Encouraging Greater Community Participation
Dave Myers
At the tail end of a half-hour interview with Paul Jay (Real News
Network), Larry Wilkerson (former chief of staff to Colin Powell)
summed things up with "what we have today is a corporatocracy: (the
political leadership is owned by) big food, big pharmacy, big oil,
finance, insurance, and real estate ... that's who runs this country
now. The president doesn't run this country ... and God help us, the
American people don't run this country. Big money runs this country."
Source: WILKERSON ON 9/11
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5591
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRKFbLJDfl4
Wilkerson's "big money runs this country" is a kinder and gentler way
to put this than the foul language that usually escapes from my mouth
whenever I try to make a similar observation. But the fact that (at
least here in the USA) political, economic and judicial systems more
and more resemble the worst aspects of their old Soviet Union
counterparts (with Big Corporate central planning replacing
"Socialist" central planning) goes a long way to describe what
motivates me to contribute to PortlandWiki.
But that's just me. If a flourishing city wiki results in reasonably
informed, empowered citizens at the expense of oppressive corporate
and state bureaucracies, I'm on board. Count me in. Let me help.
Other folks, however, might come up with completely different
motivations for contributing to a city wiki. Perhaps a particular
group wants to create an infohub for their neighborhood, club, church
or school. Maybe a small business owner wants to put up a page about
her shop. A local musician gets sick of MySpace or Facebook and
decides to go "all wiki" on us. Who knows?
The trick is, how do we (city wikis admins) get these folks to make
that first edit, put up that first page, upload that first pic, or
(gasp!) write that first article? And once they do, how do we keep 'em
coming back for more?
That's where I hope we can start this discussion.
-dave myers
Michael Mulqueen
one of the key ones has been my thoughts over the past 2 years or so
on improving society. I've started to feel that many of the problems
with ... everywhere is lack of information or perhaps lack of
information delivery -- it is why our democracy does not function as
well as it could, why our markets don't work as efficiently as they
should, damage to the environment etc. Everybody wins if the median
"informedness" is raised. I digress. On a local scale, for me, this
boils down to there being a distinct lack of competition in certain
areas, namely media and politics. I think these are two areas that
could really be shaken up and improved by a decent city wiki. It could
help to boost the fortunates of small companies too, which would help
encourage competition in the market (which is good for us, the
consumers).
On a similar vein, it seems really very hard to organise anything
around here. I would hope that a city wiki would facilitate finding
like minded people if you wanted to organise something.
Aside from that, I really like the idea of having a comprehensive
local guide. It's also an excuse in many ways for me to explore the
area more in writing it.
Something else that I once read was that wikis are like the permanent
source of knowledge, whereas news is temporary. It makes sense, wikis
brutally summarise swathes of news and suchlike, that are mostly just
padding or duplication anyway (and so searching through archives is
prohibitively slow work).
As for how we can get people to make that first edit. I see it
particularly as a two pronged solution:
Prong 1: Reach a critical mass with business listings so that
businesses are at a competitive disadvantage if they do not also have
a listing _that they keep current_ and may be at a competitive
advantage by having one. If you look at BournemouthWiki, you will see
that already, I have put quite a lot of work into generating listings
for local businesses, most of which I will expand further later on.
The same applies with bands, if 50 bands already have pages on your
wiki, then prospective band number 51 is far more likely to think
"hmm, gotta get me one of them".
Prong 2: Create lots of good content, let the search engines and word
of mouth drive people to the wikis and hope that at least some of
them, even if it is only 1%, stay and become editors. This is largely
how Wikipedia works, but it has its already existent popularity on its
side.
I'd like to do more than that, something more effective, more fool
proof, but that is the only strategy that I have come up with so far.
In addition to the above, there could be some merit in promotional
strategies like leafleting etc.
Hopefully between us all, we can develop these strategies and others
to make them easier to implement and more effective.
Mike