Invitation to Participate in NCDD's Wiki

Wikis are the posterchildren for online collaboration, and Ncdd Wiki is thriving - before we've even officially launched it. NCDD members are already using the wiki to work on projects together, and Tom Atlee has been spearheading several exciting collaborative projects on the wiki. We also hope it will be a bridge this weekend between participants in and outside of the National Conference On Dialogue And Deliberation.

Our wiki is open and available for anyone involved in the dialogue & deliberation community to work together on projects, share ideas and post information. A huge thank-you goes to Lucy Perry of Info Visions and John Abbe of the Sandhi Institute for making our wiki a reality.

What is a wiki?

Wiki-wiki is Hawaiian for quick, a word that accurately describes the process for editing pages on a wiki. Basically, a wiki is a set of pages on the web that anyone can change. Anyone can also easily create new pages on wikis, and they often do. Most wikis in use today are used for collaborative group activities. People write pages together, often with little regard for who has 'ownership' of the words. You can think of a wiki as a book, with dozens to many thousands of pages and potentially infinite more. The content of the pages is limited only by the imagination of the participants, because everyone can edit everything. Explore Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) for a mind-boggling example of what a single wiki can become.

NCDD's wiki, pre-launch, has 270 pages. That's more pages than we have on the rest of thataway.org.

I encourage you to go to http://www.wiki-thataway.org and do all of the following things:

*Explore. Click all around the wiki, seeing what's already up. To see a list of all of the pages in the wiki, hit your enter key while your cursor is inside the search feature.

*Learn how to use the wiki. Editing pages, adding comments, creating new pages - all of this is easy. But people tend to be afraid they'll mess up. I'll include some basic instructions below, but know that even if you delete all 270 pages of the wiki by accident (which you won't), we can easily get the pages back up.

*Create your own home page on the wiki. By typing your name like this - Buffy Summers - with your first and last names capitalized and squashed together, you've just created a new page that has your name as a title. Then you can add whatever details you want people to know about yourself, your work, your organization, etc.

*Initiate a new topic or project on the wiki, and use this list to get others involved.

*Participate in one of the exciting collaborative projects Tom Atlee is spearheading on the wiki. Here are short descriptions of the three projects Tom considers to be the most compelling:

- PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES - Participatory Processes -

Here we have the potential to create the most comprehensive, useful participatory process resource on the Web. Already there are almost 200 approaches listed. Ultimately, with your help, every process any of us knows about will be described -- with links to websites, practitioners, books, articles, stories, and analysis of everything about that process and the conditions for its effective use. And since this is a Wiki, all this will continually evolve as we learn more and as more people's viewpoints are included.

- EXPLORING BASICS OF DIALOGUE AND DELIBERATION - Exploring Basics -

Here we can delve into the underlying and overarching dynamics of our practice, moving deep into and beyond all specific methodologies. What are we trying to accomplish with D&D? What factors make for success or failure no matter what method we're using? Can we find common language and descriptive tools for discussing our efforts, across our various disciplines? To these ongoing inquiries we can all continually contribute our insights and deepening questions, for the enrichment of one and all.

- PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES ANALYSIS - Participatory Practices Analysis -

Here we can delve together into what various methodologies are good for - and not good for - and how we might use them together synergistically for greater effect. In combination with the previous two Wikis, this Wiki dialogue will become a great weaving and mapping exercise to guide us in connecting up with each other in our practices and in helping to build the collective capacities of groups, organizations, communities and whole societies. Here is where we find out, together, how it all fits, and how powerful it can be.