City Wiki

A city wiki is a web site that serves as a knowledge base and social network for a specific city, town or village. Smaller communities that surround the main city (suburbs, unincorporated areas, metro regions, etc.) are sometimes associated with a city wiki, even if the particular geographical entity is also represented by its own wiki. The "wiki" feature of the web site suggests that the web site's software allows for easy content contributions from the community.

PortlandWiki is a city wiki dedicated to serving as a knowledge, information and social hub for Portland, Oregon. An additional goal for PortlandWiki is to give voice to the many communities that make Portland the marvelous city it is.

Civil Society and Civic Spaces

Why create and maintain a city wiki (or civic wiki)?

Perhaps you're familiar with the Nigerian Igbo proverb "Ora na azu nwa" (It takes the community/village to raise a child), or at least with the version of this proverb that found its way onto a book by Hillary Rodham Clinton or by children's author Jane Cowen-Fletcher. Similarly, it also takes healthy communities to make a successful society.

Throughout the ages, healthy human communities have benefited from common areas where individuals and groups from the community came together to exchange information, knowledge, gossip, goods, services and so on. In hunter-gatherer societies, a community commons might consist of the simple community campfire, or extend to a much larger "common-pool resource area" shared by more than one tribe. Later, as humans formed into agrarian and industrial societies, parks, plazas, the village commons and similar spaces accessible to the whole community opened up.

An established commons often fell under the covetous gaze of one powerful interest or another. In fact, the real "tragedy of the commons" was not its over-exploitation by its legitimate stewards, as posited by Garrett Hardin, but the constant temptation felt by a few to take it from the community. Indeed, the main threats to a given community's commons usually involved its expropriation for private gain of one sort or another. The rich, powerful and/or well-connected (socially, politically, militarily or otherwise) could (and still can) take control of a commons from the commoners--who almost always outnumber them--by virtue of their wealth, power and connections.

So where does the civic wiki come in? Wiki technology (essentially read/write web editing tools that people with rudimentary computing skills can master fairly quickly) and the platform this technology operates on (the world wide web) offers a unique opportunity for members of any community to strongly influence how their community is governed. But that's just the beginning. A community wiki can serve as the community's historical archive, bulletin board, media center (as in a "read/write" daily news paper, television channel and radio station), knowledge commons and so on. It can perform all these functions without the guiding hand (visible or otherwise) of any "authority," dogma or ideology.

The practical effects are potentially profound. For instance, in "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin argues for the social benefits of "mutually agreed upon coercion," asking readers to "consider bank-robbing."

The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we...insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret. The morality of bank-robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks," without providing for exceptions.

Garrett Hardin asserts that bank robbery is a one-way street. But a post-TARP world has shown us that bank robbery can go the other way: banks robbing the common taxpayer. Although public reaction ranged from fear to pronounced skepticism to outrage over the idea of taxpayers footing the bill for a calamity imposed by Wall Street, large banks and other actors in the economy's financial sector, the major media covered this "man bites dog" story largely from the industry perspective. Thus, the industry got what it wanted with taxpayers picking up the tab, even though legislation to "bail out banks" was widely opposed. But a more actively engaged citizenry might have pushed back more effectively. In other words, a large enough group of regular citizens, perhaps with their voices collectively channeled through their community's civic wiki, might have effectively said "banks shall not rob the people," without providing for exceptions.

Civic Wiki Building Blocks

The easy part of launching a new civic wiki, or any wiki for that mater, is choosing an appropriate wiki platform and installing the software on a server. Not that this task is always easy, but compared to what comes next, it's the proverbial "walk in the park." We'll come to the software choices and installation tips later. For now, let's review the major challenges to launching and sustaining a civic wiki.

For starters, let's draw from the experiences of the bold city wiki sysops who preceded PortlandWiki and have long since established successful city wikis. The list of "steps" shown below start off as condensed versions of the wise nuggets found in "Guidelines for running a City Wiki" by Mark Krenz from Bloomingpedia, and the words of wisdom from Davis Wiki's Philip Neustrom as imparted to PortlandWiki's own Michael Andersen in his article "Welcome to Davis, Calif.: Six lessons from the world’s best local wiki."

Impassioned volunteers breathe life into a civic wiki. Not automated RSS feeds or roving cyber bots. Real people with genuine interests, passions and unique understandings of what makes a community come to life. Volunteer contributors, having other responsibilities they must attend to, tend come and go. Encourage contributors to find their unique niche and put their main focus there.

Civic wikis are fun. At least, they should be. If you're not having fun contributing to your civic wiki project you'll get burnt out and won't stay. Treat your contributions to the wiki like a favorite hobby. This is a lot easier if your input is focused on something you like to do (writing articles, editing, creating illustrations, taking photographs, etc.) rather than just making random edits.

Keep the momentum flowing. Can you make at least one edit (upload a photo, submit a drawing, start a new article, etc.) each day? Fresh and interesting content is what keeps people coming back to your wiki. Content contributors also want to feel like they are part of a community of wiki builders and not just playing in a lonesome sandbox all by themselves. An active wiki encourages others to dive in and participate too.

Create a core group of contributors. Your civic wiki's chances of success improve dramatically with a dedicated and active group of editors, administrators and maintainers. Ideally this group will set an example by contributing daily, meeting regularly and guiding the overall focus.

What's your big idea! What major theme(s) does your wiki communicate? No need for complexity here. For instance, PortlandWiki's main theme is Portland, Oregon. Of course, many subthemes flow out from there. One area PortlandWiki hopes to improve on in coming months is much stronger content on the many neighborhoods (nearly 100 identified by name) that make up the City of Roses.

Avoid premature rejeculation (rejected adulation). No sense in running around telling everyone in the world how great your wiki is in hopes they'll feel the same way too. Especially if your wiki's content remains threadbare. Gradually introduce your civic wiki to others who are likely to see its potential, and (ideally) even contribute. Once your wiki's content takes shape, others will begin showing up and (hopefully!) participating.

There's no fun like staggering through a massive directory of hyperlinks, addresses, phone numbers and other machine-generated gibberish. This is complete nonsense, of course. But if this fact weren't obvious enough to any sentient human, a gazillion sites have already tried and failed at this. Information collection and archiving bots certainly have their place, but only if the resulting data is presented in some sort of human-friendly way. For each article you create or edit, think first about that page's potential visitors. What value does your article offer its reader? Is it informative, entertaining or engaging in any way? Does it inform, entertain or engage you?

Place a link from your city's Wikipedia page to your civic wiki. Your town doesn't have a Wikipedia page? Create one.

Go for the long haul. Stay committed. Keep your wiki alive by making at least one or two edits each day. Dead wikis quickly decay and disappear. To let that fate overtake your community wiki is to disrespect all the time, energy and creativity that you and others contributed. Also, don't forget to make regular database backups of your wiki so if disaster strikes, you haven't lost everything.

Civic Wikis and Direct Democracy

Benjamin Dangl, author of Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, has written about social movements in Latin America who have developed creative methods for bringing direct democracy to their communities. For more than 20 years, the people of Porto Alegre, Brazil have directly determined how the city spends its money. The process is called participatory budgeting and it is practiced in more than 1,200 municipalities worldwide today.

Chicago's 49th Ward became the first US community to adopt the practice in 2009. These sophisticated and politically effective forms of direct democracy, found primarily in Latin America, created the social movements that brought politically left of center leaders to power over the past decade or so. Although U.S. communities suffer similar afflictions as our Latin American counterparts (corrupt business and political "leaders," high unemployment, horrific economic policies, environmental destruction, etc.), we lag more than 20 behind Latin America in developing genuinely democratic institutions that represent the vast majority of Americans.

External Links

• City wiki | Wikipedia's City Wiki page.
• Association of City Wikis | Google Groups page.
• Guidelines for running a City Wiki | (Cached version courtesy Archive.org. Original page no longer available.)
• Civic Wiki -- a wiki for your city, town, or region | A Facebook discussion page for civic wikis.
• PortlandWiki.org | PortlandWiki Is A City Wiki For Portland, Oregon. | This is PortlandWiki's AboutUs page.
• Local Search Marketing on Civic Wikis | RichmondWiki's Andrew Miller discusses how civic wikis can potentially benefit local businesses in a given community.
• THE FULL WIKI's City wiki: Reference augments content found on Wikipedia's City Wiki page with additional content, like a list of known city wikis.