Making a Small World Smaller

Attended a seminar/event today, Making a Small World Smaller: A mixed bag as usual. Some good ideas, some less spectacular ones, but it generally had a good feel.

An interesting tidbit came out from one of the speakers (to me anyway): Melbourne is apparently the first city in the world to make use of Wiki technology to make city planning a collaborative experience with the public.

They put the actual city plan on the internet in a Wiki and allowed, for a limited time, any member of the public to edit and change the city plan document.

The great success is that instead of getting a lot of profanity and rubbish, they actually got ideas, changes and edits for services, infrastructure and processes that even their highly paid consultants didn't even come near to thinking about, realized was a problem, or proposed better ways of doing things.

Impressed!