The Northwest Voice is the epitome of participatory journalism. As reported in EContent, this newspaper—both print and online—is produced entirely from voluntary contributions submitted by residents living in Northwest Bakersfield, California. Today, Steve Rubel reports on an IBM effort to determine how quickly vandalism on Wikipedia is identified and corrected. The result: pages are restored to their accurate state in about five minutes.

Th Wikipedia and the Northwest Voice are two examples of participatory communication in which the audience is also the author. In the case of the Bakersfield newspaper, people living on the ground report on the happenings in their part of town or based on their interests. With the Wikipedia, the entries are submitted by anybody with expertise and corrected by those with additional insight, resources or information. (“Microsoft Encarta look out,” Rubel writes.) Blogs are routinely scooping traditional press these days.

The mainstream press won’t be displaced anytime soon. Those reading the Northwest Voice still need to find out what’s happening in City Hall, Sacramento and Washington D.C., which isn’t covered much by the local volunteer contributors. Most people don’t read blogs (many still don’t know what they are). But the trend is irreversible, as noted in Dan Gillmor’s book, “We the Media.”

So why hasn’t this trend found its way into the world of employee communications?

Internal communicators routinely mimic the media that works in the external world. Employee newsletters and magazines mimic newspapers and magazines for external audiences. Intranets mirror the World Wide Web. Closed-circuit TV broadcasts bring television in-house. Media that works on the outside works just as well on the inside.

Imagine, then, a company newspaper written by employees. What about a how-to manual prepared using a Wiki so that the employees who know how to can assemble it based on their knowledge? Would there be value to an employee knowledgeable in her field updating a blog every day or so to report on new developments? Or members of a project team keeping each other and the rest of the company up-to-date on a blog?

Sure, there are some companies using some of this stuff. Business Week reported several weeks ago about a company that uses wikis and the company Traction Software has installed its enterprise blogging system in several companies. I’ve heard reports from other companies about the use of blogs on their intranets.

But in no company have I seen participatory communication emerge as a strategy. It’s more lilke some employees find the tools and start using them while the internal communications department sits back and says, “Isn’t that interesting? What’s the deadline for the next weekly online newsletter?”

My intranet theorem suggests that any trend that becomes commonplace on the Internet is inevitable on the intranet. Communicators should begin thinking about how to incorporate online participatory communication into their planning. The first step will be to convince management that it’s okay for employees to communicate. After that, the power of all that tacit knowledge swimming around in employees’ heads will finally find an outlet that can only serve organizational goals.