Water Wiki:About

From Water Wiki

This wiki is an experiment in collaboration about important, at times controversial, topics: water law and water policy. 

The wiki was born in early 2008 as a hub for several researchers who are working across institutions and disciplines on water allocation, policy and pricing. It is hoped it will evolve into a general source of knowledge and discussion about water, and so help to improve the management of water.

Many people believe that research and policy advice cannot be constructively generated in the inherently open world of a wiki, with its invitation to disagreement and even conflict. The hope and philosophy underlying this site is that open discourse and even conflict are actually helpful to social and policy research, provided the discourse is governed by reasonable guidelines. We shall see...and we hope you will contribute.

This wiki is also a pilot for the UNC School of Government as it experiments with wikis and their underlying, open-source software. Perhaps government itself can evolve to a more collaborative model through experiments such as this.