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December 22, 2008
Stephen Conroy put his name to a curiously disconnected entry at the Digital Economy Blog today. The entries over the past few days suggest that the blog is being written by a group of people with different objectives and different understandings about what a blog is. Or someone who mostly has their mind on other things.
Friday came an entry headed Developing Australia's Digital Skills which started with a gesture at engagement:
Yes, we know you want to talk about filtering and we will be posting about it on Monday...in the meantime, we wanted to talk about digital skills
Commenters took a dim view of Sunday's post, which appears to be a recycled media release.
Then today's post, the much anticipated chance to discuss mandatory filtering, does a series of odd things.
For one thing, it was posted three days before Christmas when there are few people around to respond, which queers the claim that "the Government is experimenting with a new form of consultation and a new level of openness in this medium." The header, Civil and Confident Society Online won't be attracting a lot of people wanting to talk about mandatory filtering either.
It's framed as part of an effort to increase public and business confidence in the internet in the interests of supporting a digital economy, as if they're trying to turn it into something like a sanitised mall experience. It would be difficult to design a less grounded understanding of reality. eBay's doing just fine amid the anarchy and child porn. Did they even ask airlines and travel agents how well online purchases are going?
Conroy says he's following discussions at Whirlpool, GetUp and the nocleanfeed Twitterverse, which must be keeping him up into the wee small hours. Whirlpool's up to its 18th installment with no signs of slowing down. Most Whirlpoolians appear to have given up on Conroy's blog, which isn't surprising. Is there really any point when "The Government takes the issue of cyber-safety extremely seriously and welcomes public debate about how we can achieve our goal of protecting children from harmful internet content" pretty much sums up where this is going.
Ditto for Conroy's responses to comments. Commenter Klaw81 responded to a bunch of the responses with some of the more obvious objections, but if the attitude of the whole thing is any indication, it's a waste of pixels.
If it gets through the Senate, I hope there's a bunch of much smarter people than me feverishly working away at some subversive software.
But wait, there's more:
Loads more comments have been posted, and more are still coming through. Today we get a so long and thanks for all the fish message with a Tannerish flavour:
All in all, we appreciate everyone who took time to engage with this first attempt at blogging by the Australian Government and we will reflect in the new year on the many lessons we have learned, in the hope that we can ensure that future online engagement efforts are more productive for everyone. Something that we have realised is that there are no established community norms about how people respond online to government and a lot of the nuances about how government functions are not transparent. This possibly led to some frustration in how we set up the blog, how we responded and what action is taken in response to the many comments we received. Hopefully, when the Government blogs again, we can work together in building up norms and improving the transparency.
Individual discussion spaces have unique community norms. It's good to see that somebody realises that and that a government blog, like any other, needs to establish its own. Norms take time to develop.
Kim over at LP links to Axel Bruns' thoughts at Gatewatching (as I should have done, Axel being an authority and all).
By attracting a sizeable number of commenters (and presumably an even larger number of lurkers) right off the bat - by virtue of its being an official government blog - the DBCDE blog never had a chance to move through the community phase in which those social structures establish themselves that are so crucial to the effective functioning of communities as communities.
So, quite apart from the filter controversy, what’s (necessarily) missing and what’s thus making the DBCDE blog a somewhat unwieldy beast at this point is a community with a sense of purpose and direction. An established community can be relied upon to do a good deal of self-policing - ensuring that comments remain on-topic, that participants exercise a modicum of civility, and that newcomers are effectively socialised into the established environment. But such communities are best grown organically, from a relatively small group of initial participants, as is evident in Australia’s best-known political blogs
While all of that is true, there's always the chance that you'll end up accidentally fostering an Andrew Bolt type community. Trevor Cook calls the ABC's Unleashed a ghetto, which is a fair call most of the time.
Still, there's no denying the glog would have stood a much better chance at establishing nice community vibes if it hadn't been launched with the filtering business hanging over its head. That was always begging for bedlam. To make matters worse on that score, there's more bad news for Conroy in the media today. We can also anticipate a bit more of this sort of thing from regional areas struggling with dial-up.
Interesting timing, shutting down the glog the day live trials start. What was that about transparency again?
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I hope you all have have a very Merry Christmas and are blessed with wonderous opinions in the coming year.
Cheers