Do you think it’s time for a humanitarian wiki?
That’s the question posed by Jon Thompson in his darkest moments. Truly, the unholy alchemy of humanitarian+wiki is something that must be approached with caution, and is not for the faint-hearted. It’s also not for the Sudanese government.
Culling info from UN, NGO and commercial sites would not be too controversial and still useful… The volatility of Darfur is one reason I suggested starting with another location. Most Wikipedia entries are woefully inadequate when it comes to the humanitarian situation. The entry for Abeche, the main hub in eastern Chad, makes little mention of humanitarian activities.
It’s all true – wikipedia isn’t and shouldn’t be so specialised that it provides in-depth information about the humanitarian situation in somewhere like Abeche (which, let’s be honest, is the Backyard of Nowhere) – so there’s an argument that a wiki-type approach could be useful for the humanitarian sector. However it has been tried before (hmm, that seems to have disappeared…) and it’s being tried again, and my feeling is that – in general – a humanitarian wiki is much more likely to fail than not.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it (because my gosh I’m tired of being Negative Nelly) but it needs to be carefully thought through. There have been examples of successes – Mikel has worked on the WaterWiki for UNDP, for example, and his lessons could prove valuable. Soehnke has elaborated a little on the technical aspects of how semantic wikis might work in disasters, but I’m not sure that we’re anywhere near ready for that level of Wiki Fu.
The starting questions are: who’s the target (both contributing and consuming), what are they going to use it for, what value does it add to existing mechanisms, and how will it integrate to existing processes? In this case, the Sudanese government has just expelled organisations on the (spurious) grounds that they’ve passed (false) information about the situation in Darfur to third parties. How prepared will agencies and their staff be to contribute reports about the rapidly deteriorating situation in IDP camps to a (presumably open) wiki, and what sort of impact will that have on the security of staff and the wellbeing of affected communities?
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
If that’s the question, the answer is almost always certainly no.
Sam
29 Mar 09 at 21:29
I’m on the board of Aid Workers Network, which is sturggling. To make an info-sharing hub useful, you need a certain critical mass of participants, and we can’t seem to get that. I don’t know if that’s our fault or something about the humanitarian community, though.
Alanna
30 Mar 09 at 5:00
Sam: straight to the point. I like it.
Alanna: AWN has struggled since its inception, and I can’t see that struggle ending in the near future. I still think that there’s a niche that AWN can fill, but… well, I’ve had this conversation several hundred times already, so I’ll shut up.
Paul Currion
30 Mar 09 at 9:30
In the case of AWN, I think the problem is at least as much the tool chosen as the model: the interface just is not very inviting, nor exciting.
There is another problem there as well, which is neatly personified by the three of us: people who have interesting things to write tend to do so on their own blogs instead of on AWN. As Alanna knows first hand, change.org made the smart move to integrate blogs into their model, instead of having them as rather clunky adjuncts as AWN does — and hence change.org is much more succesfull than AWN. I think that AWN will have to go to a similar model if it wants to become more succesfull as a community for aid workers.
Michael Keizer
30 Mar 09 at 11:43
More about the wiki idea: wikis are a mechanism, not a model. Wikis do not necessarily need to be open to the world. E.g. Wikispaces made a business model out of providing closed-community wikis. Similarly, you could consider having a closed wiki with controlled membership, or even a hybrid one with open and closed parts.
I am aware that this is not a trivial thing and that information security (especially exclusivity) will come with a handsome price tag[1]. The questions are:
1. Are we convinced that the advantages will outweigh the costs?
2. If so, do we think we can convince the humanitarian community of these advantages?
3. And can we find a mechanism that will allow us to fund the effort?
[1] Of course, as Paul has pointed out repeatedly, present information security practice in humanitarian organisations is likely to be a lot worse than even a moderately well-secured wiki will offer, but that is not how those organisations experience things — so a wiki will have to offer a considerable level of security to be acceptable.
Michael Keizer
30 Mar 09 at 11:54
Can we conceive of a wiki valuable to one single humanitarian aid worker? The first lesson of successful social software .. does it provide value for the software hermits? Flickr is a great place to stash your photos and tag for your own organization. Delicious, the same.
WaterWiki started with one person in the UNDP. It’s now growing to an interagency platform for Water Governance.
Who is that person, in what place, for the humanitarian wiki? Making the humanitarian wiki dependent on critical mass makes it a long uphill climb. We need a single champion, or very small group of champions, practitioners in the field, who see immediate utility.
From a small success, we can then consider platforms for the larger community.
Mikel
30 Mar 09 at 15:41
While I am not sure if it was one of my darkest moments I am pretty sure that if we pitch it like that it will suffer an early defeat.
Let’s be clear that I just restated a question that was already asked. And while I don’t think we need a secure wiki (wiki’s are by definition ‘open’) a central repository of information is a good thing. All those field reports inevitably get dropped into a file that few people read.
There are always going to be two information silos. Those that run within an organization and those that stand in the public domain. The greatest misunderstanding centers around the fact that agencies don’t share, they compete. Most outside orgs think that if they can just build the perfect collaboration software they’ll cure the worlds ills. The truth is that will never happen.
However, if wikis take within organizations then those orgs might be willing to contribute to a public wiki somewhere down the road. That is why a real time news wiki won’t work. Also, few people rely on real time news unless they know the source. I would never send people onsite based on random reports. At the same time I would assimilate information that had been in the public domain for a while into a larger strategy. It’s no different a resource than the ones we use when we first look at going into a location.
I know it is not a perfect solution but if we don’t build it they won’t come. Hell, why don’t we just finish filling out the Wikipedia entries?
Jon Thompson
30 Mar 09 at 15:43
I didn’t know about Reliefopedia. It’s not the only one to have failed to take off – most of those indexed here (mostly green, but a number with a development/humanitarian focus) haven’t grown.
As Andrew Lih observes: “There is an assumption that you put up a Wiki and the Wiki Magic will happen… (But) if you have no robust community with admins that fight vandalism, it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Development, aid and all kinds of humanitarian work have always been part of Appropedia’s intended scope, and Appropedia is already working very hard on this. Because the appropriate technology content has grown much faster than other areas, there’s a common misconception that Appropedia is simply an “Appropriate Technology Wiki”, but that’s only part of the story. Almost the first conversation we had as a team was to clarify that Appropedia was for all topics of both development and sustainability, as well as being global – so we cover development methodologies such as Community-led total sanitation and Water supply and purification methods for emergencies, as well as more western-focused ideas like Yardsharing, as well as info on specific crops and agricultural techniques, food processing, policy and regulation issues, organization pages, resource/supply data,and all kinds of how-tos, alongside the more obvious appropriate technology designs. That’s just a small sample.
There’s nothing to stop someone else setting up yet another wiki (see some of them at <a href=”
Chris Watkins
30 Mar 09 at 17:05
I think I’m in agreement with Jon: a secure wiki would be a much lower priority than an open wiki – “central repository of information”. A secure wiki might even be a negative, as people would tend to put info in there and not learn the benefits of a culture of openness.
“Hell, why don’t we just finish filling out the Wikipedia entries?”
That was my initial reaction a few years ago, when the first wiki efforts in development and appropriate tech were starting, and I was doing a lot of work on Wikipedia articles. The answer is: a lot of valuable information isn’t acceptable on Wikipedia – no projects, original research (in a very broad sense), designs, manuals, how-tos – and it’s also not for networking. These are a lot of the things that we’d consider very valuable in a wiki for development and humanitarian resources.
However, Wikipedia will remain very important, and a first stop for many people. Improving those articles is important, and that’s the idea behind WikiProject International development – a kind of hub for finding people working on the same topics.
(Please pardon the bad editing in my previous comment – I meant to delete the last line.)
Chris Watkins
30 Mar 09 at 22:54
@Chris: cliffhanger!
Michael Keizer
30 Mar 09 at 23:58
@Jon: “I know it is not a perfect solution but if we don’t build it they won’t come.” Having built it several times, I have realised that even if you do built it, they usually won’t come. Are we suffering from confirmation bias? Wikipedia is absolutely successful but given the colossally high failure rate of other wiki-based projects (as pointed out by Chris), we may well find that it is the exception that proves the rule, rather than the rule itself.
Currently I don’t believe that. I do think that wikis can play a very useful role but the community element is paramount. The question then becomes how to mobilise the community. Mikel is right here – it needs a champion or champions, particularly if it’s within an organisation – but I think more specifically there needs to be a concrete focus for the community to rally around. Water issues probably provide that – appropriate technology I think does, but I’d watch carefully to make sure that expanding outside that circle doesn’t kill the original momentum.
@Michael: “wikis are a mechanism, not a model.” I agree, but in this context when we are talking about wikis, I think a lot of people have Wikipedia in the backs of their minds. That’s probably not the best way to approach this – as you say, there are other models by which wikis can be implemented. I am pro-hybrid, and that’s what we tried to pitch at NetHope (around ICT issues in the field) – but eventually they went with SharePoint and I haven’t been following the project for a year or so.
@Chris: As Jon says, central repositories of information make a lot of sense, but I’m still not sure that we can generate the necessary community behaviour that would actually lead to those repositories being used. When I was looking at existing intranets for the ECB project, the general refrain was that they were there but people didn’t use them all that much – they kept their most-referenced documents on their own machine, or emailed colleagues when they needed specific information. This is rational behaviour, to be honest – it adds a burden to colleagues receiving requests, but it reduces the burden on the individual making the request.
Paul Currion
31 Mar 09 at 8:14
@Paul: A small number of people who share, especially in the beginning, will be the basis of any successful wiki project. These will be people who really get the importance of knowledge-sharing. Remember that a lot of people contribute to Wikipedia, but they have a vast number of readers – most successful wikis start with a handful of really committed contributors.
We can improve the ratios a bit by engaging better, by making editing easier, and by providing benefits (optional recognition and exposure for contributions, feedback on and improvement of contributed material, and being part of a community). We’re working on all of these – e.g. we want saving to Appropedia to be as easy as saving to hard disk, but with greater side-benefits). But we can act and succeed, regardless of whether the majority is engaged – all successful open source and open content projects (AFAIK) run on a community of enthusiastic contributors, with a much larger community of users, who don’t contribute much. Open content projects actually have a potential to do much better in allowing contributions, as much less specialized skill is needed to contribute – the remaining issues are passion and time commitment.
We know that our technology pages are being used – the more good content is there, the more people will go to the site rather than to their own hard drive. That’s much harder to achieve in a small community, like in an intranet; much easier in an open, internet-based community.
For example (not exactly a humanitarian topic, but close): a biodigester design from the Philippines was on the site for a year, when the designer contacted us to say that he was thrilled with 6000 page views, and that people had been giving him feedback and suggestions after building his design. That page is now up to 34,000 page views. We’ve also seen employers looking to hire people with a particular skill, who’ve made contact with people after seeing their project designs on Appropedia. (I don’t know if the jobs came through – we must ask.)
We have several plans in place for the coming months on Appropedia, to fill out our content related to humanitarian & development issues apart from the technical side. We already have a very active community with an interest in these subjects, though the contributions tend to be more on the technical/design/engineering side; once we have a much greater amount of content, and have demonstrated we’ll see more activity on those pages.
Chris Watkins
31 Mar 09 at 18:59
I just noticed I made an error – the last sentence was meant to read: “once we have a much greater amount of content, and have demonstrated the kinds of ways that Appropedia can be used, we’ll see more activity on those pages.”
Chris Watkins
2 Apr 09 at 22:37
[...] couple of weeks we’ve had some discussion about one general application – the possibility of humanitarian wikis, and the potential of crowdsourcing, the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0 – but throughout these [...]
The Antisocial Humanitarian Pt.1 at humanitarian.info
5 Apr 09 at 20:46
Remember that a lot of people contribute to Wikipedia, but they have a vast number of readers – most successful wikis start with a handful of really committed contributors.
Absolutely, Chris. My question is: who is the readership going to be for a humanitarian wiki. Just to be clear, I think Appropedia is a great project and definitely has legs. My specific area here is the humanitarian community and I am not sure that it’s such fertile ground. As Sam points out, however, in some ways my original question was wrong – we need to ask more specifically whether a wiki could help carry out Humanitarian Task X.
Actually, now that I think about it, the real question is whether a wiki could help to achieve Humanitarian Objective X more effectively. Hmmmm.
Paul Currion
6 Apr 09 at 8:32