I take a break in my holidays to share an important news related to what I'm doing at my office: information management.

If you had to deal once with a wiki, or even a wiki spreading process, in a company or an organization, you may (read: you should) know the name of Stewart Mader. This guy maintained Wikipatterns (http://www.wikipatterns.com/ ), a website with a full collection of do & don't, really useful to implement a wiki in an organization. Wikipatterns is now a book (yes, sometimes, these things happen and websites go paperback...)

The second thing François Nonnenmacher (http://padawan.info), the free- lancer who helped us to choose Confluence for our wiki at Publicis Consultants, gave us after our ID/PW was the web adress of Wikipatterns. I'm still reading it very often.

Stewart has a blog too (http://www.ikiw.org) where he uses to give precious insights about his experience helping big companies to implement a wiki. Stewart also shares what he is learning in the various conference he's attending. His blog is one of those I read daily even when my to-do list is overweighted. OK, I admit I check daily The Sartorialist (http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/) too ;-)

Stewart, who is the official wiki evangelist at Atlassian untill Friday, is now starting something new. He's launching a new rocket in the wiki unexplored space: Grow Your Wiki (http://www.ikiw.org/ services). This venture will be focused on helping companies and organizations to have the best return on their wiki investment. You can check his website for more details about the offer. Here are 3 reasons to be really happy of this news:

1/ If Stewart leaves evangelization to ROI, it could means the market is now strong enough to feed consultancy companies and not only software and technical companies. That is really a good news for wiki users that will be able to be helped and advised by strong professionals, neutral from a software or a platform.

2/ If big companies understands their need to be advised on the best way to use the wiki, it means wiki won the right to be on the guest list of the tools an employee can use at work. And wiki could quickly become mainstream in the workplace. I mean: not only a brand new tool in the toolbox but THE tool employees will use daily, as often as Faceb... er... the corporate email ;-)

3/ This path should be the one we'll walk on in France. The time is not far we may be able to stop hiding our wiki projects in the basements of HQ and proudly show them to the CEO with a memo entitled "This is how the rest of the world is working today. What about us?"

Steve, I wish you the best for this new and exciting project. Please continue to show us the way. You can count on me to read carefully your news and your posts. Many thanks for the good work you did with & for Atlassian... I'm sure it will not be easy for them to recruit the next Stewart Mader ;-)