Back in 2003, I wrote a short article for this magazine about a new online encyclopedia called the Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org). At the time, the Wikipedia had 180,000 articles in English alone, which at the time seemed pretty impressive. Today it has grown to 1.4 million articles in English, and nearly four million more in 228 other languages. It is a truly massive project, entirely run by volunteers.
I recently attended a meeting of people involved in workers’ rights issues. We were discussing online campaigning. At one point, the participants got very worked up over the question of how to choose an online campaign. There were different points of view about what would constitute a good campaign to select. There was agreement that a committee should be formed to set criteria and create a procedure for deciding which campaigns needed to be launched.
In an ideal world, trade unionists would be able to gather for meetings whenever we wanted, anywhere on the planet. Just like corporations do.
Several years ago, one could already detect that their were two types of websites. The first type consisted of online brochures. People spoke about “online publishing” and the idea was that you could use the web as a replacement for things like newsletters. But there was also a second type of website that was interactive and allowed people reading the sites to contribute content to them.