The newly-announced We The People e-petition initiative by the White House has been getting a lot of coverage (for example, see here, here, here, here, here).

I spent Saturday reading through comment threads on various sites to look for additional feedback, criticisms and concerns related to the public participation process, some of which I’m listing below. Try if you can spot any themes.

1. Youtube: A Big Change Coming to WhiteHouse.Gov

• Will they actually listen, or is this something to distract people?
• This could be totally amazing or totally useless, depending on how the petitions work and if anything is done because of the most popular ones.
• Sounds like a good idea to give people another way to try to influence govt besides rants, blogs, complaining letters, etc. Will attention really be paid to a good idea coming from outside DC?
• Is this just a mechanism by which tax dollars will be used to pay for the collection of information about “likely voters” in preparation for the 2012 campaign?
• The biggest hole in this idea is that because it’s based online, completely public, foreigners can create and sign petitions. This negates the opinions of the true citizens of this country whose government’s policies affects the greatest.
• … and even if they redirect IP’s, it won’t stop those who are not citizens of the US inside of this country who are using the computers to get access to the site. (illegal immigrants for instance).
• A new way to voice your concerns or a new way for the govt. to data mine? [...]
• [...] We found yet another way to spend your money on useless programs. [...]
• trying to gain respect back from the american people eh… AIN’T GONNA WORK!!!!
• ….so Obama is so scared of what the unfiltered (in person) American people will say! He has created an online filter system. Who monitors this? Van Jones?The whole thing will be a liberal lie. Producing Liberal mcfacts.

2. Hotair: White House introduces new online petition website for some reason

The post itself gives this assessment:

If, as I suspect, the site is really just a ploy for his campaign so that they can direct Obama donors there and crank out talking-point petitions for him about how “the people” demand tax hikes on the rich or whatever, then it’s very much true to form. Petitions are supposed to be grassroots populist measures aimed at getting the government to act; if this is a campaign device then it’s really the opposite, a way for the head of government to get his supporters to act on his behalf so that he can get reelected. In fact, tea-party groups are already looking into this as a type of lobbying venture paid for with taxpayer money. I doubt it’s illegal, but it tells you a lot about how far the 2008 magic has faded that Captain Charisma might now be relying on Internet petitions to try to influence Congress.

A few comments head in the same general direction:

• Depending on whether they like the petition or not, you end up on one of two lists: “donors” or “enemies”.
• Or, it could be an email harvesting platform… it needs to be looked out how the information submitted is used… will his campaign cross reference email addresses with his campaign?
• Exactly, how will the email addresses who petition on something like Fast and Furious be used? Just look at what is happened to Gibson Guitars… I would be afraid to petition against Obama with my real email address…
• Time to collect email addresses for the 2012 campaign I guess.
• This is another example of Obama trying to make Congress seem irrelevant to the masses.
• [...] if you go through the site and to the email link page you’ll see there is no privacy policy (they ask for your email address & zip code). Looks like another DNC data-mining operation….
• [...] Astroblogging on the taxpayers’ dime.
• I always thought the government organized things called elections to see what the people wanted. So if requiring an ID disenfranchises poor citizens, what does needed a computer and an internet connection do?
• This has nothing to do with “petitions”. This is social media networking/marketing gathering as many emails and names as possible and using those lists for fund raising. Pretty obvious just like those GOP “surveys” I chuck in the trash every other week.

3. Politico: White House: Send us your petitions

The article quotes a number of people in the government, politics & technology space:

• Joe Newman (a spokesman for the Project On Government Oversight): “Encouraging citizens’ participation is never a bad thing, [b]ut part of me is very skeptical that they’ll be able to handle the number of petitions that come in and give it any sort of thorough review.”
• Patrice McDermott (director Open The Government): “The other test is that range of issues [...] Is it going to be only issues that are only of political benefit to the White House, or — who designs that, and how’s it going to be limited, and will it change over time?”
• Patrick Ruffini (a partner at the Republican-leaning digital media firm Engage): “It’s just more people that they can communicate with [...] It’s the government equivalent of, ‘you may win an iPad,’”
• Kirsten Kukowski (RNC spokeswoman): “[...] more campaign tactics coming out from the official White House”

Again, a few comments:

• [...] Who in the right mind would ever believe for a “NewYork Second” that this Administration would pay attention to anything that any non Ivy League educated American would put forward to them. [...]
• [...] Pure gimmick. For one, they are not going to “consider” ANYTHING that they would rather avoid for political reasons [...] Besides, these “petitions” are so easy to fake and rig”. [...]
• You can bet your bottom dollar that this is just a political gimmick to make the public feel better. So, it’s my opinion, that you would be wasting time in participating.
• A symbolic gesture at best, even if a few coherent petitions with enough genuine signatures are selected for “action”.

* * *

Despite the fact that many of these comments are buried in a sea of noise (follow the links to Youtube or Hotair to appreciate first-hand the quality and tone of the conversation), I believe that most of the concerns expressed are very valid indeed and that they deserve to be addressed by the White House, ideally in the same venues where they’ve been raised.

In public participation, so much depends on trust. Just looking over this small and non-representative sample of comments, it’s obvious that the White House lacks trust among many citizens and potential participants. In order to increase trust, difficult as that may seem, the White House is well-advised to not let these comments go unchallenged or unanswered.

There are a number of recurring themes (with regard to impact, privacy, ethics etc.), so answers to those comments should probably be added to the official FAQ I suggested on Friday.

As was hinted at late Wednesday night, the White House yesterday announced a significant new Open Government initiative: online petitions!

From the official announcement:

Something exciting is coming to WhiteHouse.gov. It’s called We the People and it will significantly change how the public — you! — engage with the White House online.

Our Constitution guarantees your right to petition our government. Now, with We the People, we’re offering a new way to submit an online petition on a range of issues — and get an official response.

We’re announcing We the People before it’s live to give folks time to think about what petitions they want to create, and how they are going to build the support to get a response.

According to one definition, online or e-petitions can be considered a type of e-consultation whose purpose is “to affect formal (institutional) political and decision making processes.” Hence, public participation best practices apply to e-petitions just as well.

Public participation projects can fail for many reasons, but what it often boils down to from the participants’ point of view is a mismatch between expected and actual impact. One best practice, then, is for the convener to ensure that the participants fully understand the scope, process and desired outcomes of the project or initiative.

While the We the People website provides a general overview and answers a few basic questions, it doesn’t go into too much detail. The White House has encouraged the public to ask questions and give feedback. Again from the announcement:

As we move forward, your feedback about We the People will be invaluable, and there are a few ways you can share it. Numerous pages on WhiteHouse.gov, including the We the People section, feature a feedback form. In addition, you can use the twitter hashtag #WHWeb to give the White House digital team advice and feedback. I’ll also try to answer questions when I have time today — you can pose them to @macon44.

Since the announcement, a broad range of questions have been raised (anything from the White House’s motivation and goals, to the rules of engagement, to the technology, to privacy aspects etc). Earlier today, the White House gave a few more answers on their blog, and I strongly suggest that these be consolidated into one FAQ as part of the We The People website, along with other answers provided via other channels.

Here are a few additional points I’d like the White House to address prior to the official launch:

• According to the announcement, petitions can call for action by the federal government “on a range of issues”. That seems to imply that issues outside of this range may be off-limits. What, if any, guidelines will the White House provide to ensure participants know upfront which issues they can or cannot address via this tool?
• What are the ground rules that will govern the petition process? For example, will certain kinds of offensive or abusive behavior or language be deemed unacceptable?
• How will these ground rules be enforced? For example, does the White House reserve the right to moderate or delete content, ban users etc.?
• What will happen to petitions that fail to reach the required minimum number of votes within the 30-day period?
• Once a petition has been fully processed (reviewed and answered), how will participants be notified?
• How does the White House plan to measure the quality and effectiveness of this process? For example, will there be feedback mechanisms that allow participants to indicate wether they are satisfied with the responses?

Please leave a comment if you can think of other questions related to the public participation aspects of this initiative.

I look forward to the launch of the site. It will be interesting to watch how it compares to previous experiments in this area in other countries, namely Germany and the United Kingdom.

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/

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

(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/

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

(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.

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.

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.