Source: American Concrete Pavement Association (ACPA), Rosemont, Ill.
A collaborative application placing information about concrete pavement at the fingertips of anyone, anywhere in the world, Wikipave marks one of the deepest transfers to date of free content from a North American concrete industry group. It allows ACPA staff, members, technology partners, and affiliated chapter/state personnel to add, modify, or delete technical content, encyclopedic listings, definitions and photos or illustrations.
“Wikipave is the largest-scale technology transfer, knowledge transfer, and educational initiative in the 51-year history of the American Concrete Pavement Association,” says President Gerald 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. 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 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,” he adds. “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.
“It’s a work in progress. But by their very nature, wiki’s are and should be dynamic and constantly evolving. 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.”
Wikipave content draws from ACPA resources, developed by staff, technology partners, allies and affiliates. In its embrace of technology over the past decade, ACPA has also launched online learning courses, plus a comprehensive library of web applications performing an array of calculations useful to paving engineers and contractors, along with a resource center containing a comprehensive digital library of concrete pavement reports and documents.