Chris Wilson posted an interesting article on Slate last week, The Wisdom of the Chaperones, that uses some interesting data on Wikipedia and Digg contributors to look critically at the notion of the wisdom of the crowd.
Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are the product of the dedicated minority.
In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.
Chris Wilson
Unlike Wilson, I have no problem with the flimsy veneer of democracy being peeled back from these sites, as I am not particularly interested in the ideology of social media; but the reality of maintaining Wikipedia does provide some salient lessons for public sector organizations seeking to implement these content management systems.
Resourcing
The first point that these findings suggest is that while the wiki will cost (virtually) nothing to set up, it does require dedicated resource to make it a success. This would be in the form of staff whose statements of accountability include curatorial responsibility for the content, and software that supports them in this role.
Some of the tasks that they might be entrusted with range from flagging redundancies, locking pages and migrating content into other wikis or the enterprise document management system, archiving superseded content, through to jointly managing the taxonomic structure of the site.
Without these sorts of controls, particularly over an extended period of time, you run the risk of, at best, the quality and discoverability of the content will inevitably degrade, and the worst case is that you breach the Public Records Act.
Documentation
Just because it is a social media project, doesn’t mean that you can avoid your due diligence. Terms of Reference spelling out the objectives, governance and – most importantly – your content management strategy. That’s right: what are you going to do down the track with this thing? Is it a case of just install and leave it for the next generation to deal with? Or assess after 18 months, migrate everything useful into another platform and archive the lot?
The other, perhaps equally important, benefit of documentation is that you can share it. If your agency does start experimenting with wikis, then it would helpful for your peers if as much of what you did, learned and, if necessary, bungled could be made available, so we avoid the costs of multiple agencies figuring this out for themselves.
One other point about the paperwork: in terms of selling the project to senior management, having robust documentation will get you a lot further than a Govt 2.0 elevator pitch. If that documentation includes another agency’s post-implementation review and/or final assessment of their project, you are making it as easy as practicable for them to agree.
Conclusion
Providing clarity for your organization about what the wiki will (and won’t) be used for, who will be responsible for managing it to success and how they will be supported in that role, should be a methodical and deliberate process.
If we expect to see these tools become part of the standard enterprise suite for public sector agencies in the immediate future, then we need to manage their initial implementations with particular care and attention to detail — and resist the temptation built into the utility of the product to just fire them up and hope for the best.
8 Comments
In regard to resourcing, we are currently setting up a wiki with a very specific purpose. It’s not there just for “information management”, or as a “warehouse”, but because it will become a vehicle to achieve an objective.
The idea is to mitigate entrophy by ensuring that a dedicated research team (the 1%ers you mention), are required to use/maintain it. If the tool becomes obsolete it will be because it’s not useful, not because it is neglected.
Thanks Che. Sounds like a good opportunity for a case study.
Good points. I have been pondering a number of uses for a wiki in my agency, mostly for discreete projects involving 5-50 people rather than enterprise wide. If anyone has an info to share about their experiences it would be great to hear from you.
What really interests me about public sector wikis is whether their users – and in particular, those users who can update content – need to be confined to the public sector. I can see a lot of value in wikis on topics such as sustainability, energy, and climate change which are hosted within the public sector, but have input from users on both sides of the public sector fence. They could even be used as a more open way of managing public consultation on policy papers – albeit with safeguards – but would such wikis fall foul of public sector risk management and/or the Public Records Act?
I’d be interested in your comment on this.
Thanks Tim. The Web Standards Wiki is a good example of a public sector wiki that is open to contributors outside government. And I posted last year about the Police Act Review wiki that generated headlines around the globe when it invited the public to comment on changes to the Act.
These examples prove that government here is not too risk averse to deploy these tools and would also suggest that our use of them will only improve in terms of both breadth of application and sophistication.
Thanks for these examples, Jason. I see from your post The (real) cost of social media that
“The Police Act Review wiki … was very quickly overwhelmed by the volume of contributions, resulting in it being shut down only days after it was launched.”
What lesson have been drawn (or could be drawn) from this experience, for future such projects?
Regards
Tim
A couple of obvious ones, from my perspective:
Like I said, we will get better at this. Launching straight into engaging with the public over a (potentially) contentious issue is probably a more courageous approach than I would advocate. I am more the ‘trial it internally and then soft launch a beta version’ sort of person.
I almost agree with Che’s If the tool becomes obsolete it will be because it’s not useful, not because it is neglected. – I would substitute the word “information” for “tool”. As we know most people will struggle through a bad tool to get at available, findable and useful info … if there is none of that “in it” then it’ll wither and die.
And again, I would almost agree with Jason’s I am more the ‘trial it internally and then soft launch a beta version’ sort of person. – the trial is probably not (just) the chosen tool but the new approach, the new way of looking at this interaction with the public and being comfortable with the new “pointy bits” it may present to both the public and the agency.