In order to validate if a certain Technology platform can be used to implement a WaihonaPedia we have defined a set of Criteria.

• Affordable
• Co-Creation centricity
• Data management capabilities

Affordable

We believe a WaihonaPedia should be affordable for the tiniest possible group of people. We can assume that the group will need: Experience stories, Collective knowledge, Ask the expert and Personal Observations/data collection.
When affordable two aspects should be validated; 

• Build/setup costs, this can be sponsored by a one-time peek investment
• Operational costs, this is to expressed as recurring costs (each month, year)

Especially the Operational costs should be in reach of the tiniest organization in sustainable period of minimal 3 years

Co-Creation centricity

We believe the value of a WaihonaPedia is increased if a large percentage of the target-group can contribute, versus ONE service provider that will do it.
It should allow for many writers/co-authors where one can not assume that each author is a Layout-expert, Can write beautiful texts etcetera. The platform should require minimal knowledge. This means that we prefer open text area's versus a very structured/constrained approach

Data management capabilities

Data collections should be accessible by element; e.g the date-of birth, the gender.
Here the number of participants is a factor; are we talking about 100-erds or 1.000.000-erds participants

Validated for this project

We are doing the project for rare-decease groups with small numbers.
Since we still are in a prof-of-concept phase we can not do a large investment in licenses.
Since the existing photo-type of WaihonaPedia is running on the XWiki platform we evaluated this platform against WordPress and Joomla (CMS-platforms) and shortly looked at MediaWiki (the platform behind WikiPedia).

During the project we were suggested to look at: Moodle

Meetings at exhibitions also suggested commercial platforms empowered by sponsors; IBM Watson, Philips platform

Conclusions

We concluded that the co-creation requirement knocks-out the CMS systems, although they offer plugin's that go a long end towards this requirement. A soft-factor is the focus on layout (presentation) of these platforms that would tend towards loosing focus on content (what is written). It might make people afraid to not write something important because it does not look good. We would rather have the opposite.

Comparing XWiki to MediaWiki has pro's and con's on both sides, but we believe the data management is better in XWiki. We accept the more niche character of XWiki.

The Moodle suggestion would require further evaluation. It has not been seriously evaluated, but it looks like a interesting option for the future.

The same can be said about the commercial offerings. It looks like very powerful platforms but will be dominated by "expensive" service suppliers. Probably when the Proof-of-concept is successfully it is interesting to look at partnerships that might be willing to help.

So for this project we have selected XWiki