I am just coming to the end of a four-month stint working for Wikimedia UK helping to deliver Wikimania 2014 at London’s Barbican Centre. It was all quite exciting and as The Signpost put it was “not too bad, actually”. In the whirl of events seeing dozens of hackers bringing hacking home to Hackney, hunched over their laptops, while other devotees were busy tweeting, it became all too easy to miss some key aspects of the event, and so to fail to recognise that Wikimania contributed to saving lives.

Wikipedia is not just a website, it is also a somewhat heterogeneous international community which thrives on face-to-face encounters in meatspace. For myself my involvement gained an extra dimension when I started attending the regular London Meetups six years ago. It was meeting other human beings rather than tapping away while staring at a computer screen which made it interesting.

So, this August the London Meetup page modestly subsumes Wikimania within its calendar of monthly events, within an expansion to a three day event with between 2,000 and 4,000 attendees (so much for “British understatement“). But in essence it is the face-to-face interactions outside the formal sessions which make Wikimania such a powerful event. I don’t want to be dismissive about the formal sessions and all the hard work which went into them, it is just that I want to focus on the other aspects and use this to show why I believe Wikimania saves lives.

A couple of weeks after Wikimania a discussion opened up on the Wikimedia Ghana list which spoke of an initiative by Carl Fredrik Sjöland of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine who have teamed up with Translators Without Borders to set up a Translation taskforce. As they explained a couple of years ago “We believe that all people deserve high quality healthcare content in their own language.” Faced with the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa the focus of these activities has shifted to finding  people to translate information about Ebola into the relevant indigenous languages. There is something similar happening through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team who have also been very active developing mapping resources for the medics on the ground.

I had hoped to make it to the OpenStreetMap 10th Birthday Party (the London celebrations were held nearby, to coincide with Wikimania) but I got caught up in other things and only arrived after most of the people had left. But that was precisely what Wikimania was like: you find out more and more about it in the aftermath.

Another aspect I found out afterwards was Denny’s comments on A new metric for Wikimedia where he discusses the availability of Wikipedia in different languages. Considering the recent Ebola outbreak above, this is not just a “nice idea”, but something which requires support now. Often it is not so much getting hold of finances, but finding a way in which those people with the relevant language skills can be linked up with and given the resources to make things happen.

An important aspect of this is that the speakers of these languages are not just passive recipients of knowledge generated in the geographical north. They can also contribute their own knowledge. This also touches on the notion of cognitive justice  as developed by Shiv Visvanathan in The search for cognitive justice

Cognitive justice is not a lazy kind of insistence that every knowledge survives as is, where is. It is an idea which is actually more playful in the sense the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga suggested when he said play transcends the opposition of the serious and the non-serious. Play seeks encounters, the possibilities of dialogue, of thought experiments, a conversation of cosmologies and epistemologies. A historical model that comes to mind is the dialogue of medical systems, where doctors once swapped not just their theologies but their cures. As A. L. Basham put it, the dialogue of medicines, each based on a different cosmology, was never communal or fundamentalist. It recognized incommensurability but allowed for translation.

This is a viewpoint which has been taken up in what is called Open ICT for Development, where “openness” is understood to include the the participation of communities in the governance of their own lives.

So what I found out in the aftermath of Wikimania is the question: Does Wikimania save lives? Can it help people get together and come up with practical methods by which people get in touch and existing initiatives can find that they are taken to a higher level? Will it have an affect in this example and save lives? So in this sense Wikimania is not over. It’s legacy depends on what action people take in its aftermath.

So I am writing this blog because I want you to see if there is something you can do to help either the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team or the Translation taskforce find more support for their projects in fighting Ebola.

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Recently the Speaker of the House of Commons established a commission to investigate the opportunities digital technology can bring for parliamentary democracy in the UK. This consultation is a public exercise which attempts to explore various themes relating to digital democracy.

Wikimedia UK and Demos, working with Wikimedians, have been exploring whether the norms and values of the Wikimedia community can be applied to this kind of consultation, especially the consensus-based approach to writing and enacting Wikipedia policy.

The experiment has been going well and led to a community-sourced submission to the first theme which was looking at how technology can facilitate better scrutiny of the work of Parliament. You can view this submission here. The talk page is also worth a look as the discussion offered some really useful insights into how the content was reached.

However, we need your help. The second theme of the consultation has now been published and it is about digital representation. We would love for as many people to take part in this exercise as possible. The Commission was really appreciative of the efforts of the community first time around and it would be great to come up with another excellent community-driven submission. You can view the questions that are being asked, and participate in creating the submission, here. You don’t need to be in the UK, or a Wikimedian, to contribute.

A third theme will follow in the next couple of months and a similar approach will be taken then. Finally, once the Commission closes for submissions, Demos and Wikimedia UK will write up a comprehensive report on the process and what we have learned which we will, of course, make available to the community.

Carl Miller from the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos will be speaking on this topic at Wikimania at The Barbican, London, next week. If you haven’t booked your tickets yet, you can do so here.

Thank you for any and all help, it is very much appreciated.

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This post was written by Stevie Benton, Wikimedia UK’s Head of External Relations

On Tuesday I was fortunate enough to attend a round table event hosted by the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy at the House of Commons.

The opportunity came about as the result of the work that Wikimedia UK is doing with Demos in attempting to crowdsource a submission to the Commission on the theme of digital scrutiny. (If you haven’t participated yet, please get involved here, it’s open to everyone. Simply click the edit button and get stuck in.)

The session brought together people from the Commission with technology experts and activists to examine how digital technologies can encourage participation in the democratic process.

Something that was reinforced very quickly was the important distinction between between government – the collection of elected representatives that write and enact legislation – and Parliament, in this case the body as a whole, including the infrastructure and systems, and which was our main focus.

A number of themes emerged from the workshop but there were two that left the deepest impression upon me.

Firstly, that for digital democracy to work there needs to be a level of trust on the part of parliament – citizens must be trusted to make meaningful contributions to the debate and this means opening things up and encouraging participation.

Secondly, that when we break down the phrase “digital democracy” we realise that the digital part is actually pretty easy. There are plenty of tools that exist that could be successfully utilised to support democratic engagement, and building new ones if they were required wouldn’t be too difficult (relatively speaking, of course). It’s the democracy bit that’s difficult.

My own take on this is that we need to move away from the widespread feeling that democracy comes down to making a mark on a ballot paper every few years. For democracy to be effective, participation needs to shift away from the ballot box and into the every day processes that form a functioning and mature democracy. But those taking part need to be assured that their contribution is are meaningful and valued, even if their views don’t always win out.

There is a long way to go here before we get close to realising the potential that digital technologies offer to democracy. But the Commission is very serious about pushing forward change and opening up the democratic process to wider engagement through the use of digital. They should be applauded for this and, as citizens, we should be prepared to contribute our efforts towards making this successful.

For further reading, I recommend this excellent blog post  by James Smith of the Open Data Institute. James was in the same working group as myself and his contributions to the debate were particularly insightful.

The Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy will be publishing resources from the event on their website shortly.

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Wikimedia UK and Demos are encouraging Wikimedians to participate in an attempt to crowdsource a submission to a call for evidence on digital democracy from the Speaker of the House of Commons.

The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, has established a Commission on Digital Democracy. It will report to Parliament in early 2015 with recommendations on how Parliament can use technology to better represent and engage with the electorate, make laws and hold the powerful to account. As part of their work, the Commission have issued a series of calls for evidence. These are open invitations for members of the public, either as individuals or groups, to submit responses to a series of questions. They have attracted responses from unions, academics, non-governmental institutions and private individuals. The first theme was ‘making laws in a digital age’, and the second on ‘digital scrutiny’. The Commission plans to shortly publish the final three themes.

There is a growing sense that the growth of the Internet has not paid the democratic dividends that it could. Turnout in formal political elections is steadily decreasing, and trust and support in the institutions and offices of mainstream political life are low and falling. Despite many innovative attempts from both within and outside of Government, the daily reality of democratic engagement for most people in the UK would be familiar to generations of British citizens who predate Facebook or email. The rise of the Internet has, broadly, done little to challenge concentrations of power or structures of unequal representation.

Demos is one of Britain’s leading cross-party think tank and it has an overarching mission to bring politics closer to people. They contacted Wikimedia UK to propose an experiment: can an online community be used to source a response to this call? Can the ethos, community and technology like that of Wikipedia be used to engage Wikipedians to come together and collaborate to create a reply? In particular, Carl Miller, Research Director of the Demos Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, wrote this piece for Wired in which he describes Wikipedia as a masterclass in digital democracy.

This conversation has led to what is an experimental attempt to do just that. In theory there are many lessons that any attempt to increase engagement with digital democracy can learn from Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia. These include the participatory nature of content development and the nature of content (and policy) being arrived at by consensus. Wikipedians are from a wide array of backgrounds and represent a broad spectrum of views. This could lend itself to effective drafting of the kind of evidence that the Speaker is looking for. Wikimedia UK and Demos would like to establish whether this is indeed the case. In particular, we are seeking answers to the following questions:

• How can technology help Parliament and other agencies to scrutinise the work of government? 
• How can technology help citizens scrutinise the Government and the work of Parliament? 
• What kinds of data should Parliament and Government release to the public to make itself more open to outside scrutiny?

Everyone is encouraged to try to answer these questions collaboratively, in much the same way Wikipedia articles are approached – using the main page for content and talk page for discussion. Stevie Benton from Wikimedia UK and Carl Miller from Demos will happily answer any questions on the talk page but are equally happy to let the process take its course.

At this point there is no fixed deadline for evidence on the theme of digital scrutiny. However, the Speaker’s Commission will be publishing publishing a single call for evidence covering our last three themes (yet to be announced). The conversation and crowdsourced evidence will be reviewed at the end of June with a view to either continuing the process or submitting as is. If there is appetite among the community, and if the first attempt is successful, there may be further attempts to develop submissions to the later three themes.

At the end of the process Demos and Wikimedia UK will prepare a report on the process and the effectiveness of this kind of approach to crowdsourcing policy and evidence. This paper will be released under an open licence. It is a real opportunity for Wikimedians to influence the debate about digital democracy and both Wikimedia UK and Demos thank you for engaging with this idea.

You can find the consultation page here and we look forward to hearing from you.

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This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador

To influence education institutions, we need to speak their language and we need to put information in the places where they are looking for it.

The Jisc infoKits are online booklets for management, technologists and other staff in Higher and Further Education. This is where such people come for advice about Programme Management, Learning Spaces, Cloud Computing and many other topics. Today there is a new infoKit that I’ve written as part of the Jisc/Wikimedia UK partnership. “Crowdsourcing: the wiki way of working” shows how professionals and volunteers can collaborate to produce reference materials for education and research.

Like all infoKits, “Crowdsourcing” can be read from beginning to end or dipped into for short, self-contained examples and case studies. It culminates in a discussion of how collections of photographs and other digital media can benefit from sharing on Wikimedia Commons. Each section ends with a succinct summary of the lesson learned.

At around ten thousand words’ length, it is still only a skim over an enormous topic. No one has a sure recipe for success in crowdsourcing, but there are general and specific lessons to be learned from the most visibly successful crowdsourced projects: Wikipedia its sister sites.

The title of the infoKit reflects that managers have to get used to working in an unfamiliar way: accepting risk, accepting openness, working without a plan, and empowering and motivating volunteer contributors. The free and open nature of Wikipedia and is explained not as a gimmick but as crucial to the success of the project. The infoKit warns managers against taking too much control of their educational or scholarly content and thereby suffocating innovative uses and improvements.

Organising and motivating an online community is hard: the infoKit is clear about this. It will often be less effort to move digital content into an existing community than to build a community around a collection of content.

I am going to take my own advice: the infoKit will be updated in future and I will crowdsource improvements by sharing the infoKit on a public wiki. Like all the outputs of my project, the infoKit is freely reusable under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. I’d like to thank Andrew Stewart and David Cornforth of Jisc infoNet for their feedback as reviewers and for their work making my text look so good.

Link: Crowdsourcing: the wiki way of working.

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