by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
Community Self-Moderation
One of the challenges of Web 2.0 for the public sector is the fear of being overwhelmed with input, not all of which will be well meant and which in any event will be extremely resource intensive to deal with. A couple of recent examples gave me a sense that we are being to tackle this issue.
1) the Peer to Patent process is based on creating user-teams around a patent application with this self-organising group discussing the application as a group before producing an output for the public sector.
2) the US Office of Science and Technology Policy blog which allows readers to vote for or against comments (as well as flag them for removal). So far the flagging does not really seem to have taken off, but I like the idea of trying to use the community to crowd out inappropriate or just poor quality input.
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Comments
Actually, as of Tuesday night (June 9), 142 comments on the OSTP blog (out of an estimated 536 total submitted during the ongoing phase 2 of the Open Government Dialogue) had been flagged and moved to the "flagged comments" section. That's about 26%. See my post for details: Open Government Dialogue: Phase 2 Metrics Update
posted about 1 year ago
Tks, Tim, and there is lots of fantastic stuff on your blog that I would encourage people to check. In my post I meant voting rather than flagging - that there has been lots of flagging and removing is a little disappointing; what I was hoping was that the voting would have been a bit more active!!
PS If you want to do a post to tell us a bit more about Zilino - what it does and how it is going - that would be great.
posted about 1 year ago
As far as I can tell, most comments that were flagged (and moved aside) during the transparency discussion in phase 2 were all related to the issue of Obama's "missing" birth certificate. They were a considerable distraction, obviously, though the moderators could have done a better job explaining and documenting their interventions.
Happy to talk about Zilino once it's finally presentable. Any day now...
posted about 1 year ago