Contribution to a corporate wiki for the purpose of knowledge transfer can be very low because of continuously pressing tasks, a chronic lack of spare time, and motivational reasons. This is a problem because the wiki fails to achieve its purpose of collecting valuable knowledge, and becomes less attractive through this over time. We present a reputation-based system that socially rewards employees for their contributions, and thereby increases their motivation to contribute to the wiki. In a four months trial of productive use with two work groups, we could show that our concept increases the quantity and quality of articles in the repository, leads to higher activity in general, and draws employees to the wiki who had not contributed before.

The EU subsidizes research projects in the ICT area with hundreds of millions of Euros per year with the aim of strengthening Europe's global competitiveness. A key requirement of EU projects is the involvement of partners from at least three different countries. This leads to highly distributed software environments where company, country, and culture boundaries run in the midst of tasks like requirements engineering, architectural design, implementation or testing. We present results from an empirical study involving more than 50 transnational, multimillion Euro projects of the Sixth Framework Programme. The results show which tools are accepted by developers and used in practice in the respective phases of the software process. Finally, we shape the idea of Research Software Engineering.