Tell Them What You Think

TTWYT’s development blog and related musings

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.

I’ve been working with Mark Horrell and Steph Gray at DIUS over the last couple of months to improve TellThemWhatYouThink’s support for their consultations.

It has been a splendid experience. DIUS’s consultations are now provided in an XML feed — lovely, structured ATOM goodness with custom elements galore, available to all. DIUS are the first (hopefully of many!) to provide their data in such a useful format, for which they deserve some serious kudos.

Not all has gone perfectly, though. I discovered that the library I was using to parse this feed did not understand custom ATOM elements at all, and as a result, the consultations appearing on the site were pretty garbled. I’ve fixed the problem now, but the consultations I had gathered before today were pretty messed up, so I’ve removed them from the site. The consultations which were currently live were gathered from the ATOM feed — correctly, this time — during the scrape last night and are now all present and correct. Apologies to anyone who got a duplicate email alert or who was inconvenienced by the sudden loss of content!

Thanks very much to Justin Kerr-Stevens for meeting me, to the Open Rights Group for the hook-up, and to Mark & Steph for all their work.