OECD goes Wiki
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By Annette Hexelschneider in Best Practice Published: Thursday, 27 March 08 - 07:23 PM (GMT +01:00) Last Updated: Thursday, 27 March 08 - 07:31 PM (GMT +01:00) |
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The OECD Development Centre launched a wiki this month. So what you may say. But the wiki is not an internal one it's an external wiki - open and freely accessible to the public. Not only that this is an interesting move moreover the topic of the wiki is gender equity - so it is a Wikigender.
The aim of the Wikigender is to "facilitate the exchange and improve the knowledge about gender-related issues around the world. A special focus of this project is to collect empirical evidence and to identify adequate statistics and measurement tools of gender equality."
The project manager Denis Drechsler was so kind as to answer my questions.
Annette Hexelschneider: It might still be somewhat difficult to embark on knowledge management initiatives that use Web 2.0 ideas within a firm or an organization. All the more it can be difficult to start an external service like this. How could you persuade the OECD to go wiki?
Denis Drechsler: Web 2.0 applications like a wiki are still a new terrain for international organisations, so understandably there is some wariness involved. But – in ts attempt to be an innovation lab for the organisation - the OECD Development Centre realised that wikis can help reach a wider audience by attracting people who might otherwise not be aware of the work that we are doing. Additionally, we want to engage in a bottom-up dialogue with citizens on the important issue of gender equality, and for this a wiki offers an excellent opportunity.
Annette Hexelschneider: A blog or a wiki policy is a tricky balance between the wish to maintain a certain level of quality and not deterring prospective contributors. As I understood you are interested in data and
statistics among other information. How will you monitor the quality?
Denis Drechsler: Quality control is very important for us, especially since the OECD is known for its high quality information. We are confident that we can assure highest levels of quality and maintain a fruitful interaction with prospective contributors at the same time. To achieve these two goals, we follow a two layer approach. Information which have been validated by the OECD, for example, are awarded the "Official Source" label, which only we can assign. So, whenever people read an article or look at statistical data that is labelled as originating from an "Official Source" they can be sure that the information has been peer reviewed. We also protect the content of certain pages and invite people to voice their concerns in the "discussion" section and not in the actual article. Our general policy is to inform people of the actions we recommend – for example, move a particular article to a different section - rather than doing the modifications ourselves. That having said, inappropriate or offensive content will of course be removed immediately. In the long run, we want the community to gradually take over the quality control of Wikigender, which so far is mostly in the hands of the OECD Development Centre. Functions like "new pages" or "recent changes" help us track down modifications that might require our attention.
Annette Hexelschneider: What gender equity stakeholders did you invite actively to contribute and how? And how do you aim to make a hopefully wide stakeholder range contribution a sustainable "exercise"?
Denis Drechsler: With our work on the Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base, the OECD Development Centre is already well established among the "official" actors in the area of gender equality and gender statistics. We therefore hope to attract many of our colleagues from international organisations, national statistical offices and non-governmental organisation to actively use this new tool. Additionally, we will launch an information campaign to reach people who may not know of the work of the Development Centre – this campaign will be specifically targeted at people in developing countries where we see an important need for a tool like Wikigender: both to gather new information which would otherwise not be available and to inform people of the importance of gender equality for social and economic development. In the long run, we therefore also plan to provide Wikigender in other languages, for example French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Annette: Thank you very much and all the best for Wikigender.
More: Wikigender
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