A proposal submitted to World Bank Small Grants Program for initiating the Open Development Wiki.

1. Managing for Development Results Knowledge and Learning
Small Grants Program Proposal
A Wiki for Sharing Development Knowledge
Initiating the “Open Development Wiki”̶
Background
The idea of an Open Development Wiki (ODW) stems from a recently emerged paradigm change: from
closed systems to open ones. This has been enabled and fueled by rapid development of information and
communication technologies (ICT) that have empowered anyone to interact, communicate and cooperate
with anyone and everyone, i.e. in a “massively distributed” way – with little top-down central planning
and near-zero cost.
As Richard Straub writes1
“The idea of ‘openness’ is emerging as a dominant attribute of key
developments in our economic and social fabric (…) (it) is the defining quality of 21st century
globalization”. And openness is key to Massively distributed collaboration2
, which has transformed many
areas of society – but which really hasn’t been applied to international development yet.
International development organizations, including the World Bank, have had a number of knowledge
dissemination and sharing initiatives over the years, and new organizations have even been created to
improve information flows among different stakeholders. While these efforts have significantly
improved the availability of information compared to just ten years ago it is fair to say that they have not
been able to come close to what the most successful projects for harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”3
have achieved outside the development arena.
Current sharing of information and collaboration both within development institutions, including the
Bank, and between different development stakeholders are impeded by “silos”4
, even when talking about
public information. This is what the Open Development Wiki aims to change.
The initiative takes the approach that there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Rather, ODW benchmarks
the most successful (similar) projects and takes the best approaches and practices from them as regards
the use of technology, participation and content policies, etc.
An evaluation of different knowledge projects puts Wikipedia, the “free online encyclopedia,” clearly
at the forefront of successful projects, and the “Wikipedia model” could be replicated for the
international development community.
The most successful online community-based knowledge sharing and collaboration projects (i.e. those
that have been “crowdsourced”5
) show clearly that the greater degree of freedom given to the
community, the more users are likely to create useful and viable projects and content. The Open
Development Wiki will provide an open, free and inclusive venue (platform) for all interested
development practitioners to find each other, come together, share information, collaborate, and learn
from each other in a format that has been proven to work well for collaboration in knowledge sharing
among an globally distributed and diverse community; with a very low cost.
1 Is the world open? By Richard Straub in Global Focus, 2(1):2008. European Foundation for Management Development.
Available at http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media15526.pdf
2 “an emerging activity of wikis and electronic mailing lists and blogs and other content-creating virtual communities
online.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_distributed_collaboration
3 The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Anchor (2005)
4 Referring to how the information sharing tools used do little to create shared knowledge pools vs. information silos. See
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo.
5 Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. Portfolio (2006)
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2. While directly editing the existing Wikipedia website has been piloted successfully by some of the Bank
staff already, this approach will come up against the inherent limitations in adapting the diverse needs of
development-related information sharing and collaboration through a general-purpose encyclopedia. For
the needs of the development community Wikipedia has one significant limitation: It is for encyclopedic
information only. It also contains information on anything and everything in the universe, a lot of noise
from a development practitioner’s point of view.
The Proposal
The project will set up the Open Development Wiki and a range of pages to demonstrate what types of
information can be shared in a wiki environment. The pilot will also interact with other interested
stakeholders and invite them to join the pilot to illustrate the potential of a broader ongoing effort to
benefit the development community.
The main values and guiding principles of the wiki are:
1) Open and free: All information is visible to anyone and everyone. Total transparency.
The wiki content will be licensed under a Creative Commons license, which of fundamental importance
to ensure that the wiki content can always be used and reused (shared and built upon) by anyone.
2) Inclusive: thematically and geographically: The wiki will welcome all relevant information on
development, and development only, but not merely encyclopedic information6
. ODW will welcome
information on all development themes and geographic regions, not just certain sub-sets of information.
This will allow for moving beyond the scope of narrowly focused wikis that have been attempted,
including the UN WaterWiki (on water in Eastern Europe and Central Asia), KM4dev.org wiki (on
knowledge management for development), Appropedia (on appropriate technology), WikiGender for
gender issues, etc.)7
.
3) Community is the king and the control: The wiki community will be the one that not only approves
the policies and decisions regarding the wiki but shapes and makes them. Participation is key.
Work plan
• Define content and participation principles for the wiki. What should the wiki include/not
include, style issues, restrictions in adding or editing content. (March)
• Create the wiki and the framework/environment of the knowledge platform. (March-April)
• Create wiki pages (articles) to demonstrate the types of information that can be shared / issues
collaborated on. (April-June)
• Spread the word about the wiki; invite people and possible partners to participate. (April-)
• Arrange a Bank-wide BBL open to present the results. (June)
6 The community that has created Wikipedia as a general encyclopedia has a well-established policy and practice of
discouraging—and regularly deleting—information deemed to be “non-encyclopedic” or “not notable.” Thus, while
clearly of great relevance and enormous benefit to development practitioners, Wikipedia would not allow, e.g. catalogue
type lists of organizations working on reproductive health in Guyana, thorough descriptions of biodiversity conservation
projects in Colombia, or information on upcoming conferences on renewable energy in Africa.
The Wikipedia ethos also includes the belief that there is assumed to be a conflict of interest in sharing information
about oneself, organizations one works for, or activities one is directly involved with. While this may be justifiable in the
context of writing a general encyclopedia, such policy clearly inhibits experts to share relevant information about their
specialty. The ODW will allow and actively encourage practitioners to share information about their own organizations,
projects, findings and lessons learned just like they always have in their communities of practice.
7 This does not need to mean that all of the information must be hosted in the wiki but rather that the information be made
available through the wiki, such as through direct links or through a custom search engine that could search hand-picked
sites selected by community users.
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3. Audience
Anyone and everyone who works with international development both inside the Bank and outside.
Partnering
As the main point of the project is to enable and increase collaboration between organizations and
overcome “information silos,” partnering with other organizations and similar projects is important.
Organizations that have already shown clear interested towards this type of approach include: USAID
(Global Development Commons Initiative, http://www.usaid.gov/about_usaid/gdc), UN WaterWiki,
http://waterwiki.net), Center for Global Development (Wikipedia and Global Development:
http://www.cgdev.org/content/calendar/detail/4995), Booz-Allen Hamilton (Diplomacy and International
Development Practice, DID), IDB, and Forum One Communications. These and other interested
organizations will be encouraged to participate in the project, and to share their lessons learned.
Outputs
The project will produce a functional wiki site, a platform to (i) enable open and collaborative
knowledge sharing of any relevant development information and (ii) fuel a process of incremental
building of a free and inclusive global development knowledge repository.
As tangible outputs the project will:
• Establish guidelines on what the wiki should include and what not.
• Create ca. 50 wiki pages with relevant content to demonstrate how the wiki can be used. The
pages will include project information pages; country or sector overviews; lists and description
pages of organizations/stakeholders; events; direct links to relevant sources of information, etc.
• The wiki’s ability to host documents will also be demonstrated. And finally, a
• Bank-wide BBL open to possible partners that have contributed to the project will be hosted.
Outcomes
Improved information sharing and collaboration among international development stakeholders.
Budget Estimate and Request: $25,000
Staff Time F level at HQ $3,000 per week (4 weeks) $12,000
Consultants Application platform development $400 per day (30days) $12,000
Server and hosting $1,000
Total $25,000
Project Team
Carlos Rossel, Publisher, EXTOP (Lending support to a proposal with merit. This would not be an
EXTOP undertaking, but EXTOP would support the project team)
Janice Ryu, Knowledge Management Officer, IFC Advisory Services
Jaakko Helleranta, Consultant
Richard Forrest, Consultant, Creator and administrator of BioenergyWiki
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