Future Melbourne: Can a Civic Wiki Redistribute Power? Or Is It One More Place to Vent?
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, September 23 2008
In the 11 years I lived in Washington DC, from the mid '90s to the mid 2000s, I attended one city-wide town hall. Just one. At that meeting, our bow-tied and technocratic then-mayor, Anthony Williams, got up on stage at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown and proceeded to have abuse and invective hurled at him for the next several hours. Mayor Tony, as we liked to call him, stayed fairly straight-faced throughout the session. When it was done, we had vented, he had listened. It felt like participatory democracy, but was it? Did what we had to say change how one bit of how the mayor did his job when he headed back to city hall? I was pretty sure it hadn't. And that's a big reason I never went to a second town hall.
The question of how effective our attempts at influencing power from outside the system have been and will be has been on my mind a lot lately. And so it was on my mind when Melbourne, Australia's attempt to form a city plan by wiki was celebrated during yesterday's OneWebDay. What Melbourne did was to put up a draft version of the proposal that had been crafted by your traditional stakeholders -- agencies and members of the public with a bit of political might -- up online. The Future Melbourne plan was freely editable for about a month this summer. And the results are archived online.
Future Melbourne has wisely taken inspired from past wiki successes, most notably Wikipedia. Be bold, the site's directions insists. "If you do what seems sensible, it will likely be right, and if it's not right, don't worry - every mistake can be easily corrected." Contributors are directed to "criticise ideas, not people." And there's a well-reasoned argument against sock-puppetry, i.e., pretending you're someone you're not for the purpose of deceiving others. All best practices we've developed for using collaborative software.
Perhaps as a result of that good guidance, what came out of the Future Melbourne collaboration isn't the mealy-mouthed document that you might expect. Laid out in sections marked People, Creative, Prosperous, Knowledge, Ecocity, and Connected, it's a fairly progressive urban plan that, for example, ties the need for new transporation alternatives to peak oil and and insists upon ubiquitious municipal wireless Internet connectivity.
Melbourne Lord Mayor John So is out and about bragging on Future Melbourne, and reports that the site attracted more than 30,000 page views from 7,000 unique visitors while the wiki was active. And more than 200 edits were made by users, without, So reports, a single instance of vandalism or off-topic remarks. Here's So:
These spanned the spectrum from corrections of spelling and grammar through to extensive well-considered contributions on the future of the city. When compared to traditional consultation programs which often involve town hall meetings and hard copy documents, we were extremely happy with the level of accessibility and interest in the plan stimulated by the wiki and the sustainability of the process.
You had me at "town hall," Mayor So. You had me at "town hall." But it's after the collaboration is done where things get, to me, particularly interesting.
With the editing period now closed, the minds behind Future Melbourne will be conducting a holistic evaluation of the experiment, a qualitative and quantitative review of what worked and what didn't. That's excellent. But as for the city plan itself, the Future Melbourne team will "review the contributions made and endeavour to organise, refine and incorporate the range of ideas in the most practical possible way." And then what comes out of that process will head to the Melbourne city council on September 30th, where it enters the political bull ring.
And how well what the community crafted survives once committees and politicians get a crack at it may be instructive for the prospect of things like wikis actually being able effect real change in the halls of power.