In a discussion of Wikipedia, the All the Modern Things blog, reviews mass collaboration projects in Australia.
Go the full original article for the links to the projects.
“Luckily in Australia we have many bold institutions, or more to the point bold individuals in the cultural and public sectors, who are dipping their toes or even a whole foot, into the 2.0 Web. I will mention just a few, to demonstrate the breadth and inventiveness of our experiments so far.
WikiNorthia is a wiki local history project coordinated by a few community libraries in Melbourne. The City of Melbourne put their 5 year plan into a wiki as part of public consultation, called FutureMelbourne. Founders and Survivors is an Australian Research Council project, tracking Tasmanian convicts and their descendents by combining detailed historical records with publicly contributed family history artefacts. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney was the first Australian institution to take part in the Flickr Commons project, and engages with its online community in a consistent and considerate way. OpenAustralia is an open source project with no institutional backing that reworks Hansard records to make parliamentary proceedings more accessible and politicians more accountable.
Lastly I could not talk about mass collaboration today without mentioning the National Library’s Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. After OCRing newspapers spanning some 150 years, Rose Holley and her team put their millions of pages and OCR text up on the web and invited the public to correct the texts. With little publicity, it has found a niche of people who enjoy correcting the text from old Australian newspapers. Thousands of users have collectively corrected millions of lines of text, and told the Library how addictive and interesting they found it. This project has really found a sweet spot for user contributions and I am already looking forward to hearing how it evolves in the future.
The range of projects being undertaken shows there is no shortage of good ideas and interested users in this country. If we keep up the same pace we may soon be showing the rest of the world how it’s done.
Where to now?
Mass collaboration offers a way for groups to organise without having an organisation. But organise to do what? Mass collaboration has been used very effectively to organise around single issues or single events, but it is yet to really cross over to the kind of sustained action that we so far only know how to do through lobby groups, politics, charities and the like.
A major part of the problem lies in crossing back from the online landscape into the political world we are so used to, where groups need to be incorporated to be taken seriously, political responsibilities may stop at an arbitrary border, and the law marches at a speed that could be considered glacial in internet time. These difficulties mean that mass collaboration projects struggle to be taken seriously and often don’t bother, preferring to stay in their sphere of influence — the online sphere.
Wikimedia Australia is such a group — we want to take the interesting, amazing things we’ve learned about mass collaboration offline, and help more sectors and more individuals take part in similar projects. Not only should everyone have equal access to use free cultural works, like Wikipedia, but just as importantly, everyone should have an equal opportunity to participate in creating them. We have certainly struggled at times to meet the expectations of meatspace, and so a challenge I see looming for us as a society, is: how can we better accommodate mass collaborative projects making changes in the real world? What organisational structures might we be able to support? How might they be accommodated in law, especially given their borderless nature? If we can find answers to these questions, then maybe we will see the potential of mass collaboration as a genuinely revolutionary force.”