Wow! The thought of our government using a blog space to collaborate on government projects is not only mind blowing, but scary as well! I think that a wiki can be a great tool for group collaboration. In fact, our group came up with the following advantages to using a wiki:
- Younger workers expect/demand this (soon it will be expected for everyone to know how to use these)
- gives everyone a voice
- brings together management and employees
- brings together company, partners, and customers
- expands marketing opportunities
- encourages immediacy
- encourages openness (some employees could be scared to voice their opinions for fear of losing their jobs)
- share files of greater size (one picture used to fill my email box)
- always has a saved archive of previous information shared
- easier to express thoughts without being face to face
- great free advertising for people, products, and services
- most up to date information possible (business laws, market condition, company policies, etc)
- great way for leads for sales and hiring
- changes can be made and seen in real time; no waiting on emails or shared files
- eliminates geographic boundaries (people in different parts of the world can all work on the same project together at the same time)
- ease of use for even novice users
- wiki's are flexible to a wide range of formats and structures
- no one specific person is responsible for a project
- everyone in a group can see changes/contributions, so it reduces the likelihood of non-participation from group members
- participants can easily expand on each other’s ideas
Even with all of the advantages, I don’t think that a wiki is the proper place for government agency collaboration. Our group discussed the following points as disadvantages to a wiki:
- Encourages informality (texting lingo instead of formal language)
- discourages face to face contact
- no nonverbal communication (hard to recognize emotion)
- gives equal voice to experts and ‘experts’ (information may not be reliable or truthful)
- not very secure/not a good place for secrets
- can be expensive to implement
- may divide the older and younger workers of a company (or novice to advanced technology users)
- kinda brings private life into the business world (like facebook which employers make check)
- lack of privacy to those outside the company (as compared to conference calls and face to face meetings)
- requires the use of the internet (as compared to conference calls and face to face meetings)
- can easily become disorganized when there are too many users
To me, the biggest disadvantage as far as government collaboration online is concerned is the security issue. I’m sure that government wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms are highly encrypted and have other security measures in place, but there are always people out there that do their best to hack these platforms. Just the fact that it is government information would make it that much more appealing to a hacker; the bigger the challenge, the greater the thrill of hacking it.
Overall, in the case of government collaboration, I don’t think that the advantages outweigh the huge security risk involved in Web 2.0 platforms such as wikis.
