My wiki:About

This is a mediawiki project administered by Citizens for Balanced Growth http://citizensforbalancedgrowth.org

The idea of a wiki came from the realization that crowdsourced information might be a great way for us to help fulfill our responsibility as a Educational 501(c)(3). In our effort to gather and disseminate relevant facts about complex development issues on the horizon, we realized that there are a great number of people who have extensive knowledge that they might eagerly share. Since the sharing of knowledge is the essence of education, the wiki approach may be of tremendous benefit.

We also had another practical reason. In the decades since we were founded, CBG has had to keep track of a tremendous amount of data related to our activities in the community. Some things may have been simple, with a defined start and end, but others are ongoing and ever-changing. We have often found ourselves combing through files to recall the matrix of details to reconstruct a competent understanding of an issue, especially one which returns from dormancy or one we thought was settled and finished. Going forward, these mazes will be easier to navigate.

Another recurring quandary (read:frustration) about community development is that it is typically arduous for concerned residents to sift through the mountains of government documents in order to easily conceptualize the heart of a given matter with confidence that crucial facts and figures have not been lost in the confusion. This format of the "editable encyclopedia" permits efficient information formatting and unlimited citations in a manner that leaves less room for doubts and obfuscations that can become commonplace in public discourse. Knowledge gap reduction is the goal. We hope our community finds it useful.