In 2006, the Department of State launched a project called Diplopedia (wiki-based software) with a goal of creating a better way to share unclassified information on diplomacy, international relations and political figures internally. Last week we saw a ton of press coverage following Eric Johnson’s speech at Wikimania in Egypt.
Johnson said that part of the success of wiki effort comes from prosecuting anyone who posts invalid information (you have to register to post on the site) and a lack of arguments of phrasing in articles. Interestingly the New York Times’ coverage of this story discusses the burgeoning collaborative nature of the government agencies:
There certainly is a culture of collaborative writing at the State Department, Mr. Johnson acknowledged: memos are drafted, massaged, passed up the chain for comments and then approved. But this form of collaboration is based on the notion that the more people who read something, the less chance it will be candid. Wikis, by contrast, are collaborative only in retrospect — someone has to be prepared to be the first to write something, and deal with having those words changed by a complete stranger.
Mr. Johnson said his office occasionally gets calls from new contributors: “People will say, ‘I have something I want to post; I want to check before I do it.’ And we say, no, no, put it up.”
The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture,” said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003. “This is a technological manifestation of a policy difference,” he said, a change he dated to when Colin L. Powell was secretary of state.
Government adoption of new technologies tends to greatly lag consumers and the enterprise. If the government believes it can leverage web 2.0 tools to improve efficiency and accuracy in the workplace, than it’s great validation for the future of collaborative tools.