Sharpe's Opinion

The Open Government Initiative Faces Many of the Same Problems WebCameron Did

New York Times discussion on how President Obama’s ‘Open Government Dialogue’ website is dealing with some of the more ‘interesting‘ posts they receive from users.

The experience so far shows just how hard it is to allow all voices to be heard and still have a coherent discussion. When millions of Internet users are invited to discuss every regulation, how can any real work get done? On the other hand, why bother opening up the government if views that are outside the mainstream — as defined by the usual collection of lobbyists and think tank scholars — are summarily dismissed?

Webcameron’s ‘Open Blog’, which was way ahead of its time when it first began (and moved steadily backwards from there), suffered from regular invasions of quacks and weirdos who at various times seriously compromised the nature of the site. It’ll be interesting to see how (and if) Obama’s techies manage to deal with the problem. They’ve already used some of the same ideas as Webcameron, such as allowing users to vote posts up and down. The idea of users flagging ‘off-topic’ discussions to be moved to a separate part of the site is an interesting one, too.

Hopefully, it won’t end up with them simply deleting the whole site¹.

1. At this point, you must imagine me casting an extremely pointed look in David Cameron’s direction [↩]