A few years ago Meyer Memorial Trust was facing a common problem.  Several program officers had recently departed, and they realized that a lot of institutional knowledge was leaving with them.  But instead of the common reaction – throwing up your hands and saying "so it goes" – they began thinking about ways to capture more of their team knowledge.  The idea was not only to be prepared when team members move on, but to help team members be more effective together right away.

At that point the story begins to sound a bit like Goldilocks. They tried storing information in a relational database, but it was too tight – it didn't give them the flexibility to capture all the rich knowledge needed to make great grants.  So then they tried a wiki, but it was too loose – they wanted to be able to query information like a database, and they didn't want to make their busy grant officers learn a bunch of weird syntax.

And then there was Wagn. Just right.

After using their Wagn website internally, they began to realize that much of the information they were gathering would be of great use to people outside of their foundation. So they decided to launch a public website that would also retain some private data visible only to Meyer staff. They named the site connectipedia.org. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the original wiki, was in attendance and proclaimed:

Wagn lets you express fairly complex relationships in a way that's simple, but powerful.  It's one of the freshest contributions to wiki since I coined the term.

Connectipedia now contains over 23,000 cards.