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A Wiki Profile: For the Future of Australia

Posted by Kevin on February 26th, 2008 comments No Comments

Back in November, Australia went and got itself a brand new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. One of Rudd’s first acts as Prime Minister is a Community Outreach event where he will be gathering 1,000 of the “best and brightest” Australia has to offer to discuss the future of Australia. This two day summit is getting a lot of attention Down Under, some of it positive and some of it negative. The majority of negative coverage is in protest over the lack of representation of the voices and opinions of the remaining 20,699,000 Australian citizens who won’t be heard.

That’s when a self proclaimed “regular bloke” named Jim decided to use the Wild World Wide Web to help ensure that those not picked to attend the summit would be heard. Thus, the Oz Ideas website was born.

In order for Oz Ideas to succeed, Jim needed a tool that meet three critical criteria:

  1. It had to be able to handle an open discussion amongst the public. The less road blocks (accounts, etc) the tool had, the better. Trying to keep the discussion as open and public as possible was principle to the spirit of “Oz Ideas.”
  2. It had to have administrative abilities (somewhat like a blog). There needed to be people in some form of control (moderators, admins, etc.) to give the platform some direction.
  3. It had to have the ability for the ideas shared to have priority. Of course, it’s ridiculous to assume that every idea could be discussed in a two day summit. Currently, Oz Ideas is hosting a petition and will be, hopefully, presenting a great selection of ideas which are decided by those who decide to vote on the wiki.

After many, many hours of research between different platforms (blogs, bulletin boards and social networking sites) he found us here at Wetpaint. The wiki met all of his criteria- and most of all- it was simple. He figured the best way to get the most Australians engaged would be to keep the platform as simple and straight forward as possible. Within a week, Oz Ideas has already garnered a ton of attention and traffic. He expects the trend to continue and for it to get even larger as the the event’s date (April 19th) nears.

We here at Wetpaint are very happy that Jim and 20,699,000 Australians are working together to figure out their future- after all- that is the wiki way.

http://ozideas.wetpaint.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_2020

Keyword Tags: Web 2.0, User Experience, User Generated Content, Events, Wikis, General, Wetpaint

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freshcoats is a blog about Wetpaint, collaboration, technology, random acts of higher beings, and other stuff that’s always relevant to something, somewhere. But no matter what, it's always fun and always written by the folks at Wetpaint. Authors so far include Ben Elowitz, Kevin Flaherty, Michael Bolognio, Troy Morris, and more to come.

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