Gazette - New Zealand’s wiki Policing Act

FEATURED SUBMISSION

Public has a say in shaping legislation

By Supt Hamish McCardle
Police Act Review
New Zealand Police

In March 2006, the New Zealand government agreed to a comprehensive review of the legislative arrangements for policing in New Zealand, leading to a rewrite of the 1958 Police Act and its accompanying set of regulations. As the organization most directly affected by the existing legislation, and with unique insights into its strengths and weaknesses, the New Zealand Police was given responsibility for leading the review.

The Police Act Review had a broad-ranging mandate, signalling a desire for a national conversation with New Zealanders about policing. The review team had a green light to go back to first principles, to challenge things taken for granted, and to encourage public debate.

The review team decided to adopt both traditional and innovative communication and consultation methods so as many voices as possible could be drawn in to the review process. As such, online and electronic engagement have been important features.

The shape of future legislation

To allow New Zealanders to have a say in shaping future police legislation, the Police Act Review featured three phases of public consultation. The first two phases involved respondents making submissions on a series of discussion documents. Simple online forms were developed to allow respondents to directly answer the questions posed in the documents electronically or via more conventional methods. In both phases, the majority of respondents selected electronic formats to make their submissions.

Developing a wiki format to consult on ideas for a new Policing Act was seen as a natural next step for capturing views from not only citizens in New Zealand, but also expatriate New Zealanders and other international citizens interested in policing and law making. While the review team judged previous uses of online consultations as relatively successful, the team felt that a wiki discussion would allow for ideas to be stretched in new and inventive ways. The team preferred an open wiki with no password or registration because of its ability to generate dynamic, user-created content.

To make the moderation process manageable, the wiki was only open for editing during New Zealand office hours. After hours, interested people could view the wiki Act and prepare their comments offline, ready to post at the next opportunity.

What is a wiki?

Based on the Hawaiian-language word wiki wiki, which means quick, a wiki is a collection of websites or other online resources that allows visitors to quickly add, delete or edit content collectively.

It is the ease of interaction and the speed of operation that make a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. Although vulnerable to abuse and vandalism, wikis are self-correcting because of their number of users.

The review team initially populated the wiki Act with a few ideas to fast-start the process and provide contributors with a framework. However, contributors were quick to begin making changes to the wiki by adding in new sections or clarifying what they wished to see in a new law.

It became clear that many participants also wished to discuss the material they were adding to the wiki or comment on that of other contributors. Facilitating this discussion is an important aspect of using wiki technology, so the review team added separate notes pages to each section of the wiki to allow this discussion to take place away from the main pages.

The wiki Act received nearly 26,000 visits, with the vast majority of hits coming as referrals from embedded links in online news stories. Given that most people were visiting the site from a media referral, the distribution of visitors to the wiki seemed to follow media pick-up of the story, and interest in the wiki Act was international, particularly following the BBC publishing an article about the wiki on its main web page.

Foreign language articles about the wiki Act also appeared in mainstream media in numerous countries: Germany, Norway, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Thailand, Italy, Finland, Poland, Malaysia, Chile and France. A large online community, Slashdot.org, publicized the story following the BBC article and hits from American IP addresses rose rapidly (by over 7,000 per cent) immediately after the Slashdot referral.

The open wiki was closed on September 30, 2007, with the resulting conversation being moderated and edited before reopening as a document of record on October 1, 2007. The site http:// wiki.policeact.govt.nz is still receiving a large number of hits per day, with visitors viewing an average of almost four pages per visit. Individuals are also invited to directly contact the team with any further comments, and we are still receiving feedback in this way.

Current statistics indicate visitors are using the document-of-record wiki differently from the way they used the open wiki. Visitors are now spending more time on the site and are viewing more pages while they are there. The proportion of visitors accessing the site directly, without a referral from a media site, has also increased.

As a result of the international coverage, members of the Police Act Review team have been approached for further information about the wiki from a variety of international observers and researchers. Many have asked questions about the lessons other law enforcement agencies could learn from the New Zealand experience.

The Police Act Review has been fortunate that the use of the wiki was in line with New Zealand’s e-government goal that information and communications technologies should be integral to the delivery of government information, services and processes. This willingness to support new technologies was of great benefit in initiating such a novel consultation strategy and was, arguably, vital to the success of the wiki.

Initially some questions were raised about using a wiki in the law-making process, as this had not previously been attempted in New Zealand or any other country. However, these concerns were alleviated by clarifying the role that the finalized wiki would play in subsequent policy development work. Other challenges around the wiki were more practical — the moderation of posts (as noted above), managing mischievous edits and contributors, general maintenance of the site and so on.

Positive outcomes

Overall, the wiki Act produced hundreds of constructive edits, ranging from single-word suggestions through to lengthy paragraphs of commentary about a wide variety of topics. It has yielded at least three positive outcomes: firstly, a number of fresh ideas were raised; secondly, awareness of the review and engagement in it were significantly increased; and thirdly, while not a direct objective of the Police Act Review, a deeper conversation has developed around government use of web-based technologies and online social networking spaces.

Given the success of the open wiki, a second-generation wiki has been developed. This password-protected site allows participation in a wiki community to further develop the first generation Wiki Policing Act 2008.