Since I first heard about Wikipedia.org I’ve been incredibly impressed by the concept. A free, community edited project. No government bureaucracy, no corporate greed, a truly democratic, people driven resource from the people for the people. In a short matter of time Wikipedia is a very well used, very often referenced resource for every issue under the sun. I’ve spent hours reading through history and various other subjects on Wikipedia. As one issue connects to another, I follow around the beehive of links for no reason other than to satisfy my curiosity. Its almost as if I had never had that curiosity stamped out by schools in the first place.

Of course there are fears and risks associated with a fully democratic and accessible (for those who have the Internet of course) encyclopedia. There is the ever present risk of inaccurate information, and vandalism. So if someone is researching an article for the New York Times, or for your dissertation, Wikipedia probably isn’t the most reliable source. But for general learning, it is amazing.

Another time perhaps I will discuss the power and potential of Wikipedia itself, but this entry is on the usefulness of the technology for other applications. Especially for decentralized, grassroots, democratic organizations and processes.

NYRA has embraced the wiki technology, and I think we are doing some cutting edge things with it. In November and December NYRA created pages for the Student Bill of Rights and the Youth Rights Network, each using wiki technology, but in entirely distinct ways.

The Youth Rights Network(YRN) is the more traditional wiki application. Using it much like Wikipedia does, for a community edited encyclopedia, ours is specifically about Youth Rights. We did add one twist to it though. The potential centerpiece of the YRN is our law library. With all the laws out there that affect the lives of young people, it is time someone puts them all out there for youth to access directly. Information is power. A plain English, well organized, and accurate database on every law affecting the lives of youth would be a wealth of information. Making it available to all for free and having it controlled by youth themselves, that’s power.

It had long been my personal goal to develop a law library of such a sort on the NYRA page, but it is a huge, daunting task. It was looking like it would never happen without full time paid staff, and many interns, and that was taking forever to happen. So instead of waiting for funding to materialize, we just started it. With the wiki not only do we put the power in the hands of youth, we also provide the responsibility of creating it. Every chapter and individual can research their own state’s laws, and everyone will benefit.

Student Bill of Rights took a different course. Instead of just harnessing a decentralized method for creating a large quantity of information, we are using the democratic process itself as a tool for ensuring maximum quality and input on just one piece of information - a Student Bill of Rights. While the project has been delayed by planning, the intention is to enlist students from across the country representing a range of organizations concerned with student rights to collectively write one document meant to represent all of them. Without an in-person conference, the best way to do this is through the wiki technology which is able to empower the natural give-and-take, compromise and consensus building needed to draft a document that can possibly claim to be student written and truly universal. Soon this project will begin the actual drafting stage, and I’ll be able to report back the results of this experiment.

The greatest revolution in our use of Wiki technology started just three days ago. NYRA is currently planning a campaign to lower the drinking age in Vermont. To make sure it is successful, a few activists will be traveling up to Vermont for two weeks or so to organize the state in support of this drinking age bill. As the campaign was first coming together Monday night I started putting together a mental list of prep-work that needs to be done before anyone makes the trip up north. I put this list up on a new Wiki and encouraged the other people involved in the campaign to check it out.

This tool has magically come together in the last few days, and it has impressed the hell out of me. The other people in the campaign have added additional items to my list, and as they complete tasks they check them off by providing a link to their finished work and storing it right there on the page. Lists of schools, lists of house members, etc. Things started getting ticked off the to-do list, and this has rapidly become the official campaign HQ.

With this new, action oriented Wiki, we have expanded it to cover all NYRA operations. Each Board Member and Staff member has a personal page with a to-do list, and contact info and such. Each staff member can edit each other staff member’s page, i.e. add things to other’s to do lists, add things to their own, and check off completed tasks on their own list. In addition, this action oriented Wiki, dubbed the “NYRA Office”, can also store written work and attachments.

The benefits of this to a volunteer run, decentralized organization such as NYRA are multi-faceted. As we have no real world office where daily face-to-face contact is the driving force of productivity we have to rely instead on the more abstract and more difficult methods of e-mail reminders, phone calls, and AIM. That can often be slow and haphazard in addition to providing no real accountability between staff horizontally. Having a public, open to-do list system like this makes duties clear, visible, and public. Staff see what they have to do, get a daily reminder of it by looking at their list, and can feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in checking off their jobs for the world to see.

In addition to the benefits of keeping people on task with the to-do lists, the virtual office provides us with a central place to store and post completed work. Instead of trying to search through months’ old e-mails on 15 different computers in 10 different states, we can have a central place to store all the work we need to do, and save it for as long as needed.

Finally, this system should prove useful for training of new staff. New volunteers would be able to see exactly and specifically what their predecessor did in their job. Plus still have all the results of that work available to them.

I am certain more complicated, professional systems similar to this exist. But Wiki is so simple to use, so straight forward, and so…free that I am excited by the potential for this new virtual decentralized office.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2005 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.