[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]The American Concrete Pavement Association (ACPA) today announced the launch of its Wikipave™ website, which places information about and related to concrete pavement at the fingertips of anyone, anywhere in the world.
As is true of other wikis[1], Wikipave is a collaborative application, which will allow ACPA staff, members, technology partners, and affiliated Chapter/State personnel to add, modify, or delete technical content, encyclopedic listings, definitions, photos and illustrations, and other content. ACPA emphasizes that this free-resource is available worldwide without limitation, but adds that content development and editing rights will be limited to ACPA and its members and affiliates.
“Wikipave is the largest-scale technology transfer, knowledge transfer, and educational initiative in the 51-year history of the American Concrete Pavement Association,” said ACPA President & CEO Gerald F. Voigt, P.E.
“This collaborative, web-based application reflects the vast body of technical information developed by ACPA over more than five decades, but also includes a wealth of technical and general information from other sources.
“Wikipave is a significant change for the association and industry in terms of how we deliver information. As is true of most associations, we historically produced and sold commercially-printed technical resources and other publications” Voigt said, adding, “We are cutting a new path, embracing a technology that most member-based associations consider competition to the value-proposition of their members. We are not sure any other association has done this, but we are making this commitment because of the great potential and value the application offers.”
“Like most businesses and associations over the past decade or more, we transitioned to more digital publications and migrated more information to our website and microsites. This wholesale change to Wikipave, is a natural progression in our view, but starting this project has required a tremendous effort to coalesce, update, and begin the process to reformat the material into the wiki application,” he said.
Content for Wikipave was originally drawn from association and industry resources produced by the Association and its technology partners, allies, and affiliates.
“It’s a work in progress,” Voigt said, adding, “But by their very nature, wiki’s are and should be dynamic and constantly evolving. What we love most is the opportunity to engage our members in developing and editing content. Members of associations today want to engage for the value and sense of belonging to a community, but they want to do it on their own terms. We see Wikipave as a great adaptation to meet this need!”
ACPA is quick to point out that at this stage some of the content is intentionally “rough-hewn,” basically put in place for review and redaction by its member community.
“There are some pages of information that we would consider to be farther along,” Voigt says, adding, “But the fallacy of thinking something like this is complete goes against the nature of this technology, which is constantly evolving. It’s for this reason that we encourage all interested parties to bookmark our page, http://wikipave.org, then come back often. Our vision is that one day soon any search for pavement technology someone enters into their browser will lead to a Wikipave entry.”
In its embrace of technology over the past decade, ACPA has also developed a comprehensive library of web applications that perform an array of calculations useful to paving engineers and contractors (http://apps.acpa.org); a digital resource center containing the most comprehensive digital library of concrete pavement reports and documents, considered among the largest online repositories of its kind (http://resources.acpa.org); and other digital applications such as online learning courses.
ACPA announced the launch of Wikipave at a press conference at World of Concrete, the annual international event dedicated to the commercial concrete and masonry construction.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][button new_tab=”yes” icon_position=”left” special_style=”no” border_radius=”2″ three_d=”no” size=”default” color=”default” title=”Visit Wikipave” link=”http://wikipave.org/”][/vc_column][/vc_row]