I’m trying to find any examples of local authorities in the UK using wikis to provide online collaborative tools for local communities to be involved in dialogue with councillors and decision makers.

Where might this be useful?

1. Descriptive - what is an area like - key information for people who live there.

2. Decision making - who is involved in decision making; what impact do those decisions have?

3. Democracy - what do the parties say they will do; what do they actually do?

I’ve found an article at infoworld via a blog called emergic.org which is about enterprise blogs.

I did find this though, aplaws plus which was one of the original e-government pathfinder projects in the UK.

And I also found DoWire which has been set up as part of the local e-government national project .

This is a bit off topic, but has useful content multilingualblog . The post from 3 April is looking at different types of blogs.

Meanwhile, it is possible that local democracy will only be rejuvenated by grass roots activism - maybe the local council is the wrong starting point? The Sheffield Social Forum has a wiki which address a whole range of local issues from an independent view. Interesting to note the vocabulary of this site.

Headshift also has some useful general commentary and it led on to Partnerships Online .

City wide collaboration makes sense in any large urban area, particularly I would have thought in such a vast world-in-a-box type place as London. The London Open Guide .

The Sustainable Development Commission may or may not have set up a wiki, but I can’t access it.

Is it just me, or do all of the above blogs and wikis speak a language that I understand and reflect a culture I identify much more closely with than the local council? (don’t even lets start about the tax office…).