What if... Government was organised like Wikipedia?

When I was in Mumbai, I spent an afternoon meeting Bishakha Datta.  She is, in my humble opinion, a very very cool lady. Not only has she made various documentary films on the role and place if women in India, she has set up an ‘intermediary NGO’ which provides communications and campaign support to service provider NGOs, especially on things like domestic violence,  AND she’s now the first ever Indian board member of the Wikimedia Foundation.  

We had lots to talk about. But it was her description of Wikipedia and Wikimedia that got me very excited. Is it possible to fall in love with an organisational structure? At the very least, I’ve got a serious teenage crush.

Wikimedia and Wikipedia: How they organise themselves.

So, first of all, Wikimedia is BIG.  According to an estimate, the projects run by Wikimedia receive more than 364 million unique visitors per month, making it the 5th most popular web property worldwide (January 2010). Wikipedia alone comes in at number 7 on the May 2011 list of most popular websites, behind giants like YouTube, Google.com and Facebook. Compare that to the BBC who are currently at number 40. (http://mostpopularwebsites.net/). In size terms, the combined Wikipedias currently has over 1.74 billion words in 9.25 million articles in approximately 250 languages. About 3.6million of these articles are in English.

What I hadn’t realised before is quite how self-organising and disciplined this community is. Bishakha described them as ‘making collaboration an art form’. This is anarchy (or at least huge freedom), held together by some self-policed rules and principles. There around 100,000 editors around the world, and these editors do not see the Wikimedia Foundation (on which Bishakha serves) as the ultimate authority. They are in charge of their own editorial policies, and their own rules for working together. These principles are things like ‘verifiability’, ‘assume good faith’, ‘no original research’ and ‘neutral point of view’. 

The Wikimedia Foundation technically owns Wikipedia.  Apart from keeping the servers which host Wikipedia running, its constitutional role is really to provide organisational strategy, for example giving support to the smaller Wikipedia communities that aren’t in English, or agonising about whether the number of editors can grow sufficiently to match the volume of content. They are ‘serving’ and ‘facilitating’ the community, not ‘leading’ it. 

It reminds me of the way a Quaker clerks a Quaker business meeting rather than chairs it.  The clerk does not have the power of a casting vote or of shaping the recommendations to their own taste. Instead, they are there to facilitate the worshipful space of the meeting, ensure silence is held when needed for reflection, ensure everyone gets a chance to give their spoken ministry, and to notice when the meeting has come to a ‘sense’ of a decision. They then draft a minute, in the meeting, reflecting what the group has agreed, and then written minute is agreed on the spot.  They are facilitating, not leading the business. (More on Quakers and how they organise things, here.) 

So, Wikimedia is NOT a hierarchy with the Wikimedia foundation at the top, and the community divided in to country chapters. Oh no. This is a balance of power. Wikipedia’s structure is bottom heavy, the editorial community having most of the power.

The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia foundation has 10 trustees, but only 4 are co-opted by the Board (Bishakha is one of these). Three board members are elected by the community of editors. The thirty chapters in different countries select two candidates by consensus, and one post is reserved for the founder.  There are about 70 paid staff for the whole enterprise, and over 100,000 volunteers.

When there are controversies about Wikipedia itself, huge discussions are initiated amongst the community. The emails fly. There was one last year on offensive material. Fox News made a fuss about porn in the image repository of Wikipedia. In reaction, one Board member took it upon himself to delete porn from the site. The community hit back against this violation of the principle of non-censorship, taking away his deletion rights.  For the past 12 months there has been an extended, diverse and adult discussion about how to handle offensive material through Wikipedia. There was no expectation that even the board must hold a single ‘line to take’. In the spirit of transparency, they are more than happy to show there is diversity of opinion and disagreements amongst colleagues. But in the end, solutions are found by consensus. Slowly built, hard-won, consultative, consensus.

Government in the Wikimedia model.

My brain was itching to imagine what it would be like to have a Government department in the model of Wikimedia and Wikipedia.

Of course (being a good civil servant) I can immediately think of all the reasons why this would NOT work. 

• Paid staff or volunteers? Can you rely on volunteers to distribute and manage billions of pounds of Government money, rather than distributing and managing knowledge and information? 
• What about democratic accountability through the minister?  Is it really fair to give so much power to the workers/producers rather than the end-user, the citizen, who is (in constitutional theory at least) represented in Government by the Cabinet Minister? 
• What about law enforcement? How could you do THAT by consensus?
• And what about accuracy? Wikipedia doesn’t have to live or die on the accuracy of its pages. It’s a gradual process towards accuracy.

Ach, maybe I’m already too locked in to my own silo-based view of the world.  Why would you have departments and their corresponding ministers at all? Surely if you were going to have a ‘community’ you would base it around those who were engaged in an issue, not in a pre-determined slice of government functionality?

So here are some Wikipedia-inspired ideas for government.

1. Put the community on to the departmental Board. The Permanent Secretary could sit on it and select 4 people to join her. But 5 of the Board members would need to be elected by the community doing the work: from both those inside the government department, and those outside.  
2. Set up more systems for participation. You could borrow from the Hubli-Dharwad or Mysore models for citizen participation (I heard about these from Indian officials this week) and set up representative bodies with 9 people for every 1000 people in the community of workers and citizens.  You could purposefully go beyond the boundaries of the department when considering each 1000 people.
3. Put operational guidance in to the hands of the producers AND the consumers.  At the UK Border Agency, we had stacks of operational guidance on casework. It was all drafted by little process teams who knew the caselaw inside out and could write clearly. But often after a key court judgement or when a key error was discovered in the way the guidance was interpreted - or when there was a dispute between two parts of the Agency over how a particular piece should be redrafted - the process updates would be delayed.  And the process guidance might work really well for the Liverpool teams but might not be quite right for the Croydon or Glasgow or New York teams, where, for instance, the address for the unit that ‘dispatched’ the case was different, or a particular local NGO or private partner was involved with a certain part of the process.  If I think of welfare, tax, pensions, any part of government that has to make a decision, there is this kind of operational guidance. You could have a ‘Wiki’ approach to casework guidance with contributions from all round the community (NGOs, legal advisors AND caseworkers) and self-appointed editors to make sure it stays accurate.
4. When a controversy arises, let the community discuss it on a website for several weeks, and then engage the 6 most diverse opinion holders in a listening exercise, before acting. Local authorities don’t like what the UK Border Agency is doing with housing asylum seekers?  Local officers, politicians, asylum seekers, UKBA officials, could thrash it out on a website. (Hmmm, I can feel the ‘don’t expose conflicts to the media’ culture kicking in as I write that!)
5. Put key strategic questions out to the community for discussion.  E.g. How should we measure our impact? What should be on the Board’s agenda next month? What should we bear in mind while we go about making significant cuts?  
6. Abolish all Strategy Units in government departments and merge them together. Then let them form self-organising communities on strategy projects. That might break down the silo’s around environment, transport, energy, health, education, crime, justice, culture....

As I propose each of these, they cause a frisson of anxiety in me. I see that in the existing hierarchical set up of a government department, these kind of conversations feel clunky and the power sharing is terrifying. Why would junior staff trust senior staff to listen to them? How would they get past their sense of being consulted as a paper exercise? How would you handle the inevitable exposed conflict publicly? Would there be room for mistakes? How do us senior staff keep CONTROL?!! 

(On that note: I love this Glen Gilchrist cartoon...)

It strikes me that the culture would need to be one of listening,  trust and no blame for mistakes, for these initiatives to be successful.  And that also these initiatives might promote a culture of listening, trust and no blame. A virtuous... or a vicious circle.