, overworked, and relentless, there's always
another cite to research or fire to put out. This type of tool would be a
great central repository for all things retention-related. If I knew all
there was to know about software vendor retention requirements (and believe
you me, I don't, but for sake of argument), and I put it out there, there's
maybe a handful of folks that that might be of benefit to. But for those
people, this becomes invaluable as a starting point.
Here's another example, using everyone's favorite wiki, Wikipedia. I am
doing a ton of research on email policies, processes, and solutions for,
among other things, the AIEF research project previously sent out to
everyone (150 responses so far - add yours today!
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=3VlPhowfI1PPH1xcJ5ZU7w_3d_3d).
So I went out to Wikipedia and looked up email, and came across this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email. It's a lengthy article. It was first
drafted on September 27, 2001
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=E-mail&oldid=249501). It's been
edited some 1500+ times since then - and you can compare the current version
to the previous edit or any version back to the very first one.
It has links to RFC 822 and RFC 2822 and to a number of other articles,
which themselves have links to other relevant standards and laws, such as
SMTP and the Australian anti-spam law. Ordinarily I wouldn't cite the latter
as I am not an Australian and don't know their laws. But if I were writing
about that, and didn't trust the verbiage in the wiki article, I could look
up the actual law at
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bd/2003-04/04bd045.pdf (and the link is
broken, but the point remains).
The article isn't perfect; in a cursory skim I didn't see anything
absolutely incorrect, but there's always room for improvement. But at some
point I will go clean it up and add some stuff to it regarding email
management strategies and approaches, classification, metadata and
attachment management, etc. If you disagree, you can change it too. But the
changes will be tracked and the corpus of users can make up their own minds
as to how accurate they think it is based on who is making the changes and
what changes they make.
I apologize for the length and energy of my posts, but I really think that
wikis offer a lot in collaborative development. Sure, there are some
considerations - but there always are. Since we all don't have all the
answers to all our issues, I'm a firm believer of getting other smart people
to look at the stuff I put together and let them bang on it. If I disagree,
'sokay. But most of the time someone else has a different perspective or
additional key information, and I think a wiki is about the easiest way to
make that collaboration happen.
By the by, for those of you interested, I am putting together a hands-on
workshop for an ARMA chapter on "How to blog, how to wiki, how to use RSS"
and would be happy to make it available once it is ready.
Cheers,
Jesse Wilkins
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