I was asked to speak because in a previous life I spent four years running a hyperlocal community weblog for my Tremont neighborhood. I spent around a half hour or so giving an overview of the possibilities and answering quite a few questions about implementation. I was asked to put together a quick start guide with some links to the options I was talking about.

I’ve finally finished a first draft of the the guide, which I’ve called Waterwings: A Quick Start to Online Communities. This guide is deliberately targeted to folks who don’t have a strong technical background, and is meant more to help get them online doing anything at all than teach them how to be an award-winning A-list blogger.

It is deliberately simple and sparse. I don’t want to overwhelm these people with facts, figures and options. I’d rather help them get their feet wet online in the first place, and they can learn to do the butterfly or backstroke later.

I recognize, however, that my guide is still quite rough around the edges, and that I might be missing some good sources for these folks to utilize. I’ve deliberately left out social media sources like Twitter and Facebook, because I feel they might be initially too intimidating for users to adequately direct and form an online community. So please, if you disagree with anything in the guide, think I’ve left out something important, or have a question, comment, or point to make about it, let me know.

The guide is available on this page, or as a PDF.

A key ‘graph about the systemic challenge of this endeavor:

For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.

Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.

The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? – Evan Ratliff – 19 January 2009

The article was put together before Obama’s swearing-in, so it is interesting to see how things have played out in the few months since then. For the most part, everything seems to be consistent. The new design of whitehouse.gov and new sites like recovery.gov remain consistent with change.gov and the Obama campaign website. At the same time they suffer from the same content issues that I noted in my review of change.gov, namely, lack of real content, and ease of access to that content.

That’s a big caveat, but these new sites are still light-years better than the other 24-thousand federal government sites. Since we’re so comfortable with the rapid pace of the Internet communication, it is easy for web geeks like me to expect instantaneous improvement, but patience is definitely necessary with our expectations of turning Uncle Sam into Uncle Sam 2.0.

• Should E-Government Design for Citizen Participation? Stealth Democracy and Deliberation [pdf]
• Online Communication and Democratic Citizenship [doc]

I’ll be writing about the former of the two in this post.

The Issue

While the papers are written in the verbose academic vernacular, Muhlberger’s thoughts on the psychology of citizen-involvement offer some interesting ways to think about future design implementations for government websites. The basic thesis Muhlberger pushes against is the concept of stealth government which he sums up in the introduction (emphasis mine):

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse [9] find that 93.5% of a representative survey sample of the American public agree with one or more of three statements describing what they call “stealth democracy” beliefs. These are statements that express intense impatience with debate and compromise among political leaders and a desire to have government run by successful business leaders or unelected independent experts.

In addition, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse shape their various findings into a book-length argument against prescriptions to engage the public more deeply in politics, particularly prescriptions for deliberative involvement. Their “stealth democracy” thesis holds that much of the public is uninterested in politics, dislikes conflict, and believes that there is wide consensus on political goals. Because the public believes there is wide consensus, it does not see the point of disagreement and conflict in politics. The authors maintain that more deeply involving such a public in political life is a prescription for frustration, distrust, and delegitimization of the political system.

Peter Muhlberger, Should E-Government Design for Citizen Participation? Stealth Democracy and Deliberation [pdf]

Muhlberger’s counter-thesis (emphasis mine):

This paper proposes a different interpretation of the finding that Americans embrace stealth democracy beliefs. It stipulates that these beliefs are rooted in a “parochial citizen worldview” involving a set of socially problematic views and orientations and that this syndrome can be ameliorated by involving people in online political deliberation. The views and orientations include false consensus beliefs, fear of conflict, strong pro-authority attitudes, incapacity for social perspective taking, and dispositions to cognitive lethargy.

Peter Muhlberger, Should E-Government Design for Citizen Participation? Stealth Democracy and Deliberation [pdf]

So it appears that Muhlberger, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse all agree that citizens essentially don’t have what it takes to be involved in the government processes. Their difference: Hibbing and Theiss-Morse want to keep citizens from having anything to do with government and Muhlberger wants to educate and allow these citizens to engage in meaningful ways with government processes; to change their orientation.

The Solution

At first I thought that Muhlberger’s solution was on the order of “throw some freeware bulletin boards up and see what happens”, but after corresponding with him, he pointed me to his current project, Deliberative E-Rulemaking Decision Facilitation Project (DEER). His current work is building on the papers linked above and is aimed at developing software that will help citizens have meaningful and informed online discussions for the public comment periods required for most rule-making legislative activities. The software will also produce summaries of the key points and areas of interest for law-makers to review. The goal is to alter the:

…current rulemaking comment process [which] faces a number of social and organizational problems including poorly informed and distrustful participants, lack of dialog among participants that could sharpen their reasoning, and problems of scale such as the large number of comments generated. Researchers believe that most rulemaking comments are low in quality or redundant?a [sic] product of form letters used by public interest groups.

Deliberative E-Rulemaking Decision Facilitation Project (DEER)

If this ends up becoming a valuable tool, it could be used as a bridge between bureaucracy and citizenship in many more areas than rule-making.