Participants in our local Issues Forums are invited to create “neutral point of view” pages about their community on the recently upgraded wiki hosted at Pages.E-Democracy.Org. We use MediaWiki, the same simple tool used for Wikipedia.
We’ve used our wiki to successfully build collaborative candidate website directories in Minneapolis and St. Paul and lists of community links like we have in Brighton and Hove.
E-Democracy.Org projects, local steering committees, the Board and others may also use the wiki for drafting documents in public. We’ve drafted grants and technology plans this way.
Some new features include our use of categories and extensions which allow us to insert videos hosted at YouTube and other places as well as to upload MP3 audio file with a local audio player. Imagine how you might use these tools to promote local democracy in your community.
In general, as long as the wiki isn’t being used to display just one side of an issue (e.g. e-advocacy), the sky is the limit in terms of local civic use. You can now take a conversation from a forum and create some lasting stable content or perhaps informally use the wiki to publicly draft and share documents related to a local government commission or task force. Have some fun. Act first, ask for permission later.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
One thought on “Create pages at E-Democracy.Org – Wiki upgrade”