Use of wikis for political participation

From Devwiki

Enric Senabre Hidalgo

The use of wikis for political participation and civil action is one of its possible appropriations, working as a collaborative space for discussion, documentation or symbolic protest. The presentations will focus in three different uses of wikis for political engagement in Spain, each of them with different approaches, objectives and results, analysing some of its features as well as the process of knowledge generation and organisation behind it.

Since wikis are tools whose technical and structural features allow a wide range and types of collaboration, they have been broadly adapted and used for letting people create, modify and interchange information in many different social movements and political participation scenarios. After reviewing some examples and concepts extracted from literature about social engagement and technological appropriation, the presentation will focus in three recent examples of wiki tools used in Spain for (a) organising and coordinating civil protests related to the housing problem for youth, (b) documenting and archiving information around the electoral promises of political parties in the 2007 and 2008 national and local elections, (c) letting people freely modify and adapt the Spanish constitution in order to generate debate around its relevance and approach. Links