As the Chair of 2020 Communications Trust its my job to manage our governance bodies, including the full meetings of trustees and the monthly Admin committee.

Naturally we try to use the tools we promote, starting in the old days with emails and attachments. That soon gets totally unwieldy as participants add their comments, want to edit or amend documents and add or amend agenda items. The secretarial load soon becomes impossible. Time to webify the process.Earlier this year we tried to use a tool called MyCommittee.com which wasn't bad, it certainly helped walk you through the required sequence of events and had useful extra resources for how to manage organisations and keep within the rules. But we soon realised that it was too restricted; its rellay only a meeting management tool and we needed something broader.

So in May we began using PBWorks which is a Wiki with bells. Useful bells that are mostly easy to use.

When you login, you get the home page.

On the left is a column with the latest updates to the home page, including new documents or discussions we have started and new features we have added to the Wiki such as the new calendar or a file notes category and template etc. In the top left corner is the content update information.

Here you can find when the page was updated and by whom and on the right is the very handy page history in case some dreadful mistake happens such as someone accidentally deleting the whole lot, or doing an edit that corrupts or otherwise damages the page. Just select the previous version and restore the old one before continuing.

The top right of the page gives your account details and, right under that, some self-explanatory fundamental tools for working with the site in the blue area and in the white area under that, some tools for working with the page you have open.

They enable you to send a link directly from the page you are working on to someone who might need to know. It also allows you to give access to that page to someone who might not be entitled to access to the whole site. For example, we edited our annual report on the Wiki so our editor, who is not a trustee, could see and work with only the page that contained the draft. Further down the page there are more site tools for working with the users.

I can share the site with others directly from the sidebar and there's a tally of recent activity so I don't have to look through everything to find what has been done since I last checked in.

Another useful feature is the "Ajax" nature of the site. It means that I can click on those little green bars and close, open or move the modules that they control around to suit me.

As we create new content we assign each file to a "folder" for the various aspects of the work such as the AGM, Admin committee, projects etc. Those folders then automatically populate the navigation module

This is a great advance over many older style Wikis where you have to manually link the content and if you forget the pages can get littered all over the place. The only minor drawback is that you can't assign the same file to more than one folder so that I can't upload an expense claim for example to an expenses folder and also put it in the Admin committee folder where it is dealt with. Nor can you nest one folder inside another so you do need to exercise some discipline in naming folders and assigning information to them.

Click on any of the folders and you get the list of contents of that folder.

There are also "plugins" that are small programmes written by other people that can be used inside the Wiki. Like a polling tool to make decisions about venues and dates for meetings etc, and a calendar.

As well you can set up your account so that the system sends you an email when the content is updated, a copy of that content and a link to the page. You can get the updates on a daily basis or as they happen.

One Trustee told me last month that, because we edit the agenda into the minutes of the meeting as we go, and because the page automatically saves once every minute, he could watch the meeting as it happend, or at least as the discussions and motions were recorded. Almost real-time and worth considering. It also means that the minutes are available to all trustees within minutes of the meeting ending so any corrections can be made while the discussion is fresh in the mind.

The critical point is that every board member needs to have "editor" rights to the site so that they can make changes to documents that are open for discussion (such as drafting a resolution) as well as making comments on the page in a form attached to each one.

The next step should probably be to open Skype on my desktop and broadcast the meeting to trustees so that any of them can add to the discussion under way.

Final step should probably be that I run the meeting remotely from my home office and save us all the hassle and expense of travelling to meetings. Although I think that is a way off, we are still pretty much dependent on personal contact and face-to-face encounters to maintain relationships and support the trust that any organisation needs to function.

How about your organisation? Do you use tools like this? How is it working out? reports, reviews and war stories from the front lines always welcome.

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