Link

Invited to speak at the hearing were Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the non profit charity the Wikimedia foundation, and John Lewis Needham, Manager of Public Sector Content Partnerships with Google.

Jimmy Wales,  spoke about his vision in building Wikipedia. The original vision statement for Wikipedia was for all to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

He related how open, collaborative media, like wikis enable more efficient gathering and dissemination of useful information. Although it may be counterintuitive that opening up a wiki project leads to a more useful compendium of information, that is what the experience has been with Wikipedia, and Wales believe that this can be the experience for government agencies and operations as well.

The First Amendment plays an important role in this project, as do traditional American ideals of individual responsibility. Under US law, everyone writing in Wikipedia takes responsibility for his or her own actions, just as is true everyone speaking in any public forum. The maintainer of this forum, the Wikimedia Foundation, has set down some fundamental codes of conduct, including but not limited to what Constitutional scholars call “time, place, and manner” restrictions, and I have personally imposed policies which strive toward respect for others, quality writing, and the citing of sources.

It is counter-intuitive to some that an open discussion with virtually no top-down command-and-control structures can generate a high quality encyclopedia. Nevertheless, it does.

Now, given that Wikipedia is a public enterprise, open to the entire public for collaboration and contribution, you may be wondering how wikis or the Wikimedia model may be useful to government. First of all, I want to note generally that there are other ways in which a wiki can be set up usefully, including setups that don’t involve opening the wiki to the general public. You can control access, but a wiki might be useful to an agency that wants to facilitate sharing information up and down the hierarchy (increased vertical sharing). And controlled-access wikis could be used to set up inter-agency information sharing as well (increased horizontal sharing).

The main point here is no requirement of necessity for the tool of a wiki to be open to the general public in order for it to be useful.

Wales then went on to give the Committee a quick overview of the concepts behind a wiki

Wales’ wikipedia primer:

The most basic idea of a wiki is “a website that can be easily edited by the readers” but modern wikis contain simple yet powerful features that allow for the users to control and improve the quality of the work.

Wikis maintain a history of prior versions of articles. Every version of every article is stored in the database. Wikis also provide a simple means to compare any two versions. These two simple ideas combined mean that users can quickly revert back to a prior version if a new change is not satisfactory, and users can also monitor the work of others by quickly comparing to a recent version. This tends to cause the quality of the work to improve over time, since any bad changes do not live very long.

Additionally, wikis can provide fine-grained control over who is able to access or edit various kinds of information, thus facilitating the possibility of inter-agency information sharing and collaboration.

Wikipedia represents the power of a wiki open to the general public, but I believe the same wiki technology that powers Wikipedia is also being widely adopted inside many enterprises, and I’ll note here in passing a couple of examples of this innovative use, one in private enterprise and one in the U.S. government.

This brings us back to what might be called The Lesson of Wikipedia — that an open platform, allowing many stakeholders to participate, can facilitate information sharing in an extremely cost-efficient manner, and it can take advantage of a wider range of knowledgeable people than traditional information-sharing processes do.

Good democratic governments strive to be responsive to the citizen’s needs In order to do so, it is important that governments use technology wisely to communicate with the public, and also to allow the public to communicate with the government.

Electronic communications are rapidly developing, and innovations such a wiki point the way towards the kind of balance between openness and control that can make for successful outcomes.

John Lewis Needham, is the Manager of Public Sector Content Partnerships at Google. In that capacity, he leads Google’s efforts to build public-private partnerships with government agencies in the U.S. and internationally. In his testimony he introduced the idea that Goverment agencies should use Google’s new site maps technology in order to ensure that all relevant online information published by government agencies can be found and indexed by the Google Search engine.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The work that I focus on at Google is critical to this mission because few bodies of information are as important to Internet users as the broad, deep, and authoritative data provided by government.Making publicly available government information more accessible and useful to citizens not only helps deliver to Internet users the government information they need, but it also enables the government to provide services more efficiently and effectively to taxpayers, and it makes our democracy more transparent, accountable, and relevant to its citizens.

In 2005, Google introduced a technical standard that helps to ensure the accessibility of information on a web site.

This standard is called the Sitemap Protocol. It provides a mechanism for a web site owner to produce a list – or map – of all web pages on a site and systematically communicate this information or “Sitemap” to search engines.

When a federal agency places a Sitemap file on its web site, search engines can readily identify the location of all pages on the site, including database records lying behind a search form. Using this sitemap, search engines are more likely to index and make the information that the agency’s web site provides visible to citizens.

In the Web 2.0 world, where more and more citizens are using blogs, wikis, online mapping, video sharing services, and social networking sites to communicate and collaborate with each other, there will be even more demand for government to bring information to citizens where they are through these new platforms. This information will also help serve as a core component of the user-generated content that is driving the deeper engagement of Americans with each other, and with our democracy, through the Web.

The full content of both testimonies in addition to the testimonies of the other panel members:
Karen S. Evans, Administrator, Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology , Office of Management and Budget
Ari Schwartz , Deputy Director , Center for Democracy and Technology

Are available online here:
http://www.senate.gov/~govt-aff/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=513