Last month Jason Ryan blogged about our need to share not just success stories but also mistakes when Government uses social media/Web 2.0 (or indeed to avoid dishonestly painting the mild successes as stunning successes). He is right; what we need is lessons and examples, the good, the bad and the ugly. The problem is there is very little advantage in sharing our own mistakes (your lessons benefit others not you).
Jason linked to Mike Kujawski’s new Government 2.0 - Best Practices wiki as a means to achieving this, which is now receiving new contributions from around the world, including a bunch of New Zealand stuff. The Ottawa Citizen also had an article about the Canadian Federal Government launching their own all of government wiki.
So it is at this point that I both make a plug for our very own all of government wiki, the e-initiatives wiki (only viewable to New Zealand government agency IP-addresses), and also describe some of its weaknesses.
The e-initiatives wiki
Once upon a time, the SSC would conduct an annual survey of government agencies to see who was doing what in ICT. The survey was a pain in everyone’s neck and response rates were mixed. When a respondent submitted their response, they then had to wait months for the report to be published. When the report was produced, it was unwieldy due to the amount of information it contained.
It was decided in 2006 that this process could be converted to a wiki; respondents would be able to respond whenever they wanted (365 days of the year) and easily browse other projects from other government organisations. The e-initiatives wiki would be an encyclopaedia of New Zealand government ICT projects.
It was build on MediaWiki (the same software as Wikipedia) and pre-populated with the 2005 E-Awareness Survey. It was decided it would only be viewable and editable by government agency IP-addresses to avoid possible vandals (more accurately to dispel the fear of vandals).
How it functions in reality, two years on
Yays
The wiki now contains 530 initiatives from 93 government organisations. As far as I know, the wiki is the only place where you can go to find a (mostly) complete list of New Zealand government wikis, blogs, installations of Plone, Drupal, use of geographic information systems (GIS) and heaps more stuff along with contact details to project leaders. If you are thinking about using one of these for the first time, and like to seek advice from old hands, then the wiki is invaluable.
A success story of the wiki was all of the input the development of the Government Use of Offshore Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Service Providers got on the wiki. Though, this was strictly not one of the original visions for what the wiki would do.
Boos
There is only one problem with the wiki, but it is a fundamental one, with several causes: no one ever edits it* (*there have been 100 edits by 4 contributors in the last 30 days, which is not as bad as it could be). I speculate these are the causes:
I worry that while the first two points exist, government agencies will never be transformed.
Other unfinished thoughts
I often wonder whether making the wiki public would increase net positive contributions on the wiki. Would the wiki being public cause more organisations to classify it as important? If so, would it shut down the valuable and juicy “mistakes made” content (though there is currently little of this on the wiki)?
My take-away lesson
There is nothing impressive about all of government wikis (nor government blogs etc. etc.) in and of themselves. Anyone can install software and white list selected IP addresses, so be cautious of people celebrating their “wonderful wiki” (ask how many edits theirs gets a month, and watch their eyes look at the floor). What would be impressive is a dedicated community of contributors on a whole of government wiki. I think we are a long way off this.
15 Comments
What a shame it is closed. Even read-only it might be a useful resource to those of us that work in and around government, but are not privy to access. Instead, we have to create our own wikis (such as gis.org.nz/wiki - I guess I should stop working on this if there is already a GIS wiki in government) and duplicate efforts.
With all these silos around, it is no wonder we are not using the capabilities to their full potential.
Now, perhaps if we just had one MediaWiki for the whole of Government, then things might be quite different. You’re seeing the common problem of not reaching critical mass to get enough people working to improve it. If you had more people working in one place, it would probably be far easier to reach the critical mass required to make it self-sustaining.
Hey Matt,
I’m not sure that ‘edits a month’ is really everything that counts in a wiki.
To me, the real power of them is to capture content. A better measure might be how many pages they have (as a measure of content depth), and maybe how often the search engine is used (as a measure of the extent to which the content is treated as a resource).
The other thing is that a wiki can serve self-interested purposes too: when we were drafting the Guide to Online Participation, the wiki helped us manage comments, push stakeholders to take responsibility for the content of the document, and otherwise get our job done in a much more efficient manner.
One of the more successful implementations of wikis I’ve heard about here in Canada is at Natural Resources Canada. Have a read on what they’ve been up to here: http://www.networkedgovernment.ca/cp.asp?pid=758.
Hi Matt
I’d echo Gavin’s comment about the wiki being closed. There are many people who work in/around government but not necessarily for govt (myself included) that don’t have access.
It’s a myth that if you enable people to contribute content, they will. If it is not part of their role or a core competency then there is no motivation, and quite a large disincentive, to do so. Distributed content management systems, forums, blogs and the like tend to have a small percentage of regular contributors with 90% or more of the audience passively consuming the information.
One cause you might have missed off the list is that there is no one with the responsibility to encourage, support and facilitate contributions. Doesn’t mean they have to do it themselves, but if it’s left up to ‘everyone’, they’ll simply get on with what they’re being paid to do.
“there have been 100 edits by 4 contributors in the last 30 days” - couldn’t the fact that you can’t even view the site without a login explain the lack of participation?
Gavin, Sandra and John,
I am really stoked that you guys have displayed your interest in the wiki so quickly and declared that (at least) you would benefit from the wiki being open.
The wiki was the first we ever launched (2006) and at that time, the general consensus was a publicly facing wiki was outside of everybody’s comfort zone (we had no good predictions on what could happen). We settled for making it available to the thousands of employees that work at public service agencies. If we were to make it public now, we would have an obligation (of simple courtesy as we would be moving the goalposts) to our past contributors and organisations represented to consult them (as we all know a wiki is “owned” by its community).
Furthermore, a possible negative outcome would be due to government employees lacking the confidence that David spoke about, we could ostracise their contributions (”won’t I need permission from the communications manager to edit an article on a project we are doing on a publicly facing wiki?”).
I look forward to cautiously progressing; but not at the cost of existing contributors/stakeholders trust.
David,
Agreed that ‘edits a month’ are not everything, but they are really important. A wiki’s competitive advantage over any other kind of website is its ability to be edited by anyone. If no one is editing a wiki, then why use a wiki? If its main purpose is to be browsed, then any old CMS would do.
Regarding “manage comments, push stakeholders to take responsibility for the content of the document, and otherwise get our job done”, it was not the wiki that did that, it was the dedicated, passionate, and tireless team members. Yes, the wiki software allowed it to happen, but I think with the same amazing team members, it possibly could have been achieved with a forum and document management system, or maybe even email. The wiki has left us with a useful version history of the Guide.
I love wikis as much as the next guy, but sometimes they smell a little like stone soup to me.
I had not heard about the Natural Resources Canada wiki. It does sound like a real success.
Seems like it’s not all bad to me.
And I agree edits aren’t the most important aspect of a wiki. Cory Doctorow has the great quote “conversation is king, content is just something to talk about” and the key question for me when thinking about the success of such initiatives is how much have they lifted or advanced the understanding of those for whom they are developed for. This doesn’t limit success to direct hits or content edits.
What has the wiki potentiated? Do people talk about it ‘offline’? Does it stand to advance the greater goal of participatory government by acting as a convincing argument at some level - either way?
Not stuff that you can measure directly really.
I don’t see this as being a good wiki to open to the public. Its just not interesting enough.
In terms of its role in advancing the quality of services offered by government it can’t be stressed enough:
- Stop trying to measure its value because unless this is explicitly about survival because it will end up being counter productive by dragging those involved back into legacy thinking - reductionist causal logic
- Concentrate on building relationships through it and base those relationships on continued improvement just as you would if you were directing it to the public.
Matt your well aware of Govloop. The vibrancy and value there is a function of the connections people make or could make and the conversations or potential for conversations and these are predominantly about development and improvement. Ning is an excellent platform for doing this but that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t think about striving for more meaningful engagements using a wiki/blog combination. It is just way way harder.
Yes stone soup indeed. I would suggest it is also easier to make stone soup in north america than it is in NZ. However it is quite easy to convince agencies to build wiki’s and so why not play with the hand your dealt?
So to all those who are driving these 2.0 projects well done but there is a long road ahead. Good thing we all truly believe in these things right? and we fight for what we believe in?
I tend to agree with David on the “edits per month” issue. I don’t think wikis are the same as any old CMS. Part of their great power lies in the ease with which they make a site “writable” by anyone (with access rights…). “Writable” and “editable” don’t have to go hand-in-hand, and the extent to which one might expect “edits” as opposed to first-hand provision of content will depend on the subject-matter, access/edits rights and the community in question.
And it doesn’t appear to be all-of-govt, that is if all-of-govt includes local government.
Hugh,
You’ve made some good points. I think I agree that government ICT projects are not interesting enough to capture the enthusiasm of the public, but equally, I’m sure David Hume would argue that that should be up to them to decide whether they will or will not edit (and I agree with him).
With regards to government agencies being keen to adopt wikis, my main goal is to encourage this when it is the best tool for the job. A well-implemented wiki used for an appropriate purpose is unrecognisable next to the wiki (or blog) used for the purpose of being seen to be using a wiki (/blog). Another aim I have is to keep expectations in check. Even when you have a well-implemented wiki used for an appropriate purpose, people need to know that they will not get a Wikipedia over night (or over several years). There is a common misconception of “build it and they will come”. Wikis are powered by communities, and communities are hard hard hard work.
Richard,
Edits per month are important if that was one of the selling points for the wiki in the first place “we’ll get heaps on input from outsiders”. The easier (and more honest) sell is to focus on transparency “people might not edit, but they’ll be able to see when we do”. These goals/expectations should all be declared before the wiki is launched so that you can analyse whether the solution was appropriate for the problem.
Jim,
I forgot to detail this. The wiki is currently accessible to agencies on an IP-address white list. We did not have IP addresses for all local governments but have been adding them as they request it (which is rare as they don’t know to ask). You are welcome to send me IP-addresses.
Hi there - will write for e-initiatives, but in the meantime here are some thoughts. We’ve run the web standards wiki pilot for a year or so now. I recognise many of the above points: there have been few edits, and traffic isn’t exactly expressway and, critically, there was little conversation. Despite that, we got some quality feedback which made a real difference to this year’s standards review.
I suspect the limited success of our wiki falls to this: A) an audience that was always going to few in numbers given the specialist area, B) usability issues in the navigation, C) and usability issues in the editing (admittedly punters had to mark up in mediawiki-ese for a while there). And the related question (call it D) of whether a fully-editable page was actually what we wanted.
For me, the limited potential audience was important in one way and not in another. It wasn’t important that we generate massive visit numbers. But because of that, it was important that we have no expectation that the wiki would be some organic, self-organising knowledgebeast, or that users would be sufficiently enthralled by the conversation to bear the usability issues. That’d be magical thinking, which we fell into at first.
All in all though, could probably have got more with blog-style comments or some threaded webpages. The easier the ability to converse, the more conversation, and theoretically (but not definitely), the more knowledge. Especially when the likely user pool is shallow.
I agree with Gavin - what a shame this isn’t readable by the public. I was keen to see what use NZ Gov is making of open source software, GIS etc.
@Hugh - the data is potential useful to me, as a web savvy citizen. Why should it be closed to the public due to lack of “interest”? Utility is a better criterion IMO.
Matt–I agree with all your points, except, well, isn’t a wiki just a form of content management system where all the ‘content management’ buttons are on the outside rather than the inside? I can’t think of another kind of CMS that allows you to distributively publish documents like a wiki does.
I guess the answer to your question about whether it makes sense to use a wiki if no one is editing it is that it’s actually not the fact that wikis get edited that matters, it’s that they can be edited. In a lot of cases the potential matters a lot more than the actual.
Take for example the Guide to Online Participation. The fact that we didn’t get a ton of edits (though we got a fair number, to be sure) wasn’t really the point. The point was that if someone decided they wanted to weigh in, they could. That empowerment said a lot about how we were approaching our project, and our subject (online public engagement in policy and service design). Whether people chose to exercise that power was another story. But the wiki was a key tactic in trying to get people to think differently about involving themselves in the guidance we were developing. And that had a lot of value.
If you take something like the e-initiatives wiki, is it worth asking how often a document actually needs to be changed? Maybe once every two to six months? To play on one of Hugh’s points, I think we want to be careful that we don’t separate the content from the conversation, which is to say: if certain forms of content don’t need to be edited frequently, why worry?
Jonathan,
I am happy to email you the answers to any specific questions you would like, a very 1.0 solution I know (maybe not even 1.0?).
David,
You have nailed it. I agree with everything in your last comment.
I would simply add the point I made to Richard earlier about managing expectations; you have sold us the idea of a transparent document creation system that allows external contributions (which sounds great, and is an accurate description of most wikis), but often wikis are sold as “a tool that will inherently receive many contributions from many people” (a feat which no software can achieve).
You very clearly understand what a wiki can and cannot do. Not everyone else does.
I meant to add before something along the lines of what David said: “The point was that if someone decided they wanted to weigh in, they could. That empowerment said a lot about how we were approaching our project, and our subject (online public engagement in policy and service design)”.
That was certainly the case in the web standards wiki, & was esp important given the compliance-focused image the govt web standards often have.