Open Government Dialogue: Phase 2 Metrics Update

Phase 2 of the Open Government Dialogue has been under way for almost a week 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 & Technology Policy (OSTP).

The tool used for this phase is Wordpress, a free and open source blogging engine that powers the OSTP blog. Threaded comments come standard with the latest Wordpress 2.7 release. For comment voting, it appears they added the Comments Vote plug-in:

This plug-in enables users of the website to vote comments up or down. This running tally can be displayed on the comment, and administrators have the ability to activate the collapsing of comments with a designated negative rating. The comment will still be available for viewing by clicking on a “show comment” link, which expands to show the collapsed comment’s contents.

Unlike IdeaScale (the tool used in phase 1), there doesn’t seem to be a page that shows key participation metrics (e.g. number of registered users, number of votes cast etc.). The only thing that’s shown is the number of comments on each blog post.

Based on this limited information plus some plain old manual counting, here’s some of the activity we’ve seen on the four blog posts as of this writing:

• Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 6:44 pm by Beth Noveck: Open Government Initiative Discussion Phase: Transparency Principles (214 comments over 6 days)
• Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 8:23 pm by Beth Noveck: Transparency Governance (113 comments over 5 days)
• Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 4:49 pm by Robynn Sturm: Transparency: Open Government Operations (18 comments over 1 day)
• Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 8:00 pm by OSTP: Data Transparency via Data.gov (49 comments over 1 day)

That’s a total of 394 comments over 6 days (note that this number doesn’t include comments that have been removed).

Comments that are deemed off-topic (or that otherwise violate the terms of participation) are moved to the flagged comments section. Here’s an overview of how many comments have been demoted since the discussion phase started (flagged comments appear under the date they were first posted):

• Flagged comments, June 4 (26 comments)
• Flagged comments, June 5 (77 comments)
• Flagged comments, June 6 (21 comments)
• Flagged comments, June 7 (6 comments)
• Flagged comments, June 8 (12 comments)

To date, a total of 142 comments have been removed to the flagged comment section.

The total number of votes is not exposed but since most comments seem to get no more than a handful of net votes and very few comments gain ten or more net votes, it’s safe to assume that the total number of votes cast across all participants lies in the hundreds, rather than in the tens of thousands as was the case in the previous phase.

The number of registered users is also not exposed. Again, my guess would be that only several hundred participants have signed up so far (a lot fewer than during phase 1).

The word count for all 394 comments is approximately 48,000 words, or about 120 words per comment (for comparison, this number is very similar to what we saw during the Change.gov discussions).

Related Posts

1. June 10, 2009 by Tim:
   Open Government Dialogue: 26 Tips for Improving Phase 2
2. June 8, 2009 by Tim:
   Open Government Dialogue: Agenda for Phase 2 Discussion about Citizen Participation
3. May 31, 2009 by Tim:
   Open Government Dialogue: First Look at Site Activity and User Adoption