Share Your OpenGov Forum Tracking Data on GovLoop

Following up on my list of ten things to monitor, I’ve started a thread on GovLoop: Monitoring and continuous evaluation of OpenGov forums

Here’s my initial post:

As part of my ongoing efforts to monitor the various feedback channels that have been launched as part of the Open Government Directive, I’ll be tracking some basic metrics. I thought I’d share the raw data here on a regular basis so people can chime in and add any other insights they’ve come across.

23 agencies are using IdeaScale, which exposes the following in real-time:

• Number of ideas
• Number of comments
• Number of votes
• Number of registered users

So that’s nice. I’ll check in on the other two forums occasionally as well (here, here).

Aside from cold, hard numbers, I will be looking for examples that illustrate how various agencies are doing in terms of the other nine items on my list. Here it is again in short form:

• Expectation management
• Community ground rules
• Level of convener involvement/participation
• Quality of moderation
• Quantity of participation over time
• Outreach and diversity of participants
• Conclusion and impact
• Tech support
• Project communications
• Mood

I’m using this RSS feed for easy scanning but don’t expect to catch everything. Please share your impressions in the comments.

A set of screenshots will be available on Flickr.

I hope this will attract enough metrics junkies so that we’ll end up with a fairly complete picture in the end. It would certainly be great to see not only a breadth of data points but also to have a discussion about what should be measured and how. After all, the participation piece of the upcoming dashboard still hasn’t been designed in detail yet. Maybe this little exercise will create a few valuable insights.

Related Posts

1. February 24, 2010 by Tim:
   OpenGov Forum Metrics: Adoption Graph Week 3
2. February 15, 2010 by Tim:
   OpenGov Tracker
3. February 7, 2010 by Tim:
   Ten Things to Monitor As Agencies Invite Input On Open Government Plans