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Mobilizing Wikis to Assist Global Sustainable Development

Richard Forrest

Introduction

Since the 1986 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission), the term "Sustainable Development" has been used to describe the interlinked environmental, social and economic challenges facing global human society.

The Problem

Achieving sustainable development will be an immense challenge. Sustainable development can be seen as requiring: changes in the resource consumption patterns of individuals and communities; securing the human rights and informed participation of people in all development activities that affect them; the creation of legal regimes and institutions that ensure gender equity, prevent the degradation of biological diversity and other irreversible global changes, and ensure cultural integrity, individual dignity and economic opportunity and well-being for all people.

This requires simultaneous, yet decentralized, organizational learning and changes in the policies and practices of thousands of institutions at all levels of society (international, national and local, public and private) and in wide-ranging fields, from finance to fisheries. Moreover, a dizzying constellation of issues, institutions and concepts--from the esoteric operations of international organizations and treaties, to the workings of ecosystems and economies, is necessarily involved.

Despite the complexity and interlocking nature of the challenge, knowledge in relevant fields--including environmental conservation, international development assistance and organizational and professional capacity building--is scattered, highly specialized, and particularly prone to the use of jargon and acronyms. While relevant information is created by thousands of separate organizations, these usually focus on publicizing their own activities or perspectives. Easy-to-understand and use information on issues can be hard to find, and practitioners are burdened with the need to sift through enormous amounts of information, often repetitious in nature. Relevant "communities of practice," where they exist, tend to be narrowly focused and mutually exclusive, with little cross-fertilization of perspectives and findings. Also, many activities in key fields do not take place within the context of the overarching need for sustainable development. In short, efforts are failing to meet the challenge.

Due to the lack of access to printed materials, educational and travel opportunities, people in developing countries face special challenges in finding and receiving information they need for improved decision-making, learning best practices, and adopting new technologies and insights.

A Proposed Solution

The use of wiki technology offers an unprecedented opportunity to share and pool information needed to achieve sustainable development, and to create a global repository of related knowledge, experience and lessons learned.

A new wiki project to pool knowledge relevant to achieving global sustainability is therefore proposed. The project aims to use wiki technology to create an easy-to-use repository of knowledge in fields essential to global sustainable development. It is anticipated that the project could significantly reduce duplicative efforts to document knowledge, as well as promote improved learning through the creation of a persistent contextualization of knowledge within the framework of achieving global sustainable development.

Key issues anticipated will be ensuring credibility among users, and the participation of those who have and need relevant knowledge. Difficulties are also anticipated in overcoming the tendencies of fields of study and institutions to create separate “islands” of knowledge.

The project is envisioned as requiring the creation of methods to encourage the sharing of personal experiences and tacit knowledge, dialogues among participants, as well as for sharing of lessons learned and know-how on topics such as how to manage field projects, conduct policy analysis, raise funds, etc.

This project may require approaches different from those of WikiMedia projects such as Wikipedia. In particular, ensuring the perceived credibility and adoption of the project may require ensuring that information on “unrelated” topics is not included, and requiring the registration of users and peer-review mechanisms for articles.

The author has develop a proof-of-concept wiki intended to spur discussion and adoption of this approach to international knowledge sharing. The views of the wiki community will be welcomed in further conceptualizing this effort and making it a success.