Introduction

Over the past few years of my engineering education, there have been several occasions where I had to collaborate on a document with a team. The normal course of action simply involved using Microsoft Word to write portions of the document and emailing the around the group until a final document was produced.

The undergraduate engineering experience culminates in a year long team design project, appropriately known as “senior design,” a course feared by all engineering students who have not yet completed it. During the senior design process, the team creates both a preliminary design review document (the PDR) and a critical design review document (the CDR), each of which weighs in around thirty pages of technical documentation. Additional documentation is also generated throughout the process, such as data, notes, and proposals.

When my team approached the PDR, we used the standard Word+Email approach and quickly learned of its shortcomings. As we began the second phase of senior design, I began to look for an alternative method of writing our documentation so that we would not experience the same frustrations when writing the CDR. The solution that I devised involved using a specifically formatted wiki to collaboratively write the CDR. If I had come up with this solution earlier in the process (such as at the very beginning of the course), we could have extended our wiki to provide a central repository for collaborating on all of our documentation, including storage space for the various data generated through the design process. Needless to say, this would have significantly streamlined our design process by cutting down on the amount of paperwork that we were required to keep track of and providing us with a centralized and always available repository of information on our project.

Over the next few pages, I will outline the specific steps to recreating the wiki that my team used. These instructions apply to DokuWiki, which I chose due to its’ power and simplicity (it only requires a web server running PHP). While the instructions given here are specific, the general ideas can be applied to any wiki software. I recently gave a presentation on the general idea, which you can find below. I will also add a video of the presentation soon.

You can visit my CDR site, or check out the following resources.

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