Tag Archive for 'whitehousegov'

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.

Re: Grading WhiteHouse.gov

Published by Tim on March 24, 2009 in E-participation and Public Participation. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

44: The Obama Presidency, one of the Washington Post’s blogs, today came out with a new monthly feature where they’ll have a group of five experts (for today, that’s Craig Newmark, Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller, Jon Henke, and David Weinberger) examine the new WhiteHouse.gov website: Grading WhiteHouse.gov

Excerpt:

For all the innovations of Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov — yesterday, officials announced that it will distribute tickets to the Easter Egg Roll online — online observers, a sometimes prickly, often exacting, let’s-get-ahead-of-the-curve bunch, are left wanting for more. Take the issue of generating comments. Allowing comments on blogs is a given, nothing more than an online SOP. BarackObama.com and Change.gov allowed comments. But WhiteHouse.gov doesn’t — at least not yet.

To which I left the following comment:

Citizen engagement (in the form of public participation) covers a whole range of activities from merely providing citizens with useful and timely information, to soliciting citizen feedback, to collaborative drafting of policies, and last but not least all the way up to granting citizens certain decision making powers.

First and foremost, this is about process: Where can participation be helpful or required, and to what degree? What promises are being made to the public at each level and phase of public participation and how can the organization leading the engagement effort make sure these promises are consistently being kept? Only then does the question of tools come into play.

Anyone serious about public participation must get these basics right for it to achieve the desired outcomes.

With that in mind, I seriously doubt that simply turning on comments on the WhiteHouse.gov official blog would qualify as meaningful participation. Worse yet, in some cases it might even be counter-productive to quality citizen engagement.

The experiments we saw on Change.gov were definitely a step in the right direction. However, from a public participation standpoint there were many best practices the transition team did not yet manage to adhere to. Moreover, none of the tools that were used on Change.gov (IntenseDebate, Google Moderator, Salesforce Ideas) were really built to scale (much less in a public participation environment), and they all struggled with the massive onslaught of user contributions.

So rather than getting impatient with the new administration, my advice to them would be to address the participation piece with great care and caution and to innovate one step at a time. Identify the most promising use cases and work your way up the ladder of public participation. Definitely continue in the spirit of experimentation that was visible on Change.gov, but make sure you don’t fail too badly too often as the participants’ trust, once broken, will be hard to recover.

For all I know, the current linear models of commenting on the web (be it threaded or non-threaded comments, with or without ratings, advanced sorting etc.) do not scale. If the activity we’ve seen on Change.gov is any indication, the WhiteHouse.gov web team might be well-advised to hold off on any general roll-out and only use comments where they absolutely don’t have any better alternatives.

Participation on the New WhiteHouse.gov Website

Published by Tim on January 20, 2009 in E-participation. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Today at noon Eastern Time, WhiteHouse.gov, the official website of the President of the United States of America, underwent its long-expected relaunch. Those who have been following candidate and president-elect Barack Obama’s web efforts over the last year will surely recognize it.

This announcement sounds exciting:

Participation – President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Given the various e-participation efforts the transition team has already engaged in on Change.gov since November, my bet is we will see a lot of innovation in this area in the months ahead.