Stap isi

26 July 2009

Hansard for commenters

A NSW public service manager made this comment on The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC’s blog post about NSW Public Sphere:

Transparency and access are both 2-sided. Somewhere, it would be great to see a discussion about how departments avoid being tied up by citizens who get new, ever more public channels to push their own grievance? Particularly when there is no underlying basis, as sometimes happens. This small percentage of people can consume large amounts of time at current levels of access and transparency. Look at how some are adept at getting issues into the media which is, after all, interested in stories that get attention in preference to injustice and inequity per se. The number of stories in the existing media is disproportionately weighted compared to the total volume of public administration, large parts of which are both efficient and equitable. Esp the more sensationalist media. Its the side to access that we don’t like to talk about much. What happens when these citizens participate?

I like the Guardian’s community features and particularly the way comments made across the site are aggregated and displayed on a page generated for the user.

… just as every guardian.co.uk author gets a contributor page in which their contributions are archived so that their participation can be explored across topics and over time, so should our users. — Meg Pickard, 19 August 2008

There are technical challenges – you’re publishing across multiple platforms (website, satellite sites, proprietary backend systems) and you’d want to consider extending aggregation to collect contributions from constituents’ own spaces.

But if we agree that OpenAustralia is ‘a good thing’ then we should start looking at the other side of the conversation.

Your comments stand as a public record of your participation on the site: think Hansard, for commenters. — Guardian Community FAQ

— b3rn   comments, community, identity, moderation, publicsphere   Jul 26, 10:44 AM   #   Comment

15 November 2008

Lessons learnt from Twitter

After an optimistic call for local government to get on the tweet, here’s some feedback from a month or so in the ‘verse.

Continued...

— b3rn   identity, twitter   Nov 15, 05:41 PM   #   Comment

19 October 2008

Comment everywhere

The Guardian has extended the functionality and improved the information design of its community features.

The site as a whole is exceptional – see the tagging scheme for aggregating related information, the RSS feeds for almost everything and the rich yet composed front page. If you’re building or evaluating content management systems, see how the Guardian’s web platform evolved for a valuable real world case study.

But here I want to focus on their implementation of user comments, profiles and clippings. It’s how I think a Council website should work!

• Comments are not restricted to blog posts. People can respond to multiple information types.
• A person’s contributions across all information types is aggregated and accessible from their user profile.

Continued...

— b3rn   blogging, comments, identity   Oct 19, 07:28 PM   #   Comment

17 October 2008

The case for social media #2: Trust

Demos, the think tank for ‘everyday democracy’, has a report online called State of Trust: How to build better relationships between councils and the public. It looks at what they call the “worryingly low levels of public trust” in politics and democratic institutions.

It’s worth paying attention to Demos because their methodology is good. That is, they talk to lots of real people.

Many of their recommendations for improving that level of trust could include social media components.

Continued...

— b3rn   blogging, identity, the persuader, trust   Oct 17, 10:05 PM   #   Comment