Pavement Interactive: Pavement Knowledge Transfer with Web 2.0

Pavement Interactive (http://pavementinteractive.org) is an ongoing experiment in coupling a participatory web application with a unique data set to improve transportation engineering knowledge transfer. Specifically, Pavement Interactive is an online pavement community built on an open-source wiki platform where users can create, edit, browse, and search site content with just a computer, web browser, and internet connection. It contains 523 web pages and has logged just over 2 million page views in 3 years of existence. Data from Google Analytics over the past year show substantial and growing use worldwide. Observations of use indicate (1) primary use as a ready-reference and learning tool; (2) collaboration functions are possible but not extensively used; (3) substantial quality content attracts users; (4) participation drives success; (5) a majority of effort should be dedicated to content creation and participation; and (6) there should be a means to maintain currency for such websites beyond the funded development phase.