Research group internal wiki/site

[born_a_prof]

I am looking for opinions on what tools/wikis do people use to track research group activities. I am talking a private webpage/site which has to do lists, meeting summaries/agendas, files, tutorials etc. written by PI and group members.

I have some experience using atlassian/confluence, however it seems to be way to slow over the cloud.
Are there any favorites ?

[darkstarrynight]

One of my colleagues did a tutorial of Trello with us that seemed like it might be good for that. You can also use Microsoft Teams for collaborative activities. I like to work with colleagues in google drive, but it is left "trackable" perhaps.

[eigen]

My current preference is Notion. It takes a bit to set up, but there are some great guides and it's free for academic users.

I do have colleagues running much larger groups who use the paid version as well.

My main setup, however, is a shared cloud site. It used to be Dropbox and is now a Google Drive. That coupled with Slack covers the file repository, shared documents + calendar, and communication.

It does take more for me to get a new student set up than Notion promises to once I've gotten it fully set up, however.

[polly_mer]

I have some experience using atlassian/confluence, however it seems to be way to slow over the cloud.

I saw the title and came here to recommend Atlassian Confluence and Jira (BitBucket if you have a code base).  I haven't seen anything as good.  However, my employer hosts and we have an IT team who supports our site.

[doc700]

My university has a wiki platform so we use that for tutorials and how-to files.  Occasionally I assign someone to write up a wiki article on a topic but otherwise once a semester we dedicate a weekly group meeting to updating our wiki.  Everyone brings their computer to group meeting, we come up with a list of topics and all sit there and write up the pages there and then.  I'm not sure it would be updated if we didn't set aside time for it.  The most useful pages on our wiki are stuff like a checklist for new group members on where to get a key to the lab and how to set up the printer on your computer.  We have some standard experimental protocols but most equipment requires significant hands on training so a written list wouldn't be too helpful.

Otherwise, we also use google drive and google calendars. There is also a group Slack for conversations.

Let me know what else you find -- you sound more organized than our group!

[Liquidambar]

My university has a wiki platform so we use that for tutorials and how-to files.  Occasionally I assign someone to write up a wiki article on a topic but otherwise once a semester we dedicate a weekly group meeting to updating our wiki.  Everyone brings their computer to group meeting, we come up with a list of topics and all sit there and write up the pages there and then.

That is brilliant!  I don't know if my group is currently big enough to justify a wiki, but I love this idea.

[Puget]

We use a combo of Asana for project management and organizing important information and Slack for communication -- they integrate so you be notified of Asana tasks on Slack. My rules is that stuff students need from me (like feedback/edits on a draft) have to be an Asana task-- each task then gets passed back and forth with the new file attachments and comments each time-- that way its always really clear who's plate it's on, and what file is the current draft, and the whole history is preserved (sometimes revealing about how long its taking students to finish papers. . .). I also require all lab communication not involving people outside the lab to be on Slack, which keeps my inbox manageable.

My experience trying to do wikis has been that they gather dust because no one updates them (although I like doc700's idea).