Please use the Comments and Attachments features below (once you are a member) to post you own thoughts and use cases!
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. Wikis are popular collaboration tools because they allow registered or unregistered users to add, edit or delete content without knowing HTML or other web-based computer languages, track changes made by users and revisit different versions of wiki pages.
Potential Uses
Example: Future Melbourne, City of Melbourne, Australia , Planning Wiki at http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/view/FMPlan The City of Melbourne is using a wiki for public consultation when researching and drafting a new strategic plan. During May and June, six and a half million people visited the site. The wiki enables wide-scale collaboration unrestricted by time or geographic constraints. This meant that a wide variety of participants could take part whether city residents, city workers, visitors or students. Since the participation is online, participation could occur on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis. Crisis Commons Wiki at http://crisiscommons.org/wiki CrisisCommons is meant to capture knowledge, information, best practices, and tools that support crisis preparedness, prevention, response, and rebuilding. For more information on wikis check out: the wikinomics playbook 02 2008.pdfThis is a part of Don Tapscott's Wikinomics book (actually the last chapter). It is contained on the authors wiki page. From Randy Jackson.
Related Reading
Government creates own version of Wikipedia - Article from the Ottawa Citizen regarding the Canadian federal government's wiki project. 5 Ways That Wikis Help You Cut Costs - Brainkeeper blog entry that proves to be very useful in this difficult economic times. Local Government & Municipal Knowledge Base - A free resource for local councils and associated organisations (Australian-based) |
The City of Chesapeake is using hosted PBWiki for internal use only at this time. We use it for Enterprise wide projects like our Human Management and Payroll project including recurring meetings that members may want to collaborate on the wiki before having the actual physical meeting. We also downed the open source xWiki but found some bugs in it as well as the features not as rich as PBWiki so for now we are still sticking to hosted version.
We want to start using Web 2.0 internally to avoid all the challegnes this technology has if you open it up to citizens for example monitoring for offensive content, FOIA, overloading, etc.
We are looking for Enterprise wide Web 2.0 solution and have been looking at Microsoft Sharepoint, open source, Content Management, etc. Has anyone adopted a good solution yet?
The City of Little Rock is using a Google sites wiki to organize its Sustainability Commission. We use the wiki for internal communication within the commission on a private google site. We have only been using it for a month, but it looks promising so far. The biggest challenge is getting people that are only used to email to use it.
1. Send and receive emails (announcement pages)
2. Communicate with individual committees
3. Upload and download documents (agendas. minutes, etc.)
4. Find out what other committees are doing in between meetings
5. Find out what is on the local green calendar
The City of Surprise Arizona has recently embarked on a wiki to provide information and comments about our General Plan. The ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative citizen input into the General Plan. The technology of a wiki makes it a collaborative website such as Wikipedia where visitors to the site contribute content. The Surprise General Plan Wiki consists of pages of information about the proposed
General Plan 2030.
The General Plan pages allow comments from the public—after a simple registration and log in process. Some pages will include presentations about page subjects and issues and some pages have mini-surveys to gather opinions on general planning issues or elements. The Surprise General Plan Wiki employs collaborative behaviors that embrace a common theme of empowering users to gather the best ideas of a larger group of diverse interests. The underlying philosophy is that more participation is better and that
people want to work together. Increased communication and information sharing, use and input are facilitated by the Web 2.0 technology underlying the wiki.
General Plan 2030
The majority of General Plan Wiki consists of the text, format, images and exhibits contained in a printed version City of Surprise General Plan. This document is the culmination of years of study, research, input from citizens, and revision. The document is still growing and being tweaked to reflect the considered opinions of citizens and professional urban planners. The General Plan Wiki is an innovative new tool that provides local citizens and experts throughout the world the opportunity to learn about the plan and comment and influence the form and function of the final product.
Public Vote
The Surprise General Plan 2030 will be presented to the voters for ratification in late 2009. The General Plan 2030 document and the General Plan Wiki are informational tools to be used by the public to assist in understanding such a complex subject as the future vision of the City of Surprise.
Comments
The General Plan Wiki is designed to allow comments on every page of the wiki. Citizens and other observers will be able to make comments on each page for or against the concepts presented. The public will be able to see everyone else’s comments and can even rebut a comment if they wish.
The General Plan Wiki is targeted at communities of interest that include:
o Residents of Surprise and the surrounding area,
o Elected officials that will have to adopt the plan before submittal to the voters;
o Professional urban planners that have the training and background to understand the issue of the new urban form;
o Transportation planners that are challenged with designing the backbone of multi-modal transportation,
o Academics and futurists that can observe and comment on the best practices and sustainability of the cities of the future,
o Students that can learn from a new paradigm of urban planning.
Presentations
Many of the pages include a narrated presentation on the subject of the page. These presentations bring together words and images to provide viewers with another viewpoint. The presentations are stored on Surprise’s learning portal for access by anyone on the Internet.
Videos
Many of the pages include a video on the subject of the page. These videos bring together opinions and images to provide the viewer with another viewpoint. The videos are stored on Surprise’s video portal at granicus.com for access by anyone on the Internet.
Mini-Surveys
Some of the pages include a mini-survey on the subject of the page. These surveys will provide additional information to be used in planning for the future.
The Surprise General Plan Wiki can be seen at: http://gpwiki.surpriseaz.com.
The wiki is a living, breathing thing and may change daily (or hourly).
Australian Local Councils are using a wiki ( http://www.lgam.info ) to share information like policies & procedures, software system usage, technical information, contact details, etc. The site has 1100+ pages of information and is growing fast.
Omaha Commons Wiki displays a list of the top cities with wikis (most do not seem to be managed by the local government but are still great examples of city-based wikis): http://omaha.ne.us.towncommons.com/Omaha_Commons:Largest_City_Wikis