A Social Media Wiki for Birmingham?
As you may know I’ve been doing some work with Digital Birmingham over the last month which has been pretty interesting on a number of levels. They come from the rigid, hierarchical City Council environment necessary to run a large city while I come from the fluid, distributed playground of social media exploration. But we have a lot in common, principally the desire to widen the use of online tools and resources across the population, so finding ways to work together has been, and I never thought I’d say this about working with a council department, a lot of fun.
While I’ve got some personal projects in the pipeline through (plug alert!) ASH-10 there’s one idea which I think is worth talking about here since I hope it’ll involve all of us.
DB are interested in putting together some kind of online handbook for social media tools - links to resources such as Wordpress.com and Twitter but, more importantly, guides on how to use them and why in the context of Birmingham. Since this wouldn’t be a small undertaking there would be funding available either through DB or from sponsorship, but DB would look after all of that.
I’d be interested in writing something like this - if nothing else it’d help me to drill down my ideas and theories into something practical - but I don’t think I could cover everything in depth. Which got me thinking about bringing in others who have expertise in areas I don’t. So we get a team of, say, 5 writers to develop an online resource.
Since we’ll also overlap in expertise it makes sense to do this on a Wiki or similar allowing collaborative writing and editing of pages. And once you’ve got a wiki that opens up a whole new world.
But if you’re doing it as a wiki why not just bypass Digital Birmingham and do it ourselves? Not gonna work. It’s pretty well established that most collaborative online endeavours work when a lot of people contribute a very small amount of time and effort and a relatively small number doing the heavy lifting - the ripple effect, if you like. Wikipedia works because the contributor base is huge. This wiki would have a contributor base of, at most, 100 people. And, to be honest, even though it’s my idea I don’t have the time to dedicate to writing the bulk.
So here’s the proposal.
- Digital Birmingham (or, if they don’t go for it, some other body) commission a team of people to produce an online resource based on their requirements and specifications.
- This is produced using wiki software (MediaWiki or the new-to-me XWiki).
- On delivery the wiki is opened up for others to edit. I’d suggest an approved registration system which would allow anyone to join but would have a delay to prevent vandalism.
- The wiki can then be expanded and, more critically, kept up to date by the community who can use it as a resource for their own work (training, consultancy, etc)
What do you people think?
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Love the idea, but worry about the end product a little – specifically who it’s aimed at. Is it us social media types, council bodies, anyone? All very different writing styles, and the “translation” involved between them might prove as hard as to write again from scratch.
For me wiki’s don’t work well as a readable guide, they’re very “dip-in” — for the uninitiated it might not be a great format to use.
I could see a really structured tutorial guide working really well — if there was some kind of Torah-style “notes in the margin” thing going on too all so much the better.
Good point. I’d hope that by having the initial document written by a core team working to a style guide those issues would be minimised. Once it’s opened up I wouldn’t imagine most people will be writing whole pages. They’ll just be adding updates and links and do so in the style of the existing text.
As for the general thoughts about wikis I’m not sure this is a huge issue as I’d imagine the text will be pretty static most of the time. Edits will be infrequent compared to Wikipedia so maintaining a readability shouldn’t be a problem.
I can see a lot of value in this one. Especially for organisations that are highly motivated to get with the social media but lack the experience.
This sounds like a cross between an O’Reilly Reference and a Rough Guide - the fickle technical pointers balanced by a essential guide to the social mores.
As you say, a happy side-effect will be the extraction of knowledge and pooling of best practice
>As for the general thoughts about wikis I’m not sure this is a huge issue as I’d imagine the text will be pretty static most of the time.
I’d be tempted to write a wiki, but not present as one? MediaWiki is ugly and off-putting to the casual viewer, navigation is a problem — it’s the only wiki system I’ve used tho’, I’m guessing there are better alternatives? I bet there’s a WP plugin to wiki-ize it somewhere.
@Si - I like that reference / rough guide model.
@bounder - I’m intrigued by this XWiki thing http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome which was introduced to me by a random guy at the Moseley Quiz on Monday. Bits of it look dead techy but check out the links at the top. You can download each page as a PDF or RTF file. Nice. Haven’t gotten around to installing it yet though.
I wish I had the time to commit to something like this as I have several years experience of technical writing and editing. Unfortunately as I do this full time, I’m reluctant to dedicate large chunks of my free time to it.
Having said that, I’ll help out as and when I can. If someone is appointed overall editor (as I would strongly advise), I’d be happy to have a chat with them about the intricacies and potential pitfalls of technical/instructional writing.
I’d also advise that you refer to the Plain English Campaign http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/ and also John Kirkman’s books “Good Style” and “Punctuation Matters”.