Town governments should consider using wikis to encourage citizen involvement, deliver greater transparency in the public policy process, and achieve faster, more comprehensive solutions to local issues.

A wiki is a website made up of pages that users can add to or edit using a web browser. Changes are recorded and preserved in the version history of every page. I've blogged about wikis before, but here I detail specific examples of how this technology could be used by a town. I also consider some of the practical limitations and implementation issues that might stand in the way of adoption.

The wiki approach to collaboration is a fundamentally different way of creating documents. Instead of passing a single document around through multiple, serial drafts and edits, the entire document remains in a constantly evolving form, on a public website. Individual contributions are de-emphasized because it is possible for any person to make small or large-scale changes at any time. Individual authorship blends into a collaborative, consensus product. When this process works, it can solve a number of participation challenges that are especially relevant in the context of local policy action:

• Individuals can contribute when and where they have time and expertise - Rather than attend a series of meetings, a person can follow the development of a document over time and submit their modifications at 3am or whenever they have time. If a person has special expertise, they can fill in with much greater detail or correct misunderstandings of details that often escape review in higher level discussions.
• The entire process is public - the wiki is hosted on a public website and can be set up to send automatic notifications of topic changes to interested persons via email.

• The process itself can be engaging - One reason residents do not bother to attend meetings is because they have no clear idea of what is to be discussed. Or worse, they do attend and find that 90% of the meeting is about a topic they care little about and their issue has already been decided. Not only can participation be intimidating, but giving up 2 hours of a weeknight to go watch a government meeting with no substantive opportunity for participation quickly sours the average person from following the civic process, especially in the early, formative stages of policy, when their input could be the most valuable.

  A wiki is no cure-all, but it provides a much lower barrier to entry and a way for residents to research the current status of an issue--to better understand how to join the conversation. Furthermore, because the focus of a wiki is on producing a tangible, consensus product--a document--it can be a very substantive experience--not just a discussion arena. Below, I will talk about some of the complementary things needed to make a wiki work--to prevent it from being a "flame-fest."

• The process is ongoing and adaptable - By the time public policy is presented for a vote at a town meeting, the issues have been crystallized into a simple yes/no choice. Residents line up for a few minutes to "be heard," but the "losers" go home frustrated and dissatisfied. It's often too late to participate in a meaningful way as the battle lines have hardened and advocates have assembled their arguments to win, not discuss. A wiki, used to help formulate public policy prior to a formal meeting, gives residents a much great opportunity for participation and can be a tool to help the community develop policy over time.

• The process is more transparent - Massachusetts and most states have enacted Open Meeting Law legislation to prevent public matters from being decided through back room deal and crony networks. It is illegal for a town board or commission to meet in private to decide policy. Meetings must be announced, made accessible to the public, and recorded so that residents and the media have access to meeting minutes. Email alone does not help transparency, in fact, the Attorney General advises, in her guide to open meetings:

  ...Like private conversations held in person or over the telephone, e-mail conversations among a quorum of members of a governmental body that relate to public business violate the Open Meeting Law, as the public is deprived of the opportunity to attend and monitor the e-mail "meeting." Thus it is a violation to e-mail to a quorum messages that can be considered invitations to reply in any medium, and would amount to deliberation on business that must occur only at proper meetings. It is not a violation to use e-mail to distribute materials, correspondence, agendas or reports so that committee members can prepare individually for upcoming meetings.

  I was unable to locate any legal references to wikis in public meeting law and my query to the Attorney General resulted in a referral to my local District Attorney's office. It's a hypothetical question as to how a wiki would be construed, but my argument is that a public wiki better serves the purpose and intent of open meeting law than a legally-compliant public meeting. The wiki is always open. Whenever a document is modified, that change is preserved and visible in the revision history of the document. Residents can subscribe to notifications of changes and follow the evolution of policy at a much greater level of detail than simply attending a meeting. In fact, residents can step into the process at any time--they are not constrained to limited meeting times or reliance on knowing the right board member to get their input included. Armed with this information, when they do attend public meetings, they have the background and material to meaningfully participate.

• The process is organic - the truly revolutionary thing about a wiki used for this purpose is that if it works to effectively gather the input of residents, it is beyond the control of politicians. It would not eliminate the need for expert studies and professional research work, but such work could support the education of the community, not simply be an expensive consulting project the town pays for which is then disputed by opposing factions. Because the wiki is a website, it is easy to include hyper links to documents and other resources. It can be used to collect all the information around a particular issue...imagine if we had good "documentation" about the policy systems our governments create. Imagine a website that pulls together all the resources, studies, and public discussion used to craft policy...then, imagine that that website is built for free by the community, not just a marketing vehicle devised after the fact to sell the town's idea.

By now, the cynics and realists have long been shaking their heads at the impossible optimism of such a dream...yes, it is not automatic. I wish I could lay out examples of how this has worked effectively, but I'm trying to make the case myself for why my town could utilize this process and I don't know of any examples! I do know a broad outline of what it would take to address the most fundamental challenges though:

1. It will be chaos!--or nothing - anyone can edit any page? Vandals will make it impossible to be useful. People with usernames like RandomInterloper will go in and replace the thoughtful writings of DaveAtkins with idiotic gibberish. Or perhaps, less dramatically, non-residents will contribute to the process. The wiki can require registration and email validation. Key pages can be made read-only. Problem user accounts can be disabled and ultimately attempts can be made to block those users. Online Community management is tough.

   It is important to set the intended scope of the wiki and adapt it as necessary. The wiki is not just something we throw out there and expect to work--it has to be part of an overall strategy of community engagement. If the wiki becomes more a discussion board, then we start a discussion board in parallel. If town leaders want to prevent their opinions from being overwritten, we can have a blog to run in parallel. When pages become disorganized, leaders of the project will need to gently reorganize things. It is inescapable that a successful wiki requires a resourceful, web-savvy champion to help manage the chaos that could ensue and cultivate adoption and participation.

   
   
   

2. people here are not technical enough for this - wiki software tries disparately to simplify the way pages can be edited, but I think the challenges are actually more procedural than technical. It is hard to edit someone else's work, not because you don't know how to make a font bold, but because you feel like you are doing violence to their writing. You send people a link to a wiki page and it's not that they don't know how to click a button that says "Edit," it's that they don't know what they are really supposed to be doing. We cannot simply throw it out there and expect anything to happen. People need to see not just the value of the information, but the value of modifying the information.

   A wiki needs to start with a small group of people who believe in its potential and are excited to try using it. It may be that a wiki is nothing more than a place to record meeting minutes at first...or to post the meeting schedule...or to upload some key documents...whatever it takes to get people looking at it. To build momentum, there is a great deal of offline work to be done and a search for early adopters. When the project begins to work, users will help each other and technical problems will not slow anyone down.

   
   
   
3. what about people without internet access? Digital Divide! - this sounds great, but won't it just be a tool for geeky rich guys with internet access? It's part of a strategy. It's not a replacement for public meetings or traditional methods of political engagement (that have worked so well). When you consider all the advantages the wealthy and connected (people-connected, not internet-connected) have, this can only expand the level of participation.
   
   
4. the town has a website, why do we need this? - The town website is usually primarily one-way informational. It's not a tool to develop policy, it is a means of communication. The kind of wiki I am proposing is not an encyclopedia like the wikipedia, but a working document model. I'll illustrate below good and bad ideas for how to use a wiki...

As I described above in many cases, the wiki is just a tool for helping solve a particular policy issue problem. Its best use is where there is a need for multiple people to collaborate on learning about an issue and developing a consensus document or plan of action.

My town is in the midst of a great deal of tension over a massive proposed development that will create a "mini-city" of shops, restaurants, office and residential space. When I state my support for the project, it draws fire from the opponents. So, if I were to suggest starting a wiki topic on something this contentious, it would be a recipe for failure as proponents and opponents overwrote each other's views, turning the site into an erasable message board.

However, a wiki might have been a useful way to develop a shared vision in the town of our economic development future. What can we agree on that we want in the town? What are our options? When there are topics that become contentious, we could create a message board so that a threaded discussion could proceed there as people argued over what was appropriate to include in the wiki.

Another project in my town involves the creation of a Public Access Cable Channel. I started a few wiki pages on this topic and at our next meeting, I hope I can convince others to help me fill in the details as I have been educating myself on what is involved in such a project. We have a sort of standardized startup manual/kit, but we need a way to organize our local information and tap the resources of people who are busy and perhaps do not have time for marathon meetings to discuss all the details. Honestly, I don't know if the wiki is the way to go, but it seems as long as the project is information-gathering and constructive/creative, this tool is useful. If people want to debate about things...that will become evident over time.

I'm not linking to my town's wiki here...because I feel I need to do the face-to-face groundwork first. If anyone is interested, I would be happy to send links, but I think the fist step is understanding the vision of what it could be. I welcome comments and suggestions on this very, very long blog post--especially any reports of similar activities in town and cities.

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