The Nyaya Health wiki is the primary platform for Nyaya Health's vision of greater transparency and collaboration in global health delivery.  Maintaining it up-to-date is a central challenge and requires active management.  The Wiki Manager is responsible for this.  

Promoting a Wiki Culture

There is a perception that a wiki is somehow "high tech" or requires "tech saaviness" to use.  This is wholly incorrect, and the Wiki Manager, together with Nyaya leadership, needs to help dispel this myth.  The bottom-line is that if people can login to their email accounts and can edit a word document then they can use a wiki.  So establishing the wiki as a mode of how we do business is a purely cultural issue; the analogy is that it would have been unacceptable 8 years ago for any self-respecting organization to not mandate its members to use email. The wiki is just a fundamental and basic tool of the modern business world.  As an aside, there are a number of "high tech" applications-- such as all those short-attention-span, slow-typing-on-mobile-devices applications like chat, text-- that are in fact wholly inefficient and should be discouraged in an efficient organization.   See also our blog post on the subject.  The primary challenge in promoting a wiki culture is to get members out of their email inboxes.  This is no small challenge since the email inbox is one of our society's primary addictions.  We should encourage our users to take a deep breath before they write a several paragraph email and think "Wait, I am about to spend thirty minutes on something that is going to go to a handful of people, who will then archive the email.  My ideas will be lost.  I should get out of crisis-mode and get into optimization mode.  Let me take an extra few minutes to organize my thoughts only slightly more and put them on the wiki instead, and send the link to my collaborators." Now, sometimes we forget; if we come across an excellent email thread, we should be comfortable pasting the contents on the wiki.   Copy-paste however must be done with great care, as we caution our grant writers; the reason for "thinking in the wiki instead of your inbox" is so that you think in an organized, professional way which our email inboxes are not typically designed for.     

Wiki Growth

There are three primary mechanisms through which content is added to the wiki: 

• Members directly add content.  This is the preferred mechanism, and requires that Nyaya establishes an organizational culture that incorporates the wiki into our work flows.
• Wiki Manager adds content from Achham-side protocols. The reason that this step is needed is that there exists no commercial offline wiki (google sites, zoho, our vendor pbworks, etc do not offer it).  As such, the wiki cannot be particularly useful to people in Achham who live primarily offline; regardless of the speed of their internet, they just cannot be expected to use the wiki as a useful tool if they cannot access it a significant percent of the time.  There is a huge amount of content on the Live Sync and Evernote from Achham that need to be placed on the wiki.  The on-site leadership in Achham should make a list of high-yield management and clinical protocols in Evernote that the wiki manager will periodically review.  This needs to be incorporated into the basic work-flow of the Nepal leadership, that when they write or finalize or implement a new document, they note on Evernote the name of the document.  Nothing more than the name of the document needs to be written; by putting the name of the document down, the Nepal leader provides approval for adding the document onto the wiki.  
• Wiki Manager adds content by distilling emails from members.  This mechanism will be used quite rarely since 1) users should themselves be posting to the wiki rather than writing lengthy emails; 2) this is a very inefficient mechanism for the Wiki Manager.  From time-to-time, however, the wiki manager may use this mechanism if there was a particularly rich email thread, both to get the content on the wiki and to help show members how to better use the wiki and get out of the email addiction.

Wiki Maintenance

Editing the content for readability, consistency, and professionalism, while maintaining an open and transparent structure, is critical.  Once a month, the Wiki Manager should undertake all of the following tasks:

1) Organization - All new wiki pages should be examined and filed appropriately in folders or as links on the sidebar. 

2) Editing for professionalism and readability - New pages should also be inspected for proper formatting (e.g., use of table of contents) and content (e.g., no personal contact or grants information on the public page).  The Wiki Manager should discuss any issues regarding formatting/content with the writer of that content.

3) Tags for dissemination - New tags should be added and any other steps should be taken to ensure indexing on major search engines 

4) Removal of duplicate or irrelevant content - Irrelevant or duplicate pages should be deleted, and their content migrated to the appropriate pages

Priority for maintenance will be on sidebar items (the highest yield, highest traffic pages that Nyaya prioritizes).  The Wiki Manager should involve the authors of the pages whenever feasible and relevant.  

Wiki Formatting and Structure

The Wiki Manager is responsible for envisioning and maintaining a coherent formatting and structure for the wiki.  All protocols pertaining to this should be on the members' help page so that members have direct access to it in an understandable format: WikiTips.

The Wiki Manager receives wiki@nyaya emails (https://wiki.nyayahealth.org/settings/about), which come thru the contact portal on the wiki.  This is a very low-traffic email address.