I’m  excited to point out that the Government of Canada has launched a “proof of concept” wiki open to the entire federal civil service. It’s restricted to computers operating on the GofC network, but here’s a screengrab.

So far, only a day after the formal launch, the site has 512 users working on nearly 900 articles across a range of subjects.

In addition to the more traditional hurdles faced by wikis in large organizations (adoption by more than a limited group of technical types, widespread integration into project management and continuing relevance to organizational priorities and goals), GCpedia faces two additional challenges:

• producing a site that reflects the fact that the Government of Canada works in both English and French, and that employees expect to be able to work in their official language of choice; and
• expectations about the accessibility and archiving of documents, particularly in response to a request from a member of the public for documents under our access to information legislation.

GCpedia has been positioned as a test bed for the initial execution and integration of Web 2.0 technologies into the everyday work of Canadian federal civil servants.

What’s exciting is that the central agencies have taken the lead in rolling out a tool designed specifically to encourage inter-departmental collaboration on projects and policies. A tool that doesn’t necessarily demand intensive training from third party suppliers or the purchase of additional licenses by every officer and branch that would like to use it.

UPDATE: Since people have asked, it’s a MediaWiki install, and it looks relatively routine, although the sidebar has navigation in both English and French.

The path was laid for this project by some enterprising people at our Department of Natural Resources, where they have had a department-wide wiki in place for a year or more. This departmental wiki was a high profile project within Natural Resources, and was launched by the Deputy Minister herself. In fact, there is an introductory overlay animation to the wiki that features the Deputy explaining why the wiki is an important development for the organization.

Library Boy linked to an article written by the architects of the NRCan wiki, which explains their project and their goals:

The Wiki 101 pathfinder was initiated in the spring of 2007, targetting employees with a predisposition to collaboration. Its goal: 101 users in 101 days. Within four months it grew to 260 users. Growth was quick and organic.

“The Wiki was treated as an open, relatively unrestricted environment,” notes Peter Cowan, Director of Information Management. “Employees were asked to come forward with their own ideas on how to contribute to and optimize the use of the Wiki. We supported groups with promising ideas and did not place many restrictions on users, but instead, provided a few guardrails and a general code of conduct to guide behaviour. For the most part, we were confident in the professionalism of our employees – and for us that worked.”

The next step was to develop a Collaborative Technology Business Case as a means to engage senior management and secure commitment and support for a four year, three-tiered approach to the implementation of collaborative tools.

A tiered approach ensures a focus on the business value, allowing time to assess, analyze and learn through small scale, real business pathfinders before proceeding to broad implementation. The goal is to have a fully integrated Wiki knowledge base with a universally accessible suite of tools to enhance and facilitate collaboration by the end of Tier Three in late 2011.