Comments on: Open Government Dialogue: First Look at Site Activity and User Adoption

By: OpenGov Open Feedback Firehose « Intellitics, Inc.

OpenGov Open Feedback Firehose « Intellitics, Inc. — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:55:53 +0000

[...] discussion. Some of you may remember this tool from phase 1 of the Open Government Dialogue (see here, [...]

By: 14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work: “Keep folks in the loop!” « Intellitics

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:27:34 +0000

[...] of the participants’ collective input can quickly become overwhelming (for details, see here, here and [...]

By: Open Government Dialogue: Phase 2 Metrics Update at Intellitics

Open Government Dialogue: Phase 2 Metrics Update at Intellitics — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:49:44 +0000

[...] now. Following the brainstorm phase, which ran from May 22 through May 28 (see our coverage here, here and here), this discusson phase was launched June 3 and is being hosted by the Office for Science [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:02:14 +0000

Thanks, Tom!

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten hold of the user stats yet. Not sure if they are available via the IdeaScale API (haven’t seen them on the site). I agree that what we can expect is a power law distribution of user participation (with a fairly small group that is highly productive and a long tail of users with ever-decreasing participation levels).

Median figures would probably be more insightful but I haven’t had time to play with them yet.

I think the curve above goes hand in hand with a perceived (from my end, at least) increase in noise (off topic ideas or plain spam) that has hit the site since around the time the curves peaked. So maybe there’s some connection there that could be explored further.

I plan to add a rough measure of whether or not an idea was on topic and see how that played out over time (my guess: contributions were very focused initially but then strayed to all kinds of unrelated issues).

By: Tom Atlee

Tom Atlee — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:18:12 +0000

Note that there is probably a power law curve here. For example power user Robert David Steele Vivas posted far more than me — 8 Ideas, 150 Comments, 207 Votes (I only know this because I know him). What would the chart look like if the top 5-10 users were removed from the stats? What would the chart look like if it were based on median figures, rather than average?

And what would be the meaning of the differences between these charts, in terms of planning new sites?

Also, some participants have extensive networks to “get out the vote”, while others are just individuals. What is the meaning of that phenomenon for democratic brainstorming and rating?

I have seen sites that feature a random selection of ideas, rather than only most popular and most recent. This reduces the advantage for ideas that were posted early or by someone with a big network.