Peer Collaboration Platforms: Notion, WikiSpaces

WikiSpaces closed years ago. The free and classroom wikis went at the end of July 2018, the paid ones that September, and the last private label sites in January 2019. Anything written there and not exported is gone. Take it out rather than looking for a like for like replacement.

The section is more useful if it stops naming products as the answer. Two tools in the same documentation have now died, which is the actual lesson: a partnership that builds its shared memory on a free hosted service is one business decision away from losing it.

So write requirements instead. Can everyone who needs it get in without a licence negotiation. Can the whole thing be exported in a format that still opens elsewhere, and has somebody tried. Who administers it after the funding ends. Where does it live if the answer to that is nobody.

Notion is what most of the team wants. Is that a reasonable choice under those requirements?

It is a reasonable choice for a small team that works in it daily, and it fails the same way as anything else if you skip the maintenance. Two things to settle before committing.

Export, tested for real rather than assumed. Do a full export now, open it somewhere else, and see what survives. Nested pages, databases and embedded content are where this usually disappoints, and it is much better to learn that in week one.

And who owns the workspace. Partnership tools set up on one person's personal account are how content gets lost when that person changes job. It should be an organisational account with more than one administrator, agreed in writing at the start.

One more thing worth putting in the documentation. A collaboration space is for staff. Do not put mentee information in it, and do not invite mentees into it, for the reasons in the knowledge base thread.