Efficient Community Management in an Industrial Design Engineering Wiki - Distributed Leadership

Industrial design engineers use a wide variety of research fields when making decisions that will eventually have significant impact on their designs. Obviously, designers cannot master every field, so they are therefore often looking for a simple set of rules of thumb on a particular subject. For this reason a wiki has been set up: www.wikid.eu. Whilst Wikipedia already offers a lot of this information, there is a distinct difference between WikID and Wikipedia; Wikipedia aims to be an encyclopaedia, and therefore tries to be as complete as possible. WikID aims to be a design tool. It offers information in a compact manner tailored to its user group, being the Industrial Designers. The main subjects of this paper are the research on how to create an efficient structure for the community of WikID and the creation of a tool for managing the community. With the new functionality for managing group memberships and viewing information on users, it will be easier to maintain the community. This will also help in creating a better community which will be more inviting to participate in, provided that the assumptions made in this area hold true.