Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone:
The Decentralization of Expertise and the Creation of Community Knowledge Bases

Tuesday, May 30, 2006, 1:45-2:40

Speakers:

Adam Frey, Cofounder of Wikispaces (http://www.wikispaces.com/)

Heddy Nam, Cofounder of Never Again International (www.neveragaininternational.org)

Immoderator:

Liz Gannes

Note taker:

Willow Cook

This session examined the decentralization of expertise and the creation of community knowledge bases via the stories of two organizations: Never Again, an international network that connects young people around the world to generate ideas and action for peace, and Wikispaces, which provides public and private wikis for organizations.

Faced with the problem of communicating between members located around the globe, Never Again adopted a wiki. The group has used the wiki to discuss both the day-to-day issues of its operation as well as to house content about peace building, becoming a community knowledge base for both the organization and others interested in genocide prevention.

Wikispaces allows organizations to create their own private and public wikis, which can be hosted on Wikispaces or on the organization's own site. The service has become popular with NGOs and schools, who appreciate the user-friendly wiki format.

What are some of the challenges in creating a community knowledge base?

1. Usage: People don't always know how to use a wiki, which can be problematic for finding new members and demonstrating its value to fundraisers. To help new users along, Never Again sends them information introducing them the organization, as well as a link on how to create a new page.
2. Content Control: Never Again doesn't edit any pages except spam, meaning that the vast amount of content can be difficult to control. Within the organization, Nam says, there is an ongoing debate about how much and what type of information to share on the wiki: as the organization has grown from five to thousands of people, she points out, it may no longer be appropriate to include the organization's budget discussions on the wiki.
3. Accessibility: The majority of Never Again's members are in central Africa, where there is little Internet access. The organization has tried to work around this problem by using email to share and request information.
4. Adaption: Frey notes that wikis are useful when they are a by product of process; it's important, therefore, to set up a wiki with a specific goal. "Wikis that don't go away [those where] someone is passionate about the content or the process. Don't ask 'Why do we need a wiki?' but 'What are we doing that the wiki can facilitate?'" A good formula, Frey adds, is: Vague goals + wiki ≠ productivity. Project + wiki = productivity
5. Privacy: Wikispaces offers two levels of privacy: totally open to the public, where anyone can edit the wiki, and totally private. He himself feels that too many restrictions are counterproductive in a community knowledge base. "A passionate community member is better than thousands of unactive community members," he says, adding that this is a give-and-take situation. "If I allow you to make a change, I'm allowed to manage that change. This process leads to a good knowledge base."
6. Authority: Who gets to create content? Who gets to delete spam? How do you delegate permissions? Never Again has addressed this challenge by allowing any user to add or change content, and Nam points out that the strategy has worked for them. "Anyone can sign up as a user [on Never Again's wiki]," she says. "Aside from an occasionally spam entry (which are easy to detect and remove), it has been a blessing to have it open. It adds to what the wiki is, and to the offline work as well."
7. Credibility: How do you know who is part of your community, and what their reputation is? For Never Again, this issue hasn't been a problem. "We've just been lucky," Nam says. We don't claim to be authority on topics, but use wiki for reflections and experiences."
8. Dissemination of information: What do you do when you have so much content and want to share it with those who are not part of the community, who don't know much about topic or even care much about it? Nam notes that this has been a challenge for Never Again, who never considered the wiki an end in itself, but a tool to further its work in the field. "Peace building can only be done offline," she says. "We've brought offline work onto wiki, but have yet to do the reverse."
9. Fragmentation: Where does a movement go when there are too many communities? What do you do when there is one community per person? Frey sees this not as a challenge but an opportunity: "Having access to many communities is not a huge problem," he says, "except each must recognize there is limited bandwidth. In fostering a sense of meta-community, you can get distracted --- there might be five wikis on the same topic. Ultimately, you may want to aggregate communities that can work together. Hopefully this is a good, rather than a problem."

What makes a community knowledge base successful?

1. Ownership: Members need to feel a right and a responsibility to edit and to share information.
2. Simplicity: If it takes an hour to learn it, people won't use it. Permissions, inviting others to the wiki, getting files, tracking info, even adoption of the wiki -- all of these functions need to be user friendly. "Realize the barriers are social, not technical. You'll find that if the tool gets out of their way, their expertise will come to the fore," says Frey.
3. Accessibility: Members must be able to access and contribute to the content.
4. Capacity building: The knowledge base should both aggregate and expand community knowledge, allowing users to translate it into action.
5. A reflection of the real world: However your organization works, it has to be reflected in the tool. "Expertise has always been decentralized," says Frey. "It's a matter of exposing [information] to a broader community."
6. Community: "Wikis are not useful when there isn't a group dynamic," says Frey.
7. Flexibility: "You're better off fostering passion than implementing rules and regulations that will ultimately turn people off," says Frey.
8. Evolution: "If the work is over, a wiki ends," Frey says. "It may transform into a body of knowledge -- as an online reference, or be published offline." His advice? "Make [your wiki] easy to export, turn off, delete content if it suits the community. The [transition] should be smooth."