Tag Archive for 'ogov'

Open Government Dialogue: 26 Tips for Improving Phase 2

Published by Tim on June 10, 2009 in Events and Research. 9 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

While working on the previous post, I couldn’t help but think how valuable it would be for participants, researchers and everyone else interested if these high-level participation metrics were readily available in real-time on the site that hosts the discussion, rather than having to dig them up manually and deal with incomplete information, assumptions and more or less wild guesses.

Some of the numbers I usually like to track over the course of an e-participation initiative include the following (these are all pretty straightforward and a number of tools recently used by the transition team and the new administration already expose some of them by default):

  • Number or registered users
  • Number of posts (or ideas, questions etc.)
  • Number of comments
  • Number of votes
  • Number of flags
  • Total word count
  • Participation per participant (e.g. average number of comments, median)
  • Leader boards (where applicable)

Others — both participants and observers — have pointed out other issues with the site that make it harder to use than necessary.

Based on their feedback and some of my own observations, I’ve compiled a list of 26 enhancement ideas that would considerably improve the participation experience during phase 2 of the Open Government Dialogue and increase the overall quantity and quality of participant input.

Some of these refer specifically to the tool used for phase 2 (Wordpress blogging engine for threaded discussions and a plug-in for comment rating) but most should be generally applicable across other tools as well.

I’m sure the list is far from complete. Please leave a comment below if you can think of anything else that could be improved.

Registration

  1. Improve the usability of the sign-up process (including a better fall-back solution for CAPTCHA, which a lot of users apparently can’t seem to figure out).

User profile

  1. Add a prominent link to the user profile self-management page, where participants can edit their name, contact information, password etc.
  2. Add a public user profile page that allows participants to voluntarily reveal more background on their real identity (e.g. by sharing their name, affiliation, a brief bio, photo/avatar, link to their personal blog etc.).
  3. On each participant’s profile page, list some basic participation metrics for that user and link back to all of her comments (this also makes finding one’s own comments a lot easier than, say, having to browse the entire archive).

Commenting

  1. Allow participants to edit or delete their comments for a reasonable time period after posting (e.g. to correct typos or remove duplicate entries).
  2. Consider imposing smart limits on the maximum number of characters allowed per comment to avoid overly lengthy submissions.

Navigation

  1. Add permalinks to comments for easier referencing and sharing across the web (e.g. using email, blogs, Twitter etc.).
  2. Highlight staff contributions more prominently.
  3. Display posts and threads in chronological order.
  4. Provide a more robust tree structure, one that properly associates replies with the comments they refer to (even if one or more comments from a thread have been hidden or removed) and which supports better browsing and sorting of comments and threads (e.g. show most recent posts or most recently active threads).
  5. Highlight recently added comments.
  6. Allow tagging of posts and comments.
  7. Add a tag cloud.
  8. Add a searchable directory of all registered users that supports various filters (e.g. sort by most active users, most recently joined, most highly voted etc.).

Notifications

  1. Add a prominent link to the general comment RSS feed as an alternative way to follow the discussions: http://blog.ostp.gov/comments/feed/
  2. Enable email notifications for new or updated blog posts, comments and replies.

Comment voting

  1. Allow participants to correct (take back or switch) their up or down votes on comments.
  2. In the meantime (and at a minimum), make participants better aware of the fact that votes cannot be changed once submitted.
  3. In addition, improve the usability of the voting (vote up, vote down), flagging and reply buttons: the icons aren’t clear enough and the buttons are fairly small, both factors that can lead to accidental mis-voting).
  4. In addition to net number of votes, expose the total number of positive and negative notes for each comment.
  5. Expose controversiality (the ratio of negative to positive votes).

Moderation

  1. For comments that have to be removed due to a violation of the terms of participation, leave a note that references the type of violation.
  2. In case a comment is removed, notify the original poster of her offense (we don’t know for sure if this is done consistently but judging from user feedback it’s not).

General

  1. Add an FAQ or help page.
  2. Add a statistics page that shows the number of registered users, number of comments, number of votes and number of flags over time.
  3. Add site-wide search (currently comments don’t seem to show up in search).

That’s all I could find over the past week. Please expand on this list as you come across other stumbling blocks.

Open Government Dialogue: Phase 2 Metrics Update

Published by Tim on June 9, 2009 in E-participation, Events and Research. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

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:

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):

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).

Open Government Dialogue: Agenda for Phase 2 Discussion about Citizen Participation

Published by Tim on June 8, 2009 in E-participation, Events and Public Participation. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The White House Office of Public Engagement just shared in an email the agenda for the phase 2 discussion about citizen participation, which is scheduled to start Wednesday, June 10 over on the OSTP blog:

As we wrap up the transparency conversation with a final posting about information access and the Freedom of Information Act tomorrow, we want to preview what’s coming this week in the discussion about Citizen Participation and Civic Engagement. Beginning on Wednesday we’ll start conversations on Participation:

  • Creating More Opportunities for Citizen Participation in Government Decision making
  • Increasing Citizen Participation and Civic Education
  • E-Democracy: New Tools and Technologies for Participation
  • Web 2.0 Policy Framework
  • Public Participation in Federal Rulemaking

Good stuff! Really looking forward to this part.

Quality Participation Doesn’t Waste Participants’ Time!

Published by Tim on June 2, 2009 in Community, E-participation and Events. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Over the past few days, the site that’s hosting the Open Government Brainstorm has been overrun with off-topic ideas and spam (most noticeably, there has been an avalanche of requests to “release President Obama’s birth certificate in order to prove his US citizenship”). See this snapshot of the tag cloud I took yesterday:

Open Government Brainstorm: Obama birth certificate spam attack

Steven Clift just posted an idea that suggests a tried-and-true way of how to better deal with this situation:

Move Off-Topic Submissions – Add an Out-of-Scope button to move off-topic posts to their own space

Since a few people seek to dominate any public space hosted by government regardless of the topic, re-establish some equity by allowing participants to flag submissions as “off-topic.” With 10 off-topic votes, instead of deleting such posts, simply move them to a proper tab for all *who wish to see* can view them. An online consultation should make engagement more efficient. The online consultation manager should be able to freeze this feature should a minority of users attempt to game the system by flagging clearly on topic posts as off-topic.

Why Is This Idea Important?

When government spends tax dollars (or lends their support to partners like NAPA) to host structured sessions to gather online input, it is a waste of resources if relatively few individuals seek to hijack the public space for their pet issue which is clearly off-topic from the promised theme or agenda. Such submissions should be channeled rather than deleted (which would be a potential violation of the first amendment in what appears to be a legally public forum).

Here’s the comment I left:

Leaving off-topic ideas and spam unmoderated also forces those participants who come to this site with a sincere intention to contribute to dig through layers and layers of unrelated material. This makes participating more cumbersome and a lot less productive (and less fun). Any convener of e-participation effort of this kind would be well advised to being more mindful of their participants’ precious time. In that sense, moderation and community management become a courtesy.

Aside from off-topic discussions and spam, I’ve also noticed an increased use of foul language, general rudeness, and name calling.

I’d argue that taking a hands-off approach to managing an e-participation effort such as the Open Government Brainstorm (especially in light of these spam attacks) is a violation of a couple of rules laid out in the Core Principles for Participation that were released a few weeks ago (see the  expanded text for reference). For example, the third principle advises to avoid “hostile, disrespectful or stilted conversations,” (which, of course, doesn’t usually happen on its own without any management).

In my view, it is the convener’s responsibility to design and manage a process, online or offline, that maximizes each participant’s chance of having an impact, and there’s a cost involved in not doing so: By tolerating abusive behavior and by allowing the quality of the conversation to degrade, a large portion of the participants’ overall time and effort (which in large-scale efforts such as this one can easily exceed tens if not hundreds of person months) will be spent on low-quality, low-impact activities (e.g. browsing duplicate entries) when the real opportunity lies in enabling participants to share the best they got.

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

Published by Tim on May 31, 2009 in E-participation, Events and Research. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

As mentioned a few days ago, the past week saw the first round of the Open Government Dialogue, a three-phased e-participation initiative launched by the White House that aims to gather public input for the crafting of the Open Government Directive. From their May 21 announcement:

Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking on the White House website. In a sea change from conventional practice, we are not asking for comments on an already-finished set of draft recommendations, but are seeking fresh ideas from you early in the process of creating recommendations. We will carefully consider your comments, suggestions, and proposals.

Here’s how the public engagement process will work. It will take place in 3 phases: Brainstorming, Discussion, and Drafting.

Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own.

Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion.

These three phases will build upon one another and inform the crafting of recommendations on open government.

The first phase, Open Government Brainstorm, was convened by the National Academy of Public Administration and used IdeaScale, a crowdstorming or idea generation tool for large groups.

Based on my own Open Government Dialogue site activity tracking data from the past ten days, I did the following quick analysis:

1) Activity over time (incl. registered users)

Table: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planspark/3583067924/in/set-72157618585823580/

Open Government Dialogue: activity over time (raw data) 

Graph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planspark/3582188431/in/set-72157618585823580/

Open Government Dialogue: activity over time

(Note that the “votes” curve uses a different scale in order to make it fit into the graph.)

2) Average user activity over time

Table: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planspark/3583071264/in/set-72157618585823580/

 Open Government Dialogue: activity per user

Graph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planspark/3583198476/in/set-72157618585823580/

Open Government Dialogue: average activity per user over time

(Note that the “votes per user” curve uses a different scale in order to make it fit into the graph.)

What’s interesting is that up until 05/23 (two days into the initiative, at only several hundred registered users) average user activity was very high but dropped sharply over subsequent days as thousands of new — and much less active — users signed up.

For example, on May 23 at 8.32am (about 36 hours into the project), I measured the highest average activity per user:

  • 2.5 ideas / user
  • 3.0 comments / user
  • 82 votes / user

As of today, May 31 at 12.08pm (almost a full 10 days into the project), average activity per user is much lower:

  • 0.2 ideas / user
  • 0.6 comments / user
  • 11.7 votes / user

I see a real potential here how such user adoption and user activity information could be used in real-time to manage and optimize individual as well as overall participation levels, to distribute attention more evenly (e.g. away from the most highly-rated items) or to encourage collaboration among participants.

Open Government Dialogue: “Create an Open Government Project Directory and Knowledge Base”

Published by Tim on May 28, 2009 in Events and Ideas. 1 Comment Tags: , .

As the first phase of the Open Government Dialogue is almost drawing to a close, here’s Intellitics’ humble contribution (as posted a couple of days ago):

Create an Open Government project directory and knowledge base

The basic idea is to make sure that any important information about past, current or upcoming government projects or programs in the areas of transparency, participation and collaboration is captured and shared in a timely manner and easily accessible to anyone interested in or affected by these projects/programs.

The project directory would contain project briefs, contact information, key performance indicators, lessons learned, media coverage, citizen feedback etc.

The knowledge base could include information on key people and organizations, tools, metrics, case studies etc. as well as checklists, how-tos and other best practices.

This information would benefit everyone involved (citizens, government, research, media, vendors etc.) by helping design better projects/programs as well as increase the likelihood of project/program success.

Why Is This Idea Important?

Because a lot of the work that will be performed in this area is relatively new and fairly experimental, it is important that successes as well as failures (or experiences in general) be captured and shared so as to avoid reinventing the wheel too many times.

The idea has since garnered 73 net supporting votes (74 for, 1 against) and has quickly entered the top 100 highest-rated ideas (out of over 1,000), which — given the short amount of time it’s been up — seems to indicate that tracking is high on many people’s agenda.