I just did a search for humanitarian wiki and here’s why:
I need a rather concise description of “cross-cutting issues”. I know what they are but I wanted to double check if my understanding of them needed refreshing. That means I can’t consult all the aid manuals on my laptop, because they’re ‘old’. So, if I google ‘humanitarian cross-cutting issues’ I still need to sort through all the results to find one published by a reputable source, within the past year.

Theorhetically, a humanitarian wiki would have an entry on ‘cross-cutting issues’ that would have already noted changes in the current literature.

If this were applied to other topics, I see as a useful endeavor. Is it necessary to have an entry on ‘Darfur’? In my opinion, no. If I want an update on Darfur, I turn to a trusted source because it is implicit that the update I require will need to be an interpretation of available data.

Therefore, I vote, yes. And I’d be willing to contribute time to see it successful. Or, perhaps I just create a wikipedia page for ‘cross-cutting themes’ and author it myself…

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.

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.

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.

“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.)

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=”

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?