gatewatching

It’s been less than a fortnight since the federal government’s Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) - perhaps best known at the moment for its attempt to filter the Internet (boo) and its hardline stance against the corporate thugs at Telstra (yay) - launched its Digital Economy consultation blog. Foreshadowed in a number of earlier publications (in particular, a recommendation to trial blogs in the Australian Government Information Management Office’s report on online consultation with citizens, concluding a thought process begun under the previous mob, and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner’s post on his blog in The Age), the blog was introduced in a guest post by Tanner - and that post alone has generated more than 750 on-site comments to date.

So, as far as community involvement and consultation is concerned, the DBCDE blog can be seen as a success - it constitutes a new venue for the still all-too-rare direct online citizen feedback to a sitting government. That said, a majority of comments on the initial blog posts appeared to deal with those two hot-button issues - Internet filtering and Telstra’s exclusion from the broadband tendering process -, quite regardless of the blog posts’ topics themselves, and that’s a significant problem. If the point of this blog is to engage in a bit of crowdsourcing, harvesting some of the better ideas put forward by commenters on the blog, and in return perhaps also harnessing satisfied participants as virtual marketers for the government’s policies, then so far it’s not yet achieving its purpose.

I’m not blaming the commenters here, incidentally - though perhaps not using the blog in the way its creators had intended it to be used, the blog is as good a space as any to air their obvious grievances, and as I’ve said, precisely because this blog is the first of its kind there are precious little other spaces online where so direct a feedback mechanism to the relevant minister and his staff is available. Perhaps the DBCDE folk should just tackle the issue head-on and post an article about the Internet filter to their blog, so that it can act as a clearinghouse for all those comments, allowing the discussion around other posts to be detached from that topic: “if you want to harangue us for the filter proposal, here’s your chance - just please leave the other posts alone.” Indeed, a post titled “We hear you…” on 12 December promised as much, and it’s probably about time to follow through on that promise (update: today’s post, in turn, says that they’ll tackle the topic in a post on Monday):

In responding to the many comments on the blog to date (over 900 to date), there are a lot of comments related to the issue of ISP filtering. As we indicated in our introductory page, we plan to blog about this issue and respond to many of the issues you’ve already raised in the comments in an upcoming post and welcome anyone who has anything new to add to topic to respond to that thread.

(As an aside, and for what it’s worth, I’m strongly opposed to anything other than a voluntary and/or opt-out Internet filtering model, and the level of opposition against the filtering plan shows a clear need to reconsider the proposed approach. Senator Conroy shouldn’t take too much comfort from a recent poll showing that a slim majority of all Australians does support Internet filtering - of course people are in favour of ‘protecting children from inappropriate material’ when Essential Research asks it that way, but it’s the how that’s highly questionable here. And ultimately, of course, any attempt to filter the Internet will never be any more than a nuisance, and misses by a wide mark those it aims to target, as Mark Pesce points out. But I digress.)

Still, though, even if it’s possible to quarantine all the discussion about the Internet filter (and the trouble with Telstra) into posts of its own, the underlying problem for the DBCDE blog is its inherent exposure as a high-profile government blog (even now, without particularly massive promotion for the blog). We’re dealing with an age-old problem here (well, at least in Internet time), perhaps best articulated by Clay Shirky in 2002:

communities have strong upper limits on size, while audiences can grow arbitrarily large. Put another way, the larger a group held together by communication grows, the more it must become like an audience — largely disconnected and held together by communication traveling from center to edge — because increasing the number of people in a group weakens communal connection.

By attracting a sizeable number of commenters (and presumably an even larger number of lurkers) right off the bat - by virtue of its being an official government blog - the DBCDE blog never had a chance to move through the community phase in which those social structures establish themselves that are so crucial to the effective functioning of communities as communities. The same is true to some extent for the ‘blogs’ of many news Websites, which for the most part are still merely print-style opinion columns with blog-style comments functions plugged into them - and in fact I’m only refraining from similarly calling the DBCDE site a ‘blog’ in quotation marks because for the moment I’m willing to believe that the DBCDE bloggers are genuinely interested in engaging with their readers (in contrast to, say, a Paul Kelly or Janet Albrechtsen…).

So, quite apart from the filter controversy, what’s (necessarily) missing and what’s thus making the DBCDE blog a somewhat unwieldy beast at this point is a community with a sense of purpose and direction. An established community can be relied upon to do a good deal of self-policing - ensuring that comments remain on-topic, that participants exercise a modicum of civility, and that newcomers are effectively socialised into the established environment. But such communities are best grown organically, from a relatively small group of initial participants, as is evident in Australia’s best-known political blogs; while - pace Shirky - with the right technological support structures in place some communities are able to grow very large (as I described in the book which gave this blog its name, a site like Slashdot has managed to attract well over half a million users to its community spaces), it is very difficult indeed to retro-fit this sense of community into an existing site, even one as young as the DBCDE blog. (One question arising from this is whether future government blogs could have an even more phased roll-out.)

So what’s the way forward for the DBCDE blog, then? In the first place, I don’t want to be too pessimistic here - it’s quite possible that the initial wave of comments on the filter will wash through the system fairly soon, and that subsequent posts will allow for much more focussed and sensible discussion between commenters and Department staff. Even so, though, no doubt there’ll be other hot-button issues in the future that will generate substantial discussion, and to be better prepared for this in the future, I see two possibilities here.

One is to learn from the experience of sites like Slashdot, and to introduce more of the advanced community self-management and (ironically in this context) self-filtering functionality that exists there. This could involve peer-rating mechanisms allowing the community itself to highlight the best and hide the worst of what its commenters are saying, and perhaps even a contributor karma system to reward consistently insightful and constructive contributors. Over time, this will help the community develop a sense of itself, and will curb instances of blind anti-government vitriol; additionally, it may also point DBCDE staff towards insightful voices in the community to be recruited for focus groups and other citizen consultation processes beyond the blog itself.

My other suggestion is a more radical solution (and may conflict with government policies about dealing with external sites): there already are a number of very well established Australian online communities dealing with a number of topics that fall within the purview of the Department - so, rather than (or in addition to) inviting interested citizens to come and give feedback through the DBCDE blog, why not go to them? Why not explore the views of the Australian Internet user community regarding the planned National Broadband Network, for example, by going to Whirlpool, the country’s pre-eminent Website for broadband discussion and advice? Sure, Whirlpool’s membership is hardly a representative sample of the Australian population, but then neither is the commenter community on the DBCDE blog, and the Whirlpool community is at least as much a self-selecting group of interested stakeholders as is the DBCDE blog readership. Crowdsourcing can happen just as well by going out to meet the crowd where it’s already gathered as it can by building a space where crowds may come to gather…

At any rate, it’s early days yet for the DBCDE blog, and for the government’s wider strategy for engaging with the online community. One can only hope that the righteous frustration currently being expressed at some of the Department’s recent policy proposals doesn’t in turn frustrate these (ultimately very welcome) attempts to develop new approaches to citizen consultation. It’s probably worth remembering: as untried as government consultation blogs are at the federal level in Australia, so too are citizens unused to being able to engage with their government in this way. They may be new at it, but so are we - and both sides still have a lot to learn about the other.

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