Can Wikis Save Democracy?

Recent polls show President Bush's approval ratings are languishing at a historic low. The only thing worse is the all-time low approval ratings for that wild and crazy gang over on Capitol Hill. Their approval ratings are 10 points lower! Only 16% of those polled say the country is moving in the right direction.
Have we lost all faith in our democracy? Have we decided that no matter who runs things they're going to run them into the ground? The dissatisfaction with our government institutions has reached a nadir (and I don't mean Ralph Nader either). Perhaps there's some audacity for hope (and I don't mean Barack's either).

Our problems of creating a government by the people and for the people may be solved by social network power and a little idea called a wiki. You know, like Wikipedia.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is an Internet-based technology that enables mass collaboration among peers. It's a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Some defining features:
• A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
• Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
• A wiki is not a carefully-crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape.

Advantages of Wikis

1. Low cost organization – free software and hosting
2. Enables mass collaboration – ground-up creation process
3. Open participation  sense of ownership and control over product
4. Easy to make and correct mistakes
5. Converges solutions: thesisantithesissynthesis
6. Solves collective action problems by reducing costs and raising benefits of participation
7. Integrates ideas across many levels and issues
8. Promotes public goods public commons
9. Many-to-many network
10. Favors populism over elitism by offsetting organizational power, money and fame.
11. Power and control resides with the users, i.e., not the elites
12. Saves history of changes, reversible

Why a Policy Wiki?

A wiki enables mass collaboration among peers by reducing the costs of collaboration and providing the necessary incentives for participation. This changes the costs and benefits of collaboration and facilitates collective action. This is especially significant for the provision of public goods.

Government policy design, implementation and adaptation is a public good that requires mass collaboration of citizens, experts, NGOs, government agencies and those involved in the political process. This collaboration is costly, requiring subsidies from a variety of sources including philanthropic foundations, research and educational institutions, ideological or partisan organizations such as unions, political parties or business organizations, politicians, and bureaucrats. The process is top-down and suffers many disadvantages of institutional dynamics and citizen participation is minimal.

A policy wiki would be bottom-up, virtually cost-free and administered with a minimal of effort. It would be a network of dynamic intelligence integrating many different issues and levels of analysis. A policy wiki would not be a forum for partisan propagandizing. It could engage the public in a much more direct and effective way than traditional methods of political activism or writing to one’s congressperson. The wiki would link local, state and federal levels of policy so that users could quickly locate the specific issue they wish to address. In a sense, the wiki would be like a local to national community bulletin board that constantly informs and adapts. Most critical, a policy wiki would be productive by converging on solutions rather than splintering policy debates into various opposing camps.