Innovation in Government

Here's a Post story on the government's use of a wikipedia.

This sort of thing is needed. I remember the old SCOAP QandA's and the various bulletin board systems and mailing lists we used to have. There's limits on how much you can do with a straight up and down hierarchy--you need some other methods. A problem for us in ASCS was that technology opened up possibilities, and each innovator followed his or her own nose. Of course, when technology is changing fast, you don't want to standardize quickly.

And another problem was that this was all guerrilla stuff--top management was mostly only vaguely aware of what was going on, if that. It's possible now that wikipedia has given the "wiki" methodology enough visibility and prestige, and its experience has mapped out some parameters that this is truly a useful exercise. (Assuming that the relevant user community is all comfortable with computers, etc.)