New Zealand puts its law on a wiki for public editing
Sara sez, "The New Zeland police have launched a wiki open at anyone wanting to edit and make suggestions to the Police Act as part of a wider revamp.
New Zealand's current Police Act is nearly 50 years old. In March 2006 a review undertaken. Following this a new website wiki.policeact.govt.nz has been launched to allow people to suggest wording for the new Policing Act. It uses similar wiki technology to the popular user-generated site Wikipedia.
The wiki version of the Policing Act will be viewed by New Zealand parliamentarians, before an official bill is introduced into Parliament."
NZ Police Superintendent Hamish McCardle, the officer in charge of developing the new act, said the initiative had already been described as a "new frontier of democracy".Link (Thanks, Sara!)"People are calling it 'extreme democracy' and perhaps it is," he said.
"It's a novel move but when it comes to the principles that go into policing, the person on the street has a good idea ... as they are a customer," he said.
"They've got the best idea about how they want to be policed."
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Another case of Life Imitates Onion.
Wow, I think that's a terrific idea.
Wikis can be a great thing, but only if everyone is working towards the same goal.
If there are people with different agendas on Wikipedia with its NPOV debates, just imagine the disagreement on our legal system.
Of course, we all realize what this will have to be called:
The Kiwi Law Wiki.
Stephan's concern echoes my own, which raised the red flag in MY mind up to both the Onion article referenced above and a lesson I used to teach my high school students (in private school) when we first start talking about Web 2.0.
The lesson went like this: all students were given a piece of chalk...and told that whatever rules remained on the board at the end of the week will be the classroom rules for the following Monday.
Inevitably, students end up fighting over chalk, destroying each others' chalk, holding each other back from the board while their friends write rules...one year a kid even carved a rule into the board with a nail (It got taped over, though).
Come Monday, the board was a mess. At best, we ended up with rules like "Thomas has to sit under his chair all day" and "Mr F can't use the letter W". At worst, what remained weren't rules at all, but slurs and gibberish (how do you enforce "Becky rules"?).
The moral, which kicks off our discussion of web 2.0 culture: in an open access world where content is driven by users, it only takes a few miscreants to disrupt the best intentions of the majority.
Given that even wikipedia has some structure in place to mitigate this sort of thing, but that the kiwiwiki may not, I'd be interested in seeing if this works...especially because I suspect there's a few folks out there who will be trying to push the Kiwi police-wiki towards the libertarian end, which seems to me anathema to most models of policing.
Personally, though, given my own experience, I'd bet on the Onion. 'pediawikis work, I think, because most people most of the time agree on what is and is not fact (note the "mosts" there, though). But IMHO, lawmaking and wikis don't mix -- because not everyone agrees on what should be.
Oh, and for the curious: I now teach middle school, so I've had to turn what used to be a violent but fun and educational activity is now a thought experiment. In the US public school model, at any rate, the activity is a bit too risky to run.
Would something like this work for re-districting in the US? Maybe not a Wiki per se but some sort of web interface to google maps where local residents hash out different boundaries for congressional districts. It's a bit of a pipe dream I know but I would like to see some way of returning power to the people.
Maybe a market where people put a nominal amount towards specific local legislation? It would be interesting to at least try the experiment and a small local community would perhaps be the best place to start.
BOYHOWDY:
Interesting experiment, but it strikes me as the kind of mistake a lot of classroom teachers make--it stops at a 'simple truth' rather than exploring a larger problem. You seem to hold up a classroom of adolescents as the model for the entire world.
I've done similar high-stakes experiments with kids. Right from the word go I tell them they are creating their classroom rules. Within minutes, chaos erupts and mindless comments begin to take the place of real work. However, some sharp kid figures out pretty quickly that this is their 'chance' and if they blow it, they probably won't get another one. Yes, some groups are more stubborn than others, and sometimes I need to step in as a moderator (hmmm ... familiar, that word) and remind them what their task is.
Sometimes we even take a moment to establish some ground rules, rules that everyone might not like but can live with, for establishing the classroom rules. Even the most disruptive kid hates being disrupted himself.
Yes, the whole 'ha ha, the internet is just a giant CS server with everyone calling each other "ghey n00bs"' made for good humor 10 years ago. However, I think the internet has largely gone through its forming, storming, and norming phases and is now performing. If I were to use your activity in my classroom and let it simply run amok as you have, I'd follow it up with this question: 'Why does it seem that Amazon.com *knows * me?'
After all, Amazon.com was web 2.0 before there was such a thing.
...Yeah, it may be a nice experiment, but from my own experience with Wikipedia, rest assured the whole thing'll get ruined by a pair of British schoolboys who've become admins by kissing enough admin ass and supporting enough RFA's that they were given admin powers even though they're too young *and* immature to wield said.
[shakes head in utter dismay]
I wonder if boyhowdy's exercise, fascinating though it is, wasn't hamstrung by the establishment of a deadline. Would things have happened the same if the class could have modified the rules at any time, but there would have been a week (during which time the rule couldn't be changed) between when the rule was written and when it went into effect?
And I'm not sure what you're talking about OM, maybe you'd like to give something more than a vague accusation? I don't doubt that something happened, like any system the guidelines surrounding wikipedia are open to exploitation, I'm just wondering what it was and how it played out.
boyhowdy - you say that Stephan's concern echoes your own, so I wonder a couple of things:
Should we not modernise the consultation process of deciding laws that affect us because people have differences of opinion and their own agendas?
Who should we exclude from the decision making process? A few miscreants who disrupt the best intentions of the majority. Who decides who these are?
Like most, I have some opinions about laws - maybe not enough to submit a formal submission during a consultation process, but enough to edit a wiki on my lunch break at work.
Kingsara: I think the answers to your questions are "yes" and "nobody...until they demonstrate that they are not reponsible enough to participate -- that is, until they demonstrate that they are not willing to accept responsibility for shared consensus-building." Yes, that second answer leads to questions about how one manages the recognition and subsequent priviledge-loss, if there is to be one, but I'd not presume to be the one who should answer that question -- that itself should, IMHO, be part of the consensus-building process.
Kiwihopeful: by saying that my activity suffers from a mistake is to miss the fact that this activity was designed to spark subsequent conversation and subsequent activities. If this was the "whole" unit, I'd agree it was a pretty silly unit for exactly the reasons you present; that it is not, however, makes moot (I hope) your concern that the activity merely exposes OR reinforces OR teaches a "ha ha web 2.0 won't work" mentality. It must do that in the short term, I guess, in order to show students why it is important to learn better ways, but such is the classroom: you can't teach everything at once, because students are STUDENTS, and so subsequent activities can't take advantage of "we all understand" assumptions unless we do previous activities that help us all understand, expose, develop and explore those assumptions. Students don't "own" the ways something can NOT work, in order to think about how to make it work, unless they are confronted with the potential for disaster. Only those who would leave it at that -- who would assume that every activity must cover everything that CAN theoretially come from that activity -- are the ones taking the cheap shots, IMHO.
Missed some :)
1. An "endless" activity would be better, of course -- as would ANY activity allowed to run until it had truly hit an organic end. I hate to say it, though, but anyone who suggests that is clearly not ready to confront the cold hard realities of teaching in public environments. Balancing the large number of standards we are required to cover in the 40 hours I have with any given student with the obvious ideal of letting every activity run the way it "should" is the lot of all public school teachers. I used to think it was better to avoid this by teaching in environments where the amount vs. depth of content I covered was up to me. As I age, however, I find public school students need me, and people who, like me, agree that there must be SOME way to create a better balance between good learning and competency-standards. And I, for one, am not ready to abandon the next generation of kids who need to be exposed to better teaching and learning modes just because it's easier to teach the "right" way in environments where only the rich and privledged can benefit. That said, if anyone has any ideas about how to do both better in the usual 40 hour course, let me know -- I'll send the competency and coverage list along, so you can see that even the activity I described is a high, high risk that costs us time we cannot and may not spare lest we lose our jobs. Don't like it? Curse NCLB...
2. Oh, and ironically, three units later, there we are asking students to consider what the internet know about you. Kiwihopeful: Glad to see your "concerns" are based, instead, on the same assumptuions of what SHOULD work than that which drives my teaching!
This story made me immediately think of Paul Di Filippo's story, Wikiworld available here to read for free: http://www.pyrsf.com/chapters/Wikiworld/Wikiworld.htm
I hope it works out for the kiwis. I hope it becomes viral.
France is also trying something new although it is less "web 2.0" than New-Zealand's wiki. The Law Commission of the French Parliament has launched a website inviting the internet community to submit suggestions for their simplification.