I meant to write about this earlier, and the blogosphere has punished me for my tardiness — Simon beat me to it.
In any event: DIUS have launched an online consultation exercise on the Science and Innovation paper that they published in March. It looks great, and much like MyLifeMyId, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of results it produces. It is inspired by the Open Rights Group’s platform for collaborating on consultation responses, which features similar paragraph-level commenting. Apparently, this functionality is available as a plugin.
I’m particularly interested in the outcome of this experiment because I’ve wondered, since seeing ORG’s version, how well paragraph level commenting works as a discussion medium. It’s extremely granular, which is fine if certain paragraphs attract a lot of attention and thus spawn discussion, but doesn’t work so well if the feedback is more diffuse.
It is rather similar to an example of bad practice in online fora: a new site seeking to develop a community will often deploy forum software. A classic mistake is to make umpteen fora, one for each topic that could possibly want to be discussed, or, more commonly, for each topic the administrators would like to be discussed. A new user, upon encountering pages of mostly empty fora, rapidly gains the impression that there is no activity, and no point in staying around. A rather better strategy in this situation is to make very few fora, to funnel new users into a smaller number of places and give the impression of greater activity. New fora can be added later, as demand dictates.
I don’t know whether this problem will apply to these kinds of exercises. It will be interesting to see.
The Home Office have launched a new website — MyLifeMyID — to solicit the views of young people on their ID cards scheme.
I make no secret of the fact that I think the ID cards scheme is an utterly inept folly, and neither, it would seem, do the participants on MyLifeMyID. There has been a flurry of activity since the site went live, almost all of it expressing the view that ID cards are bad, and that the respondents don’t want them.
This kind of open-ended consultation is great. It should be happening a lot more than it is. Its major benefit is its freeform nature: although the discussion may be seeded by the team running the consultation, the frame of the debate is (hopefully) not predefined — although there have been some complaints about over-zealous moderation.
There is, of course, a political problem for the Government in this kind of exercise. What will they do when their pet database is shot down in flames by informed people, whose views they have sought? And in a public medium, to boot? Undoubtedly they will spin a line about needing to educate the public, but really, anyone who decides to visit the website after the fact will see the real story for themselves. I wonder how long it will last, after the exercise is over. We shall see.
On a technical point, the site appears to be rather well put together. The design is clean and easy, the discussion is visible without registering, and you can get RSS feeds for all the posts on the forum. I’m not sure if it’s bespoke or based on some other software — does anyone know? In any event, it seems to be a bought-in solution. It’ll be interesting to see if this kind of process delivers useful results.
The Office of Public Sector Information has launched its Unlocking Service.
This is a site that allows you to submit a request for information held by a public authority to be made available for reuse by the public.
If you are aware of some public information that should be released to the baying throng, do go and post a request!
