Wiki Your Government

Katherine Mangu-Ward | December 3, 2008

All the content on change.gov, Barack Obama's transition website, is governed by a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to copy, reuse, reproduce or otherwise rip off everything on the website, as long as they say where it comes from. This is a great step, especially in a world where the actual legal codes of some states are covered by far more restrictive copyright rules.

But in the wake of some unannounced content switcheroo on the policy agenda portion of the site, Internet guru Tim O'Reilly wants more transparency.

There's a primitive form of revision control in word processing products like Microsoft Word, but we need more than that, especially for documents that bring together the work of multiple independent authors. For change.gov, the wikipedia model might work: logging of every change, with only authorized participants allowed to make changes, but everyone (the public) able to review and comment on associated discussion pages.

The real holy grail, of course, would be to provide revision control on all government regulations, and eventually, on legislation.

One benefit of this approach for the administration: No more gotcha stories like this one.

Via Julian Sanchez