The Poker pattern encourages putting seemingly trivial content into your wiki to give a non-threatening reason to use it.

There is a very low barrier to creating a new wiki page, as anyone can do it. So simple things, trivial things, silly things that one might not ordinarily have considered putting on the company intranet become fair game. As long as there is one person on the team interested enough to do it, then the content can be shared.

The Poker pattern is named after the habit of putting up the scores of the frequent, after-hours poker tournaments to the company wiki. Setting the precedent that all content, no matter how trivial, should go into the wiki encourages your team to put the important content in there, too.

A wiki page with the poker tournament results “represents, in a microcosm, every little bit of information that a company's employees think is worth writing down, if only there were a convenient place to do so.”

Changing the process for non-critical or social content is a easier than for business-critical information as there is less risk involved. This content is also less likely to be governed by pre-existing, entrenched processes that might resist the change.

Finding non-essential content to showcase the wiki is fairly simple, as almost anything will do. For example:

• Poker tournament results
• Staff birthdays
• The weekly grocery order
• Review restaurants near the office
• Signup sheet for a pot-luck dinner
• Photos from events in the organisation
• Item list for the family vacation.

If you have corporate team-building events like a picnic or a day at the ball park, upload any photos from the event to a gallery on the wiki.

• Magnet - the Poker pattern is a good first step toward the magnet pattern. Putting social content like the weekly poker schedule gets people looking at the wiki.

• Wiki A Subversive Technology