How one old dog learned a new trick

Sometimes you just walk into a special situation that brings the human face of an IT project into bold relief. That happened to me yesterday. When I walked over to a colleague's desk to ask about something completely unrelated to the wiki, I noticed something interesting.

On her PC she had an open wiki text editor with some text typed in it. But she was working on something else. Since she's never posted anything on the wiki, I was intrigued.

"Ready to post something?" I asked her.

"I'm not sure," she replied.

"Why not?"

She just looked at me for a few seconds.

"Don't worry about posting something. All ideas are welcome."

"I'm not sure," she replied.

"Just go for it. With thousands of people on the wiki, you never know where your idea might go."

She thought for another second, turned to her computer, and hit Send.

"Good for you," I said.

She was visibly relieved. Less than 5 minutes later, she had her first reply -- from her manager, no less. He thought her idea had legs. Without the wiki, I wonder if it would ever have seen the light of day.

Score one for the wiki. Score two for the power of human relationships.