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Exerpt fromPeace Corps: the Icon and the Realityby Anthony WatkinsPeaceCorpsWiki.org

Will Dickinson served in Armenia from 2004 to 2006. He had gone to the town of

Jermuk expecting to be involved full time in development projects, but instead found his mainassignment only kept him busy a few hours a month. He found communities jaded and wary ofVolunteers, Volunteers whose previous projects and activities were lost to memory. He said:

A metaphor for PC amnesia greeted me every time I arrived in Jermuk; justnext to the bus station was a cannibalized children's play ground constructed by a well-meaning and well-liked volunteer about five years before me. At this desolate location, Inever saw any children use the remaining jagged steel structures; this skeleton made astrong impression on me.

I also discovered that the source of knowledge about PC activity in Armenia was

not PC headquarters but the residents of the community in which I was situated. Theycommented on how nave new PCVs were given they found they had little sense ofthe immediate needs of the community, unaware of the successes and failures of theirpredecessors, and limited knowledge of the country as a whole. They even told storiesabout past PC efforts that were unsuccessful because of an unrealistic assessment ofthe community's needs.

Dickinson eventually had to go outside the Peace Corps to find work. He got a recently-

placed Country Director to sign off on his work, but met with hostility from other Peace Corpsstaff. One staff member burst into tears when he told her he had gone to get his own work,accusing him of going behind their back. He was threatened with Administrative Separation, buthe was able to provide documentation of his time on a GIS project, and they backed down.

Toward the end of Dickinsons service, he was finishing up a GIS mapping project whenhe came into contact with another Volunteer who had done an eerily similar project. I wasshocked! How could I have no idea about this work?

He returned from Armenia burned and bewildered by a so-called development agencywith very little evidence of its development. He built PeaceCorpsWiki.org as a transparentsource of information for other current and prospective Volunteers. He felt Volunteers neededcomprehensive information to be able to make informed decisions about serving in the PeaceCorps.

After a while of trying to collaborate with the Peace Corps and National Peace CorpsAssociation on this project, it became increasing clear that our message needed to beconformed and controlled in order to receive anysupport from these groups.

Over the next several years, as Dickinson and others built on his wiki site, the Peace

Corps ostracized him. It would become clear that the agency had political motivationsthreatened by an open source of information about the program. I had no idea the politicaltraction the Peace Corps myth had, in the face of verifiable data, and how this mythologypermeates Washington DC and US-centric development world.

For those that served in my generation, the PC is career stepping stone from nowhereinto the folds of the foreign service and development world....but based on the volunteer surveysmost agree it needs a major reform.

Dickinson had initially hoped for cooperation from the agency on a project that wouldhelp modernize and streamline its operations, but the agency treated him as it did everyone who

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threatened its sacrosanct nostalgic dream. After several years of passive-aggressive hostilityfrom the agency, he was left burned out and frustrated. I just want this story told. I just wantclosure, he said at the end of 2011.

By now, Chuck Ludlams reform campaign had been going on for six years. The agencyhad blackballed him from official circles as well, and faced with the agencys unequivocalhostility, he had been forced to publish his survey results, memorandums, testimonies,

and other Peace Corps information on Dickinsons site. Ludlams goal was also to provideVolunteers with complete, unfiltered information about Peace Corps programs, including but notlimited to complete Peace Corps Volunteer survey results.

Ludlam had managed to obtain and publish the 2008 biennial survey results on thewiki , broken down country-by-country. He created a sortable excel spreadsheet so prospectiveVolunteers could sort the information themselves and make informed decisions about the PeaceCorps programs.

He described the Peace Corps resistance to his requests in his 2009 memo to AaronWilliams:

The process by which the authors obtained the 2008 survey results canonly be described as Kafkaesque. In March of this year, at our request, Peace Corps

staff gave us a hard copy of the worldwide responses to the survey. On April 13 we fileda FOIA request for the country-by-country breakout of the results. In our request wenoted that the hard copy in our possession invited Country Directors to view the country-by-country results on the Peace Corps intranet confirming that the country-by-countryresults exist there in electronic form. On May 11 the Peace Corps FOIA officer notifiedus that, It is estimated that the total number of pages responsive to your request is6,068 pages. The file containing these documents is too large to send electronically orscan to a CD-Rom. Therefore, your request will be subject to a reproduction charge of$895.20 for all pages over the 100 page limit. In short, she was insisting that we pay fora hard copy of the breakouts for each country. About this time she produced for us asample table for Question E 11 (regarding Country Directors) that provided answers forall of the countries to this question, a question-by-question format. We inquired whether

the answers were available in this question-by-question format as well as in the country-by-country format. We were told that itd cost the Peace Corps $2,242 to produce theresponses in a question-by-question format, again apparently only in a hard copy. Weasked repeatedly if the documents already existed in electronic format on the intranetsiteshe never confirmed that they didand we offered to supply her with a mini-external hard drive to which to download the electronic files. Out of exasperation at herevasions and unresponsiveness, we filed a FOIA appeal on May 27 asking again forelectronic copies of the filescountry-by-country and question-by-question. On June 23the Peace Corps formally denied our appeal saying that the processing of our request,including the refusal to produce the documents in electronic form and the outlandish costestimates, was proper. Anticipating that our appeal would be denied, in early weapproached Peace Corps headquarters staff who went to the Peace Corps intranetjust

where wed said the documents were postedand downloaded for us copies of all of thecountry-by-country survey results77 files. They fit easily on a flash drive. It took lessthan 5 minutes to download the documents.

Needless to say, the agency was not happy with the publication of those survey results,

even though they are legally required to provide them through the Freedom of Information Act.The Peace Corps unsurprisingly denied Ludlams requests for the 2009 and 2010

results. Ludlam sued the agency to obtain those results through FOIA. When obtained, he says,he will publish them online as well. Over the years, Ludlams gradual expulsion by the Peace

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Corps community would lead him to believe the Volunteers were the ones who had to press forreform. He had initially avoided going to the press.

Dickinson explained:

Early in 2008 I suggested Chuck to go to journalists but hes like no, no, Illgive them the benefit of the doubt. Chuck believed that he had to exhaust the proper

methods before going to the press.... this included presenting multiple rewrites of hislegislation, but he got little feed back or support from lawmakers who had little to gain inpolitical capital by reforming an American icon...even if it was flawed. He knew the presswould inherently misrepresent the issues in favor of the shock value and ratings potentialof accepts of the story mainly dealing with death and rape.... but NOT come to logicalconclusion that the political interest groups and bureaucratic momentum were was whatwas causing the organization to stagnate. The iron rule of bureaucracy was at work. Theinterests of the organization -- in this case to grow -- trumped its mission.

Ludlam has said he feels an open, wiki-like site is critical for successful reform efforts.

But faced with the unwavering hostility of the agency and a lack of support from the PeaceCorps community, Dickinson says he is tired of the whole thing and is done dealing with the

whole situation. The future of the wiki is uncertain, he says.