Wiki-ing for volunteer help

I can be persistent, and at times impatient, but I’m really jonesing for my organization to test out a wiki. There’s a lot of buzz floating around wikis (great podcast) online, and everyone knows within the organization that I’ve been proselytizing like no tomorrow, but can we take the leap of faith…let go of the notion of message control?

I’ve been trying to pitch various uses of wikis within, such as Riverpedia, Toolkitpedia, MERpedia, or and Outreachpedia, and though there’s been interest, I can’t land the kill. I’ve been putting on the hard sell and it’s got to be getting annoying, but I’m pretty eager to give it a test run outside of our organization.

My latest idea: dress up the wiki as a spreadsheet and ask for the public’s help to map out our national site’s information architecture (IA) by conducting a content inventory analysis. I’d love for folks to weigh in on this process (like, um, the blog here) and help us break down the pages that live on our site…the building blocks for the redesign process.

Can we really turn our visitors, online activists, and supporters into virtual volunteers—working at their own pace? That would be cool and it even plays in to Tim Reilly’s #4 core competency.