mark-elliott.net

I’m quite excited to announce the launch of a project I’ve been working very hard on for the last 6 months: 

• Future Melbourne wiki - Melbourne’s draft city plan currently in public consultation.
• CollabForge.com - the company myself and Marcus Leonard set up in response to this project and spin-off opportunities (our website’s not much to see right now - been to busy to even think about it!).

Here’s some background:

A month before I graduated (Nov ‘07) I was contacted by the manager of the City of Melbourne’s Strategic Planning & Sustainability Branch - David Mayes. David had a vision for reengineering the City of Melbourne’s process for generating its next 2020 ten year strategic plan. Previously, plans were produced using co-operative participation. A requirement of this project was that the new plan be produced by collaborative participation.

What followed was several months of meetings in order to map the existing process and redevelop it with the aim of taking advantage of ‘Web2.0′ opportunities and the emergent capacities of mass collaboration.

Fast forward five months: the city’s ten year plan has been moved to a wiki-based collaborative environment for both internal collaboration, and public consultation.

• Facilitated by the wiki, the plan has undergone internal collaborative development by the City’s special team in charge of the plan’s creation, Future Melbourne, City officers, Councilors, councilors, and hundreds of stakeholders (compared to Sydney’s recently released plan which was put together by more or less a handful of people).
• The project launched its public consultation last Saturday, May 17th, and so far around 60 public participants have registered and there have been approximately 50 contributions to the either the plan directly, or one of the many ‘discussion pages’ associated with the plan’s content. While this isn’t the first project to use a wiki for public consultation, it is (as far as I know) the first in Australia. It is also the first (in the world as far as i know) to use a wiki so extensively in a city planning process. It is also possible the wiki may play some role in the life of the plan post Council adoption in October. But one step at a time :-)… 

Yet more interesting are the implications: could this be the beginning of participatory governance, where the public relies less on the elected representatives and is more able to directly engage in the creation and implementation of policy?

While it’s true that editing the city plan wiki does not guarantee that your contribution will still be there when Council signs off on it, there can be no doubt that a well considered opinion demonstrated in the context of the document (not just as a comment in the margins) will not only be more persuasive, but will influence the downstream development of the plan.

In other words, the wiki is the plan’s content, even post consultation, and whatever form it takes in the end, the publicly edited version will be a step on that path. (Imagine sending a story you wrote to a team of editors and having them not only reply with meta-level commentary, but also edits directly to your story. If this went back and forth enough times, you’d probably lose track of whose words were whose, and in the end, really only be focused on the merit of the content. Well this is exactly the idea and potential behind mass collaboration, ‘the power of the many’ - by putting the primacy on the merit of the content instead of the reputation of the author, bigger and more complex results can be achieved (Wikipedia has almost done in 6 years what Britannica took 230 to do).

Anyway, as you can imagine, I’m very interested to see how this phase of the project pans out - will the public rise to the challenge and exert their will, interest and newfound influence regarding the future of Melbourne’s development, or are we happy for others to make those decisions for us?..

Oh, and btw, if you’re interested in more information regarding CollabForge’s services, or Future Melbourne, or in having a chat about project ideas, please don’t hesitate to email me: mark.elliott AT collabforge.com.