Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times Beth Noveck, the head of the White House Open Government Initiative.
People have been crowing about online communities for decades, but creating a space where people feel comfortable talking to one another is actually a difficult task. Successful online sites have found a way to welcome newcomers, make regulars feel at home and manage the provocations of “trolls,” spammers and misanthropes of all sorts.
The Obama administration is running into some eccentric characters of it own as it tries to build Web sites to get citizens talking about public policy. I wrote in Tuesday’s Times about how an brainstorming session about open government on the White House Web site attracted vocal comments from people calling for exposure of records on U.F.O’s, legalization of marijuana and an investigation into alleged defects in the president’s birth certificate.
The White House is hardly naïve in its foray into the scrum of the Web. Beth Simone Noveck, the New York Law School professor appointed by President Obama as deputy chief technology officer for open government, has studied these systems as much as anyone. She built Peer to Patent, a system that lets experts assist patent examiners with technical information.
Ms. Noveck has some strong views about how to create sites that get the best out of people. She was too diplomatic to disparage anyone participating in the forums she is setting up. But she was clear that over time, with the right structures, the wonks will in fact triumph over the trolls, and policy discussions will thrive.
The most important lesson she draws from previous experiments with online public participation is that sites need to be designed carefully to keep people on topic.
“If you don’t frame the debate, if you don’t ask a good question, you don’t get a good answer to the question,” she said.
Similarly, having a given discussion running for a short period of time also improves the quality of the conversation, she said, and it also doesn’t overwhelm government officials with far to much to read.
“If people are going to be asked to spend the time on contributing, you want to use the participation they give you,” she said. “If you run a dialog over weeks and weeks, you cannot begin to use the inputs you are given.”
While Ms. Noveck is trying to use social networking tools as a model, she said the government must also create a culture that is in some ways more formal than much of the rest of the Web. On sites like Slashdot, she said, the most popular posts are “the funniest or the snarkiest.” But that’s not an appropriate standard when trying to debate policy.
On Peer to Patent, users were told specifically to rate ideas based on how relevant they were to the patent itself. “You weren’t voting on something because of the reputation of the person posting it or because it was funny.”
But even if most participants accept the serious mission of a government site, what to do about those blowhards and showoffs who do show up, not to mention those who simply have a sincere belief in some view (say the existence of U.F.O.’s) not held by the vast majority of other participants?
Ms. Noveck had two answers. First, there are the tools developed on the Internet to let users vote on submissions by others or even flag some comments as inappropriate. Second, she argued that as many more agencies start opening up to the public about specialized topics, the discussions will attract fewer off-topic discussions.
“Even on something like open government policy, it is broad enough and the megaphone is big enough, by virtue of doing it on the White House Web site, that we will attract a lot of chaff with the wheat,” she said.
At the same time, Ms. Noveck hopes that the Internet culture can also change government. Her effort, she suggested, is breaking more than a few taboos. In addition to the public brainstorming session, she ran another online discussion for government officials. This was unusual in that it asked for ideas from people at every level of government, speaking on their own. That’s very different from the usual structure in which feedback on ideas posed by one agency is funneled up through the chain of command at other agencies.
And she argues that government blogging itself is still provocative. The series of posts about open government policy on the blog of the Office of Science and Technology Policy are the first on any White House blog, even in the Obama administration, to be open to comments from users.
“Even something like having a blog with an open discussion about policy is so revolutionary in the way government works,” she said.
It may not sound like a revolution if government officials simply listen more to members of the public, but it’s not really that revolutionary if the opinions are then ignored by the bureaucrats. Ms. Noveck is clear that none of her efforts is meant to create a sort of direct democracy.
“There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have,” she said. But she said that the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account.
“It makes it impossible, I hope, for us to go about our business ignoring the information presented to us.”
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