Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia

Then there's the networking factor. The wiki features a directory of users, with their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, an important feature in a government where people transfer among agencies or take different jobs every few years.

Career employees at the OMB have played key roles in rolling out the wiki and steering its development. It is part of a larger initiative to find ways to produce the federal budget with common, automated processes that agencies can share rather than rely on their desktop office software.

The budget wiki is not the government's only foray into user-generated content and sharing of important documents through password-protected sites. In 2006, the intelligence community launched Intellipedia to foster sharing of information. It has 32,000 users and more than 250,000 pages, which are edited or updated about 5,000 times a day.

Karen Evans, who oversees government-wide technology policy at the OMB, views wikis as a way to provide an opportunity "where everybody gets a say" that then leads to "a very informed decision" by officials.

Too often, the government takes three years or longer to reach agreement on a solution to a problem, but the problem will have grown or changed in the meantime, Evans said. "How timely is that?" she asked. "Are you addressing the same issue you started out with?"

Today, with the Internet, "technology people can deliver solutions and capabilities really fast, while people are still focused on the problem," she said.

Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.