The American Concrete Pavement Association (ACPA) announced the launch of its Wikipave website upon the World of Concrete 2015 opening, placing information about and related to concrete pavement at the fingertips of anyone, anywhere in the world.
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 and photos or illustrations. The association emphasizes that this free-resource is available worldwide without limitation, but adds that content development and editing rights will be limited to ACPA members, staff 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,” 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 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,” 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.”
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 observes. “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, 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.”
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| Wikipave content draws from American Concrete Pavement Association 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 (http://apps.acpa.org), along with a resource center containing the most comprehensive digital library of concrete pavement reports and documents (http://resources.acpa.org). |