Barriers to participation
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
The objective of this page is to "Come up with a reasonable comprehensive account of barriers, and for each, devise a stragey for overcoming it." Of course, since this is a wiki, one person can add their thoughts about what they think the barriers are and another person can add their thoughts on what could be done about them.
The most obvious barrier to participation on the wiki is a lack of internet access itself. A person may choose to live their life 'disconnected' from the internet, for reasons varying from the desire to live "real" life or to avoid being 'tracked.' The result of this is a very limited capability to spend requisite time online to get very in-depth and engaged with the wiki. However, this is not an issue for the majority of Evergreen campus student, and other options exist for devoting time towards attending a public library.
A second barrier is the format of the wiki itself. There is an unfocused Main Page. For some people it is a sudden mass of text. For students not technically minded, there is no 'help' page that clearly instructs how to do basic tasks.
The fourth barrier is psychological, an apprehension to editing someone else's submitted content. A possible solution is to develop procedures on editing and quality control. Other psychological barriers include:
- Lack of familiarity working with Wiki
- Limited or computer/internet experience
- Limited HTML or other programming experience
Another barrier is a deliberative issue, of some voices drowning out others while being unaware of the problem. This could be solved with some awareness of how much deliberative "space" one is taking up. Another solution would be to implement a set of processes similar to Robert's Rules of Order. This approach could complement any style guides or other approaches to how the end-result should actually appear.
A third barrier to participation was the lack of a defined goal of the wiki that can be put in terms of potential student action. There were conflicting opinions on the purpose of the wiki, and the open-ended nature didn't offer a resolution.
Is this wiki project intended to be a standard wiki (a source of information/data) or is the intention to be a community-building experiment? Or, depending on how it develops, do our goals include both?
If this wiki is intended to be an experiment in collaborative (or community) knowledge construction, it would be useful if we could identify some research questions or hypotheses in advance. For example, what is the relationship between community-building and quality of the result? Are there activities or workshops that would help develop a stronger sense of community? And would this stronger sense of community help promote a product of higher quality in the long run?
