To date- the universally agreed upon gold standard for collaborative, web-enabled technology is the wiki. This is largely due to its successful role powering Wikipedia. Consequentially, whenever someone hopes to harness the wisdom of distributed individuals to develop an idea or resource, they think “I know- let’s set up a wiki!”

However I’m not sure I buy it. I’ve seen very few successful engagement projects utilizing the basic wiki format (and you could argue that Wikipedia engages very few of us. Most of us never edit or write, we just use it). This seems particularly true within the field of social change; I have yet to see a wiki site for social or environmental issues that really takes off and unites the globe and the movement. Just look at this extensive list of wikis all aimed at improving our green/social/sustainability knowledge.

So my question is: should us sustainability nuts continue in our attempts to use wiki type technology to share ideas, knowledge, and develop the resources we need to work towards a better world? Or is it time to throw our hats into a new ring.

I could write my opinions on this for hours, so I’ll spare you and let you share your feedback. I just want to leave you with one thought.

I recently heard a very important/interesting fact about the primary administrators and editors of Wikipedia, ie the people whom Wikipedia successfully engages to collaborate. Most Wikipedia editors partook in a curious recreation as children: reading encyclopedias. Yes that’s right, for fun they liked to read encyclopedias. If this was your favorite past time as a young one, it might be difficult to find an outlet for that passion. Can you imagine the joy these lone children across the globe felt when they had the opportunity to work with others, with similar passion, to write their own encyclopedia? I can see how wiki was a wonderful technology to allow these individuals to collaboratively create encyclopedia articles. These are WORD people- they love the written text. So a technology devoted to collaborative text for knowledge collection is their dream come true.

However most of us collaboration ninjas working towards social change are not quite that word oriented. There is something else that uniquely brings us together. Some intangible hope, belief, emotion, passion. For that- is a text heavy collaborative medium the best way to engage and unify? Or is there something else out there that better suits our core….