You might be interested to hear that we recently utilised a wiki at the City of Melbourne in Australia to collaboratively draft our next 10 year strategic city plan in a manner much along the lines of what you propose above.

During a 4 week public consultation period, anyone in the world was able to register at http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au to directly edit the content of the plan. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time this has occurred on such a scale. We required people to use their real names when editing in order to maintain accountability. We welcomed participation from around the world, as planning solutions are rarely confined to specific localities. One of the most impressive edits was a contribution depicting bicycle lanes in Helsinki, which you can view here:

http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/view/FMPlan/BicycleLanesInHelsinki

We employed a separate discussion board behind each page so people could comment on the plan if they didn’t feel comfortable editing the content directly. We utilised a number of other components such as a media centre, blog, podcasts, youtube channel, etc in order to ensure a wide variety of engagement options.

We received over 7000 individual visits to the site and several hundred edits to the plan by members of the public. Not a single instance of spam, offensive or off-topic content was recorded during the consultation period. We employed a process of direct community management, directly engaging with citizens as edits were made, answering questions, referring them to the appropriate area of expertise or correcting formatting errors should they occur.

Our main challenge involved re-evaluating what was meant by community engagement, as the process of site visits/edits/comments etc differs significantly from traditional consultation methods. We commissioned a paper authored by our site consultants CollabForge (http://www.collabforge.com) titled ‘From Consultation to Participation. A copy is available to view here:

http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/view/FMPlan/FromConsultationToparticipation.

This led to our online ‘Guide to Participation’, which outlined the various methods bv which people could engage:

http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/view/FMPlan/HowYouCanParticipate

Ultimately, the wiki itself was only one tool in a suite of many traditional consultation tools such as town hall style meetings etc which were run in parallel with the website. I notice that Parks Victoria are soon to undertake a similar planning process using wiki technology:

http://weplan.parks.vic.gov.au/?q=participate

The best of luck with your local wiki endeavours. Would be happy to discuss/share further knowledge should you have any questions.

Dale
Future Melbourne site admin
City of Melbourne
http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au

A few thoughts (and I’ll blog about this myself soon):

Maybe there could be two levels of participation (you might be saying this already). Anyone can read the dialog and the updates. Only certain people who have applied for access and proven able to handle the responsibility can modify documents, and likely only specific documents at that.

Perhaps a town policy Wiki would also need an attached Forum where people could express their concerns, questions, etc. and have experts and those in authority answer them. Ideas expressed in the Forum might then be incorporated by designated authors into the Wiki document?

One question: staffing. How many extra people would be required at city hall to manage a wiki-based system? There would be technical requirements (keeping the wiki website running) and editorial requirements (making sure all comments posted are appropriate) and the need to answer public input in a timely way such as before misinformation develops a life of its own.

Lots of potential. I hope you tell us how your town wiki project works out.