I knew a song about Hawaii years ago (”Ukulele Lady”) that had a lne in it: “wiki wacky woo.” Well, I’ve just gone a little wiki wacky lately, having just started my first “wiki.” What is a wiki? It’s a group collaborative site, at which many people can come together, contribute posts, share files, and edit and respond to one another.

I had started an email list for some of my peers in the psychotherapy training field. It was for people who travel and teach quite a bit. I thought we could share travel tips, business strategies, presenting tips and so on.

I invited about 30 people and the response was good. But a few problems surfaced. To reply to the whole group, you just had to hit “reply all” and send your reply. But that made for a lot of emails and most of us get more than enough of those already.

Next, one person had an update to her email address, which required that everyone change that one email when replying rather than use the original email that came in. Then two people decided they didn’t want to be on the list, but everyone kept including them on the “reply all” list and I felt bad about them getting unwanted emails.

One person on the list suggested I start a “Yahoo Group.” But I wanted to explore some other options, so I searched for free wiki sites (I like free) and came across one: http://www.wikidot.com/

It’s pretty good. The learning curve wasn’t too bad and I got it up and running in a few hours with a bunch of categories and a few posts to seed the discussions. Only one glitch: Mac users couldn’t sign on using their built-in Safari browser. They had to download Firefox and use that. A bit of a hassle, but Firefox is a handy browser to have for other reasons and other sites as well, on which Safari won’t work. I’ve come across several of these over the years.

The downside. The members have to be active and visit the site and sign up and post rather than passively waiting for emails to come in. But I figure this will sort the wheat from the chaff and eliminate people who aren’t motivated enough to participate actvely.

Why not try setting up your first wiki? It’s not that hard. Step out of your comfort zone, exercise those brain cells and learn something new. Just a suggestion and I am only a hypnotist.