Governance

Context:

Normative requirements for governance are the foundations of the project.

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The project needs to comply with all relevant institutional and legal requirements in order to operate in a legitimate way.  Systems should be established to manage internal and external risks associated with the project, including site security and improper use. 

Any wiki requires a set of basic rules or principles which determine how it will be used.  When the number of people collaborating on the wiki is small it is feasible that these rules are not written down and the wiki is governed by informal consensus – refer pattern Social Capital; however, as the wiki grows it is important to document the fundamental rules and principles which govern the relationship between the wiki, its owner and its users.  These rules are not simply guidelines about how to use the wiki – they concern issues which could adversely affect the reputation of the RIBA if they are not managed in a proper fashion.  The principal issues which should be governed are licensing, accreditation, and site security.

Copyright is a legal concept which grants certain exclusive rights to the owner or author of a particular work, restricting the way in which it is used.  The digitisation of information has led to difficulties in interpreting copyright law, leading to moves to strengthen copyrights as well as moves to develop alternative system of copyleft.  Copyleft covers a variety of licensing arrangements which fall between the restrictions of copyright and placing information in the public domain.  The main purpose of copyleft licences is to ensure that the source information (and sometimes the edited changes) remains freely available after a third party has modified or redistributed the information.  Two widely used copyleft licences are the GNU General Public Licence and the Creative Commons Licence used for this report – refer to back cover.

Most public wikis allow anybody to contribute material or edit content - formal qualifications are not needed.  Wikis tend to work when the numbers of participants is sufficiently large to ensure that mistakes, typos, poor grammar and other flaws are corrected by others.  Exactly why this works is hard to explain, but the fact is empirically proven.  Nevertheless, some people are always eager to criticise a wiki, so that a means of governing the accuracy of the wiki is vital.  Methods of quality control include: prohibiting anonymous contributions (although this may not prevent the use of pseudonyms); selecting an expert group to check content; providing a user rating system which provides an aggregated quality score; and attaching a means of deliberative debate alongside each page, such as a threaded discussion forum or a separate discussion page.

Open access to public wikis means that they are often a target for malicious use.  In one sense, wikis are vandal-proof because versions of pages are stored on the wiki so that unwanted changes can be erased by rolling back to a previous version.  However, there are some precautionary measures which can be taken, such as Captcha.

Therefore:

Document the normative requirements for using the wiki and post it in a prominent position on the site.

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Good governance provides the project with legitimacy within the wiki community.  It is an essential step in the plan to transfer ownership from the RIBA to grass roots participants - refer patterns RIBA Mission, Academic Community and Engage Practitioners.