EnvironmentalWiki is an encyclopedia of environmental knowledges and process information to be used as an Agency resource for all to communicate, share, and collaborate their information on environmental and Agency business matters. Our goal for our EnvironmentalWiki encyclopedia is a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of Agency knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. Encyclopedias are divided into articles with one article on each subject covered, starting with, but not inclusive of EPA's Taxonomy and Terminology. EnvironmentalWiki is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the agency; anyone can edit it.
Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute, since their primary role is to write articles that cover existing knowledge. This means that all staff of all Program Offices, Laboratories, and Regions can write articles on EnvironmentalWiki. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Agency extranet or intranet, simply by clicking the edit this page link. Anyone is welcome to add information, cross-references, or citations, as long as they do so within our editing policies and to an appropriate standard. Substandard or disputed information is subject to removal. Users need not worry about accidentally damaging EnvironmentalWiki when adding or improving information, as other editors are always around to advise or correct obvious errors, and wiki software is carefully designed to allow easy reversal of editorial mistakes.
Because EnvironmentalWiki is an ongoing work to which, in principle, anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed.
EPA spends considerable resources investing in the education and professional development of its workforce, it does not have a formal process for capturing key information and knowledge that could be useful for other EPA employees to communicate, share, and collaborate among the Staff information on environmental or agency matters. It is evident that when an experienced staff retires, leaves the region, or moves to a new role within the Region, we risk losing valuable intellectual capital, institutional memory, experience, and expertise unless we invest in a strategy to capture and transform it into reusable knowledge which is accessible to the people who need it. In addition, when new employee needs to search, obtain information it is difficult to obtain these information readily in one place. We hope that we may use EnvironmentalWiki to fill these gaps and provide an information resource where we all could use.
Implementation of Four of the Five Pillars of EnviroCentral
- EnviroCentral is an environmental related encyclopedia/ knowledge base incorporating elements of general encyclopedias, glossary of subjects, specialized encyclopedias, and almanacs. All articles must be referenced and supported with facts or follows on original research, policy, and guidelines and strive for accuracy. EnviroCentral is not the place to insert personal opinions, issues, or arguments. In addition will facilitate context aggregated dynamic search on intelinked Web 2.0 LAMP based Applications on the proposed Environmental wiki.
- EnviroCentral has a neutral point of view, along with programmatic regulations and guidances in accordance to environmental laws and judicial decree mandated by U.S. Congress and courts, respectfully. This means, we strive for articles that advocate single point of Agency view, but with different dimensions in accordance to the respective programs dictated by their respective environmental laws and judicial decree mandated by U.S. Congress and courts. We recognized the different view, facilitate and hope to see asa blackboard with series of dimensional sub-blackboards (foot notes, discussion and comments) showing the differences of the programmatic views and help to communicate and understand different programmatic issues across the Agency and stakeholders. Sometimes this requires representing multiple points of view; presenting each point of view accurately; providing context for any given point of view, so that readers understand whose view the point it represents; and presenting not one point of view as "the truth" or "the best view". It means citing verifiable, authoritative sources whenever possible, especially on controversial topics. When a conflict arises as to which version is the most neutral, declare a cool-down period and tag the article as disputed; hammer out details on the talk page and follow dispute resolution.
- EnviroCentral works by building consensus and collaboration through competent and authorized contributors with Wikis and Blogs. Consensus is an inherent part of the wiki process by collaborating and integrating different points and expertise knowledge toward a subject article. Each part of the article may be linked as a gateway portal to other parts, referenced links, web sites, blogs, Third Party links or widgets i.e. flickrs, YouTube and others, wikis, bookmarks, RSS feeds, emails, documents, or publications and other EnviroCentral topic area.
- EnviroCentral will serve as a knowledge encyclopedia to communicate, collaborate, and share information. While there are many cross-divisional teams and workgroups within various Offices and Regions, the divisions operate independently of one another in many respects and there is currently no central repository for sharing information on a broader scale. The Knowledge Exchange will fill this gap and act as a vehicle for sharing information and knowledge across the divisions within their offices. The wiki may cover virtually any topic and is intended to serve as the “Wikipedia for EPA”. However, we have a core group who will focus on capturing tacit knowledge in a form that can be shared through the wiki so that EPA employees can benefit from each other’s experience. Methods we will use to capture this knowledge include standard operating procedures and process after action reviews, best practices/lessons learned, case studies, and story telling. The experience we capture with these methods will itself be useful to the staff but the documents we produce and share though the wiki will also serve as models for applying these knowledge transfer methods in the future.
In addition, many Offices and Regions also currently has a resource directory which lists information about an individual employee’s function in the organization, expertise, education, past work experience, languages, and other background information. However, the current directory is an outdated Lotus Notes application and it not kept up to date. While using the wiki as a general encyclopedia about our work, we will also interoperate the built-in user profiles within to serve as a resource directory and social networking tool. This internal social networking application is similar to the popular FaceBook. We will assist the employees in setting up user profiles which contain the same type of information found in the current resource directory but we will also encourage staff to write about themselves and their outside interests so that other staff can get to know their interest and hobbies and other skills sets. Experience in other organizations has found that people are more willing to share information and engage with each other if they feel like they know their colleagues and the wiki with social network application will help us accomplish that. Furthermore the profile will assist our search engine(s) for dynamic context searches to improve information discovery and access.
