Why A Wiki?

In a previous post I suggested that wikis might be good tools for democratic processes. Here I explain in more detail how a policy wiki might work and why:

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is an Internet-based technology that facilitates mass collaboration among peers. A wiki is 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
12. Saves history of changes, reversible, archival

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 while citizen participation is minimal.

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

The initial administration will require a ‘board’ of policy experts to provide informed oversight on policy ideas and promote convergence through empirical testing. Eventually, this professional oversight can give way to a participant board voted on by popular nomination based on reputation. In essence, a policy wiki creates a competitive and productive open marketplace for ideas.