New Inside Story policy: provide your full name for publication or your comment won't be published

I have had a great deal of respect for the Australian Policy Online (APO), produced by the Australian National University and University of Swinburne.

For several years the site has been a fantastic venue for serious discussions of public policy options, and a very useful source for policy resources and research. The site also, without prompting from me, republished several posts from this blog.

However, after commenting on an article in the Inside Story section of APO late last week, I received an email from the editor pointing out a change in their commenting policy.

Now anyone who submits a comment to Inside Story, as part of APO, must provide, and be prepared to have published, their full name. This new policy is detailed following their full articles using the text as below (highlight is mine):

Send us a comment

We welcome contributions about the issues covered in articles in Inside Story. Well-argued and clearly written comments are more likely to be published, and we’re now asking all contributors to provide their full name for publication. Because all comments are moderated, they will not appear immediately. Your email address is never published or shared. Required fields are marked *.

Now while I appreciate the sentiment of an editor who wishes to avoid spurious comments from people using pseudonyms or commenting anonymously, I found myself uncomfortable with the prospect of a website that forces anyone who comments to publicly reveal their real name in full.

I wrote a piece about this very topic a few months ago for Mumbrella, Toughen up - we need online anonymity, which discussed the various pitfalls involved in forcing people to reveal their real identity.

While I am sure it isn't the intent of this policy, one major risk - particularly relevant to a policy discussion site - is that of excluding certain groups from the conversation.

This includes people who, if their identity is published, may face physical or financial risk, those in witness protection programs, people who fear online attack if their views are taken the wrong way, those involved with policy making who have suggestions or questions, those under the age of 18 and more.

In many policy areas there are people who need to be cautious about revealing their real names publicly for legitimate reasons - whether the topic be health, law and order, immigration, development, gambling, climate change or something else.

While it is the right of each publication or website to define its own moderation and publication policies, the effect of this policy may be to silence people who have valid and important contributions to make, reducing the richness, robustness and usefulness of discussions.

If the primary concerns of Inside Story's editor and publisher are inappropriate comments, defamation, personal attacks and the like, these can be handled through pre-moderation (which they do already), backed up by a public moderation policy and community guidelines (which I cannot find in their site).

Alternatively Inside Story could require people to register and provide their real name in their account details, then publish comments under a name or pseudonym that the user selects. This would ensure they had real names if needed and allows regular contributors to maintain a consistent identity while still providing them with sufficient room to make valuable comments that otherwise they may not feel comfortable doing.

When Inside Story's editor, Peter Browne, (also credited as the Commentary Editor of Australian Policy Online) emailed me last week to ask if I was happy to have my comment published under my full name I thought about it for a few minutes and then decided that while I didn't mind my name being connected to my comments, it was time to take a stand, the damage to the public conversation could be too great. So I said no.

I won't be commenting further on Inside Story or Australian Policy Online while their current policy is in force, nor will I spend as much time reading the site. They remain welcome to republish my blog posts (which are licensed under Creative Commons, so I can't really stop them even if I had wanted to).

This decision may make me slightly poorer, however I believe Inside Story's decision significantly weakens their effectiveness and inclusiveness. The unintended consequence of forcing people to have their full name published alongside their comments is to make all of Australia poorer by stifling public policy discussion, particularly amongst those whose views most need to be heard.

I hope government agencies do not follow the same course on fulll names. It would severely restrict the value of the online channel to collect input on policy consultations and thereby make good policy harder to develop.

For the record, I've included a copy of my email exchange with Peter Browne, Commentary Editor of Australian Policy Online and Editor of Inside Story:

From: Peter Browne

Dear Craig, 

I’m not sure whether you noticed, but we now ask people commenting on articles to provide their full name for publication. Are you happy for your full name to appear with this comment? 

Cheers,

Peter Browne
Editor

From: Craig Thomler

Hi Peter, 

I didn't notice this policy change. I have now looked through your 'about' pages and see no mention of this - nor of your moderation policy. 

I would normally be happy for my full name to appear on my comment, and all my comments online are made on the basis that people can track down and find out who I am if they wanted to. 

However I'm not comfortable with a site that forces people to provide their full name publicly. This requirement prevents many people from commenting - those in witness protection programs, minors (such as 17yr olds), those concerned about stalkers, bullying, identity theft, privacy and so on. 

I see your policy as reducing the potential for open public dialogue without providing any safeguards. A backward step that only damages your reputation. 

It is also impossible to enforce anyway - people can use fake names and email accounts, thereby making your policy useless.

If your concern is around identity, have people register and use a unique username (which may or may not be their full name) - you still have their full name in the background, however they are not exposed publicly. 

If your concern is around inappropriate content, this should be managed through anti-spam and moderation techniques, potentially using the registration process above to allow you to identify and manage persistent offenders (where IP address isn't enough). Your moderation policy should be published so that commenters understand the basis on which they will be assessed. This is simply a matter of respect and setting the context of a discussion - similar approaches are used in face-to-face meetings. 

So in this case, I decline the publication of my comment and will not comment further on APO until your policy is adjusted to not require the publication of full names and is made easily accessible in your site along with your moderation guidelines. 

I will also be publishing this email in my blog to show the perils of requiring full names and linking to my post for Mumbrella: Toughen up - we need online anonymity (http://mumbrella.com.au/toughen-up-we-need-online-anonymity-58441). 

Cheers,
Craig

From: Peter Browne

Dear Craig,

My view is that if writers use their own names then responders should too. The policy is at the bottom of each article, just above the comment field. 

Cheers, Peter

From: Craig Thomler
Hi Peter,

Thanks for pointing this out. I had looked for dedicated 'Community guidelines' 'Comments policy' or 'Moderation policy' pages and looked at your summary articles, where I can still register or log-in to comment, but do not see the same message.

I now have looked at a full article and can see the text. It remains unclear on what basis you moderate.

Here's an example of what I mean by a moderation policy: http://myregion.gov.au/moderation-policy

I appreciate you believe that writers and commenters should have the same rights - although writers are often contributing for different reasons and have different agendas for expressing their views, some are even paid to do so, directly or indirectly (aka not necessarily by you). 

It will certainly be interesting to see how you decide to represent the writer when you receive an article from someone in a witness protection program or a whistleblower, and how you will treat comments. 

Cheers,
Craig

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Should you design websites for the '1%'?

A concern I’ve had for the last ten years is how websites are designed and approved by organisations (both in government and the commercial sector).

In a better-than-average world, when asked to develop a new website or improve an existing one, the web team goes out to discover what users think of the site.

This involves identifying the site’s key audiences and using surveys, focus groups, other research and past feedback to identify good and bad design and usability features. After this the team come up with concepts, tests them on audiences and refines.

 (In a average or worse world the web team isn’t given the time or resourcing to do all this research, so short-cuts the process with their ‘best guess’ design improvements based on feedback and experience. This is far too common but can still deliver improvements.)

When the web team reach final agreement on a few design alternatives, they go to senior management for approval, often with a detailed case explaining all the design decisions.

And this is where the process breaks down.

• “Can you make the website more blue? I want it to be bluer.”
• “I like (pick a random site visited in the last day). Can you redesign it so that our website looks just like that one.” 
• “I don’t use search, I use menus, so can you move the search to the bottom right of the page” 
• “I don’t believe anyone wants three columns in a webpage, please restructure to two columns.” 
• “It’s too hard for me to find anything, can you simply list all the main site categories and pages in the homepage.” 
• “We’d prefer to organise information by our divisions rather than by subject, I’m sure that would be much easier to understand” 
• “We actually wanted the website to look just like the printed brochure” 
• “I like the shirt I am wearing today, make the website the same colour”

Suddenly web teams have to reassess what they are attempting to deliver and who they are delivering for.

Their collective expertise and research is no longer relevant.

The audience of the site is no longer relevant.

They are designing for one person, or a small group of people – decision-makers who are often not the target audience and possible don’t even use the website.

This is a source of great frustration for web teams. They are no longer designing for the 99% of their audience, they are designing for the 1%.

Now what if this process was turned on its head...

Rather than having an executive or Minister approve a website, we instead released several near final designs for A/B testing on online audiences (as organisations like Google, Amazon and Microsoft do), a proven and effective technique, or took the final couple of design alternatives and put them online for the public to vote on and thereby approve.

Of course there would still need to be some level of senior executive involvement in defining the organisation’s overall requirements for the website. The site does have to meet the organisation's goals.

However the actual approval would come from the audience, the 99%, people using the website, the people you wish to communicate with, support, engage or influence.

Radical? Maybe.

Effective. Certainly.

Doable?

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Is it time for government to take Google Plus seriously?

Often in government there's only two social media networks discussed and considered for community engagement and communications, Facebook and Twitter.

MySpace is a distant memory, LinkedIn is used just for resumes and services like FourSquare, Plurk, Ning and others are not well-known.

Also not that well known is Google Plus, and perhaps rightly so - it is very new and still quite small in social media terms, only around 62 million users, although it is predicted to grow to over 293 million by the end of 2012, or so Google believes.

However with the recent integration of Google Plus into Google search, it may be time for governments to consider establishing Google Plus channels alongside Facebook and Twitter, due to the impact on search results.

With Google's search tool holding close to 90% of Australia's search market, it is a more dominant 'publisher' than News Limited - and remains the number one website in Australia. Search engines are also the primary source of traffic for Australian government websites, with an average of over 40% of visitors reaching government sites from a search engine (according to Hitwise) - and therefore around 36% coming direct from Google.

So what has Google done? According to Gizmodo, they've integrated Google Plus into their search product in three ways,

First, it now provides "Personal Results" which include media—photos, blog posts, etc—that have been privately shared with you as well as your own stuff. Any images you've set to share using Picasa will also be displayed. Second, Google Search will now auto-complete queries to people in your circles and will display people who might also be interested in what you're searching for in the search results. Finally, it simplifies the process of finding other Google+ profiles for people or specific interest groups based on your query. So if you search for, say, NASA, it will display Google+ profile pages for NASA and space-related Google+ interest groups in addition to the normal results.

Whether you believe this is a good move, a legal move, or not, it does provide opportunities for organisations to leverage Google Plus to improve their overall presence in Google search by operating a Google Plus account.

It's certainly something to keep an eye on, if not actively consider. 

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Social media drives five times as much traffic to Australian government sites as online news media

A couple of years ago Hitwise, an internet measurement company that uses ISP logs to measure traffic to websites, reported that social media sites had become a larger source of traffic for Australian government websites than online news sites.

This was a seismic change in user behaviour. Suddenly people were more likely to reach a goverment site in Australia from Facebook, Twitter or another social media site than from news.com.au, smh.com.au, abc.net.au or another traditional news source.

Of course it may have also been a simple one month hiccup.

Therefore last week I asked Hitwise to provide a 'two years on' view at their blog to see if there was a trend.

And there was!

Social media referrals to government sites in Australia hadn't only remained above news and media sites, they'd skyrocketed.

Source: Hitwise Experian

As Tim Lovitt posted in Hitwise's blog, in a rather understated manner, Social Media important to Government, between December 2008 and December 2011 social media had doubled it's share while news and media had barely held it's own.

In fact, by December 2011 social media was sending 9.75% of the traffic to government sites while news and media sites were only sending 2.27% of the traffic.

So should agencies invest in producing more media releases or in developing their social media presence?

I know which I would choose.

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IT can drive big productivity gains in government

With the rise in the efficiency dividend and increasingly tight budgets across government, I keep wondering whether there are places where government can make real savings and raise productivity other than simply by cutting costs.

The crunch is often that one must invest money to save money - a position common in business but often a struggle in government, where the focus is so often on grants and programs.

However, having spoken to a fair few frustrated people lately from a range of agencies, there appears to be a significant source of productivity gains - and thereby cost savings - right under the noses of many departments. Their IT systems.

Over the last year more and more of my friends and peers changing departments have cited IT as one of their reasons for wanting to make a move. They all want to be productive, however grappling with slow and aging computers and software or restrictive internet access policies appears to be rising as a concern and even becoming a question to agencies in interviews.

This doesn't surprise me - in fact I noticed when I originally joined the public service that, through no fault of departments, the IT equipment and software wasn't up to the same standard as I'd experienced in the private sector. Over time people adapt and learn to work within the constraints of the system, however what productivity could be unlocked if these constraints were relaxed?

Today I'm aware of agencies where reportedly close to 50% of staff have their own computing devices at their desks. Personal ultra-light laptops, tablets and smartphones have become one route to employee productivity, overcoming desktop IT restrictions.

However since a friend of mine left an agency late last year frustrated that they lost over an hour a day of productive time in struggling with their desktop computer and that they couldn't access the forums and blogs written and frequented by their stakeholders due to access limits, I thought it was worth doing a calculation of the productivity losses that could be attributed to IT constraints.

Let's say that an agency's low bandwidth or older desktop PCs and software cost 2 hours of productive time per employee each week. This may sound like a lot, but if a PC takes 10 minutes to start up each morning you're halfway there already.

For a moderate sized agency of 4,000 staff the lost productive time would be 8,000 hours per week - the equivalent of employing another 200 staff.

At an average wage, including onboarding costs, of $70,000 per year (about $35 per hour), this lost time equates to $280,000. Each week.

Per year the cost of the IT productivity loss would be $14,560,000. Every year. Or, if you prefer, a productivity loss of $3,640 per person per year. Every year.

For an agency experiencing this type of productivity loss there's a few ways to offset it:

1) Reduce wages across the board by $3,640. This would be deeply unpopular.
2) Find efficiencies in other areas (reducing expenses) equivalent to the lost productivity. This may be difficult to do every year.
3) Reduce expenditure on programs and activities affecting citizens. This is politically dangerous.
4) Invest in IT improvements.

So how much would agencies have to invest to reclaim that 2 hours per worker per week? It would vary quite widely as it depends on what is causing the IT productivity drain.

However it is possible to model how much an agency should be willing to invest into improving their IT. This, of course, assumes that agencies can convince their Minister, the Department of Finance and Treasury that they should invest in IT systems - not an easy sell.

Assuming that an IT cycle is around five years (from a top-end PC becoming a low-end PC and corresponding software and network impacts), an agency should spend less than the cumulative five years of productivity loss in order to emerge ahead.

On that basis, a Department should spend less than $18,200 per staff member (the $3,640 productivity loss multipled by five years). Given wage rises, let's round this up to a maximum of $20,000 per staff member.

Therefore a Department with 4,000 staff should spend at most $80 million to rejuvenate its IT and remove the productivity shrinkage. If it spends less than this it is realising a productivity increase.

That's a fair chunk of cash - and far more than most agencies of that size would ever need to spend on IT equipment and software.

In fact, if you bought every staff member a $3,000 PC plus the same amount for support, equipped each staff member with $2,000 of software and $2,000 worth of broadband (coming to $10,000 per staff member), you'd only have spent $40 million for a 4,000 person agency.

Of course with bulk purchases agencies can get much better prices than these. Also I didn't include staff, training and overheads. Hopefully it would balance out.

If it did, that would leave you with $40 million dollars in productivity savings - $8 million per year.

Of course all these figures are 'finger in the air' rough and some of the productivity benefits can be realised quickly and cheaply by simply adjusting internet policies and filters or giving staff who need the best equipment the equipment they need.

However the basic premise holds, that IT isn't just a cost for agencies, it is a valid and important source of productivity gain for agencies. If an agency can equip their staff with the right tools and connectivity for their jobs they will be able to be more productive.

And if an agency can do so at less than the cost of their staff not having the right IT tools then the agency, the government, and Australia, are all ahead.

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