One of the themes at Northern Voice this last weekend that stood out for me was wikis.
OK, what’s a wiki?
A wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It is astonishingly easy for people to jump in and revise pages – it’s even easier than blogging. The advantages of wikis are
- Good for writing down quick ideas or longer ones, giving you more time for formal writing and editing.
- Instantly collaborative without emailing documents, keeping the group in sync
- Accessible from anywhere with a web connection (if you don’t mind writing in web-browser text forms).
- Your archive, because every page revision is kept.
- Exciting, immediate, and empowering–everyone has a say. (Thanks, O’Reilly)
One of the most successful wikis I’ve used was for planning an event with people who usually only use email. Most of them were people who were not very tech savvy at all and yet the wiki worked perfectly, making this volunteer-run event run smoothly and collaboratively. I’ve also used wikis as online document repositories when using email was not useful (e.g. because multiple versions of a document needed to be accessible to a number of people). Wikis are wicked!
Matt Mullenweg, the “inventor” of WordPress, the blogging software we’re using here, had lots of inspiring things to say in his keynote speech on Saturday (go here for the full audio version, or here for a quick text taste of it). What stood out most for me, however, was when he said that collaborative open source efforts like wikis should be our vision for the future – not just for our technological future but for so much more.
What if, he said, every new bill of law that is passed goes through a wiki process, where citizens collaborate on law and order? Wikis offer a possibility for true demoracy.
That got me to wonder. Are there governments using wikis for true citizen collaboration?
Quite a few people write about it (e.g. “Government 2.0 comes to Ottawa”). Not many of them link to examples. And most of the examples are dead links. However, there was one that I found, in New Zealand, thanks to Open Innovators. A Police Act review was done with the help of a Wiki. This is part of the ParticipatioNZ project. On Monday, I emailed the project asking them for access to the wiki to see what’s going on inside but haven’t heard back from them. So far it looks very interesting though. I’ll keep you posted!
(Image by kbaird)