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The US State Department Ventures into Wiki Collaboration

The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a "need to know culture" to a "need to share culture," said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003.

I was intrigued by the recent New York Times article "An Internal Wiki That’s Not Classified." It seems the State Department --- not exactly famous for its openness and lack of bureaucracy --- has adopted the free-wheeling collaborative tool to keep abreast of everything from meeting agendas and biographies to how best to get lunch delivered.

The new collaborative tool is called Diplopedia - after Wikipedia, I infer - and it's open to contributed content from all who work in the State Department.

The article points out:

If wikis can work at the State Department, with its fabled bureaucracy and attention to protocol and word choice, they can work anywhere.

There certainly is a culture of collaborative writing at the State Department, Mr. Johnson acknowledged: memos are drafted, massaged, passed up the chain for comments and then approved. But this form of collaboration is based on the notion that the more people who read something, the less chance it will be candid. Wikis, by contrast, are collaborative only in retrospect — someone has to be prepared to be the first to write something, and deal with having those words changed by a complete stranger.

Mr. Johnson said his office occasionally gets calls from new contributors: "People will say, ‘I have something I want to post; I want to check before I do it.’ And we say, no, no, put it up."

The encouraging aspect of this is that a bureaucratic organization that introduces and promotes use of a collaborative technology can actually use that technology to change its culture. My take is that State Department employees have been willing to risk posting their own entries - or editing others' – and have experienced no negative consequences. On the contrary, it seems that they are using the collaborative technology to positive, albeit limited, advantage. The article even points out that competitiveness among departments is spurring increasing use of Diplopedia.

The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a "need to know culture" to a "need to share culture," said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003. "This is a technological manifestation of a policy difference," he said, a change he dated to when Colin L. Powell was secretary of state.

Now this may seem to be the cart driving the horse – that is, technology imposing collaboration vs. collaboration naturally being supported by technology. But if a bureaucratic culture needs to demonstrate its intention to change that policy, what better way than to boldly encourage collaboration?

Published on 08/06 AT 09:06 AM

TAGS: collaboration • technology

Comment on this idea:

Tim Parker - 10/27 06:20 AM

Agreed; there are parallels here with other areas of IT. Since the advent of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) in the late '80s, the generally preferred way of introducing new ways of working has been to change (and fix) the processes and organization first, and then introduce the new tools.

But I have seen several companies successfully make the changes by driving in the new tools first and then reorganizing and retraining around them. A senior manager at a German firm I spoke with recently laughed at the naiivite of thinking one should change the processes first - in his view the processes inherent in SAP (an ERP system) were so much better than theirs, it made much more sense to implement the system and then figure out the rest afterward.