Close to my heart this one, not just because it’s to do with my home city, nor because I used to work there, but because the broader issue has been a personal bugbear of mine for ages. Namely, public sector organisations trying to use discussion forums.
Have said it before, but it bears repeating. Discussion forums aren’t just some software you install and watch work. They’re quite complex pieces of software that allow a lot of things to be done (user profiles, message posting, message following, private messaging, all sorts) but above all they’re real communities. They take a long time to build, and people have to want to hang out there in the first place. Ones I’ve set up before have taken a good year of daily work to come to maturity, and even then have fallen away when the work going into them has stopped. They’re living breathing things, just in a virtual world.
So very often, the best way to get discussion going on topics, at least amongst transient users only interested in a single issue for discussion, is to use a blog based approach. It keeps it simple, allows people to use their existing profiles from elsewhere if they wish, and doesn’t require user registration and all the other barriers that can go with discussion forums.
Bristol City Council have been trying with forums for ages now. First there were some Ask Bristol forums that went along with the National Project on Local e-Democracy. They had a very small hardcore of users, but were generally pretty quiet, especially once the project wound down.
The authority then moved across to an approach combining video and discussion called Viewfinder, which again saw pretty limited participation, not least amongst the video upload side of things (users could upload videos as well as add comments). Odd in a way, as Youtube does well for user generated content and (very limited) discussion to go alongside it. Perhaps it was because the site seemed to fall for the fallacy of such things being most popular amongst young people. Either way, discussion just wasn’t really happening in any great volume.
But now, joy of joys, the council has an Ask Bristol Wordpress domain name set up, and on it a simple blog based platform for running online discussion based consultation. Three discussions are up already (nicely displayed from the homepage), and one of them, in less than one week, has had 74 different comments from 51 different names. For comparison, a similar discussion saw 104 comments from 58 different names in 12 weeks on Viewfinder (can’t tell if they’re actually different people posting without access to the IP records and so on of course).
Comments can now be rated too, and the same WordPress based discussion has had 469 ratings assigned to comments made. Again, not sure how many users will have generated that number of ratings, but it’s not too shabby at all in a week.
There’s more that can be done here, it’s still a pretty basic site with many parts that can be worked on. It’s probably running fewer daily comments than the local paper as well, although my gut feeling would be that the council’s WordPress site has got a wider range of people involved, and the quality of discussion is definitely streets ahead.
One caveat though. Up until now, one of the best places in Bristol for online discussion was a blog called ‘The Bristol Blogger‘, written by a chap who knows the local political scene well, and who had built up a regular audience from across the social and political spectrum. It even became the place that local councillors went to discuss issues.
Always unafraid to say what he thought, yesterday the Bristol Blogger covered the story about a campaign to unseat Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy, and today, the blog’s been pulled down for violation of WordPress terms of service. It has to have been reported to WordPress by someone for this to have happened really, and it does seem a large coincidence that this happens after he criticises some campaigning bloggers on the opposite side of the political spectrum.
So, he’s still on Twitter, and has moved his blogging over to the Indymedia site, but there’s a lesson there. If you’re running an online discussion, you’re legally liable for what you post, and for what others post on your site as well. If your site is hosted by a third party, then unless you make sure the terms and conditions are right, the whole thing could disappear off the web without notice.
Free is good, but if you’re looking for security in what you’re doing, there’s often a cost to it. As ever, it’s all a case of balancing what you want to achieve with the resources you have. Necessity is the mother of invention though, and Bristol City Council seems to be inventing pretty well in this field at last. It will be interesting to see how it progresses.
