Following up on my recent post about Quora’s approach to anonymous postings, here’s an example of a related feature.
Peak Democracy is a “non-partisan company whose mission is to broaden civic engagement and build public trust in government.” Their Open City Hall™ service is a monitored online public comment process that promises “order and decorum of a government meeting” (see entry on ParticipateDB).
The City of Palo Alto uses the service to host discussions on various topics. Some comments are posted as “semi-anonymous”. Clicking the link opens a pop-up window with more information:
The pop-up reads:
Q: What are ’semi-anonymous’ statements and why do you allow them?
A: Statements whose authors are identified privately to Peak Democracy, but not publicly on the website are called ’semi-anonymous’. Per our privacy agreement, Peak Democracy does not identify the author of a semi-anonymous statement to anyone – not even to the government agency hosting the forum – unless we are required by law to do so.
We allow semi-anonymous statements because there are people with great ideas who will only share them anonymously. Some people cannot sign their statements because doing so will interfere with their job, business or other personal relationships.
At the same time, we have developed technology and procedures which safeguard against systematic abuse of this privacy feature.
As I mentioned before, allowing participants to “choose if and to what extent they want to share their real identity with the other participants or the general public” is a valuable feature for the exact reason given above.
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Apparently, http://ask.metafilter.com/ also allows users to post questions anonymously (each question is first reviewed, the user’s identity is known to the reviewers).
Another example is Localocracy, which apparently allows anonymous voting: http://localocracy.posterous.com/identity-matters
New post: “Semi-Anonymous Comments on Peak Democracy” — http://bit.ly/aymxHP #edem /cc @peakdemocracy
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[Global] Intellitics, Inc. » Semi-Anonymous Comments on Peak Democracy: Following up on my recent post about Quor… http://bit.ly/9kR46g
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