Deliberative Wiki

The LawPrawfsBlog has a posting today about the idea for a Wiki-Treatise. Meanwhile the State of California has launched a curricular wiki project to reduce the costs of creating K-12 school curricula. Community Board 3 in Queens under the tutelage of Tom Lowenhaupt created the first ever policy wiki. We are witnessing new and innovative uses for the tool every day.

The wiki craze for collaborative drafting and editing is meeting a long-felt need in many sectors. The benefits to education from access to collaboratively-created knowledge and reduced costs of information are tremendous. But it misses the boat as to the full potential of the technology.

The wiki is ideal as a means for collaborative drafting. True enough. But it could be the future of deliberation.

The wiki is an ideal way to create deliberation within a community by focusing discussion around a task to be accomplished. Instead of merely complaining about the school board, what better way to bring about reform than to get parents, teachers, educators and policymakers working together to design a better curriculum and course materials. Instead of griping about potholes, why not use a wiki to create policy together and work collaboratively to effect real change? It demands a public exchange of reason in writing, no less, and engages stakeholders in deciding their future together.

But to transform the wiki from a drafting into a deliberation tool, we need to think through the processes and procedures for how we are going to get people involved in using it. The simplicity of the wiki is great for creating an encyclopedia. But if my goal is to make sure that more and new voices are heard in the process and that those voices respond to each other, how might we improve the wiki? If I want to have parents and expert educators involved in drafting curriculum together, should contributors have to self-identify? If we want a community writing its own laws and policies, do we want anonymity? Do we want a reputation system? Don't we want to be able to create wiki sub-committees to facilitate small group drafting?

How do we need to improve the wiki tool or the way we implement it to make it more useful to communities making decisions together?