I'm coming to realize that the greatest opportunity for adoption and leveraging of wikis in the general population may lie where the greatest need is - in the public/nonprofit sector.
The title for this post comes from a post written by David Wilcox of Designing For Civil Society back in October 2005 (If Participation 1.x isn't working, let's develop Engagement 2.0). It is an insightful summary of his observations and conclusions regarding the disconnect between what the internet promised and what people have experienced, You should read the post in its entirety - it is a theme I'll be revisiting more and more often. Some quotes from Wilcox' post:
It's easy enough to say 'participation isn't working' - but what comes next? I think we need more than an upgrade in the ways that public bodies and nonprofits relate to citizens and service users - we need a new version as well as a new vision. Let's call it Engagement 2.0, as shorthand for participation + openness + Web 2.0......If you talk to people in the participation business they will agree privately - and sometimes publicly - that much of the time what they do isn't getting results.
Web enabling information and making it accessible doesn't make it collaborative or participative. Wilcox is right - it's all about 'engaging' the audience. Now, he's more focused on e-democracy and advocative pursuits while mine are a bit more mundane - civic volunteering, youth organizations, etc. But in both cases, the market is huge and success will be a bottom-up approach....
What's that you say? E-democracy will bring some changes? I'm not so sure on the current model. Government has spent £4 million on pilots, but it is mostly top down. There are two pilot community forums, and Bristol council is developing a community campaigning pack, but I suspect a lot of e-democracy is just going to be old-style participation online, without much impact on the cultural and organisation problems that need to be challenged.
Why? Because it is superficial, more 'what' and not enough 'who, where, when, how, and why'.
People continue to look at the net as a repository of data and not as a means to engage, participate, and contribute. Let's face it, local civic activity is a grass-roots process and, just like politics, the real activity is all local.
Real activity. That's the foreign, unknown potential of the internet.
What's less well known - and difficult to explain - is the way that new web tools have the potential for shifting the way that knowledge is organised from top-down to bottom-up.
Wilcox quotes the think tank Demos in a very readable pamphlet called Wide Open,
which suggested how the approach could be applied in three areas: Open knowledge, Open team working, and Open conversations. They say that 'open' projects share these characteristics:
• transparency
• vetting of participants only after they've got involved
• low cost and ease of engagement
• a legal structure and enforcement mechanism
• leadership
• common standards
• peer review and feedback loops
• a shared conception of goals
• incrementalist - small players can still make useful
• contributions
• powerful non-monetary incentives.
That bullet list describes not only the attributes of most civic, nonprofit organizations, but those are exactly the attributes that wikis facilitate. Wilcox concludes his post with:
I think these characteristics give some clues as to what what might be needed for Engagement 2.0. Participation version 1.x can be a bit like the old top-down ways of organising knowledge: "you can join in, but only on the terms that we set. If if we don't deliver what you want, I'm afraid there's not much you can do about it."
[The group leader] is in charge of the meeting. Raise your hand to speak. If you don't like what we publish, send up a letter ... but it may not be published. Of course you can produce your own newsletter, but you'll never have the resources to produce many or get it distributed." I know there are terrific examples of good participation practice... but even the word implies that people are being invited to join someone else's thing, and that they will retain control
Civic and volunteer groups have two faces - the official one that the public sees on websites, newsletters, and at public meetings and forums. The other face is what goes on behind the scenes where volunteers actually do stuff and carry out the group's mission. This is the natural habitat for wikis. It provides the means for the group to better engage with each other, engage new members, manage work, get things done, and actually have some fun in the process.
As for adoption....Individuals need to be proactively encouraged to make it a habit and the 'organization' needs to be providing the motive - might be cool if there was a means to realize some fundraising for the nonprofit as a by-product of using the wiki.
I'm working on that.
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