Australian Government Consultation Blog Discussion Paper
The consultation blog is envisaged as a website that lists consultations and allows people to post responses, comments and feedback against each consultation. All Australian Government consultations could be accessible and promoted through this single Australian Government Consultation Blog.
The blog would ensure that people are able to easily find, be informed about and contribute to government consultations. The ease of use and features of the blog would encourage people to seek out and participate in government consultations.
The blog could provide a mechanism for government to announce and publish consultations.
At the end of each consultation the government may publish a report, where appropriate, of the consultation including a summary of the responses received. Accessibility for people with disabilities would be a priority for the blog.
Features of the Australian Government Consultation Blog
A number of possible features are proposed for the consultation blog.
The proposed features are discussed in the following groupings:
- providing information about a consultation;
- responding to a consultation;
- people telling others about the consultation;
- finding a consultation.
The proposed features for the consultation blog are shaped by the challenges discussed in the section, Challenges for the Australian Government Consultation Blog.
Providing information about a consultation
The blog would publish information describing and supporting each consultation. The information could be published as documents and as sound or video recordings.
Each consultation could feature an invitation to people to participate. The invitation could be made by a minister, the head of a government department or by a department.
The invitation would be accessible to all users and could be made using text and other types of rich web media such as sound or video. It could be made easy for others to link to the consultation and embed the invitation on their websites. The government could also place the invitation to participate on other websites as relevant.
Responding to a consultation
People would be able to respond to a consultation either publicly or privately by posting comments and views to an online discussion forum.
The consultation blog would also support people responding to the consultation in other ways including by:
- completing an online survey;
- email; or
- post.
Discussion forum
Each consultation could have an associated discussion forum where people could discuss and respond to the consultation.
People would not be required to register to post comments in the forum. However, people who do register could have access to more features of the forum than people who do not.
People who participate in the forum could be able to request additional information related to the consultation such as the consultation report or to be contacted if clarification of their views is needed. People who do not register could be invited to provide contact details at the time they submit their comments, so that they could also select these options.
Forum administrators could moderate the forum by either preventing or removing posts to the discussion forum if they contain inappropriate content. Draft moderation guidelines are included at Appendix A –Draft consultation blog moderation guidelines.
People who register and perhaps have established a reputation by previous participation in the forum, could post to some consultations without moderation by a forum administrator.
People who register could recommend a consultation to others. The total number of times a consultation is recommended or the most recommended consultations could be displayed to people using the blog to help them find consultations of potential interest to them.
People who register could recommend other people’s posts to the forum, if they support the included points of view. The total number of times a post is recommended or the most recommended posts could be displayed to other people to help them see how interesting or representative of people’s opinions a post may be.
People could notify the forum administrators of inappropriate posts to the discussion forum.
Other ways to respond to a consultation
People could also be able to respond to a consultation via an online survey, by email or in writing and would be able to control whether their comments were made publicly available.
People who do not register to use the forum would be able to respond to consultations using these methods.
Questions to consider
Would you respond to a government online consultation of interest to you, if you were aware of it?
Would you read the views of people published in the public discussion forum?
Would you post your views in a public discussion associated with an online consultation?
What proposed features of the discussion forum do you like or dislike?
Would you participate in a notification system that allowed you to be informed when reports and policies developed as part of the consultation process were made available?
What other features for the discussion forum would you like to see?
Expectations about responding to a government online consultation
People participating in a government online consultation may have a range of expectations about what will happen with their comments and how their comments might be used by the government to influence or develop policies or ideas. The development of some government policies can take a considerable amount of time and additional rounds of consultations with various communities. The final reports and outcomes of a consultation may not be available for sometime.
Questions to consider
Would you expect to see other responses (submitted via email, post, or survey) published on the consultation blog website?
Would you expect to see other responses published in full in a consultation report?
If your response to an online consultation affected the policy outcome would you expect to be recognised?
What other expectations would you have in contributing to a government consultation online?
People telling others
People could ‘tell a friend’ about an interesting consultation, or comment posted to a consultation, by sending an email to their friend.
People could be able to easily embed information about consultations on their own websites. This may include information such as:
- the invitation to participate in the consultation;
- a list of the most recent consultations;
- a list of the most recommended consultations;
- a list of the most recommended posts to a consultation forum; and
- a list of the most recent posts to a consultation forum.
Questions to consider
Would you ‘tell a friend’ about consultations or comments posted to an online consultation forum of interest to you?
Finding a consultation
Each consultation could be classified, labelled or tagged according to the subject areas of the consultation. These labels could be used to assist people finding consultations of interest to them, (for example by searching for all consultations related to health). People could add their own classification, labels or tags to consultations using descriptive words that are meaningful to them. These public labels could also be used to assist other people to find that consultation.
People could be able to find or discover consultations by browsing and/or searching for consultations in a variety of ways, including by:
- most recently published;
- most popular as determined by the amount of visits;
- most highly recommended based on the number of recommendations for the consultation;
- most public responses to the forum;
- subject label;
- public label; and
- publishing government department or agency.
The discovery service could be supported by RSS2 document and email subscriptions which allow people to be notified of consultations in their areas of interest.
Questions to consider
Would you add your own classification, labels or tags to online consultations using descriptive words that are meaningful to you?
Challenges for the Australian Government Consultation Blog
Who is posting and registering to use the consultation blog?
Should registration be required to use the consultation blog? This is a complex question; registration potentially helps ensure that the views expressed in the forum representative; however it is also likely to discourage usage of the consultation blog. When reporting on a consultation it may be useful for the provider of the service managing the consultation to gauge how representative a particular view is. That similar view is posted a number of times, that the response is a representative view number of people and not just of a single person.
Similarly, the interactive features of the forum should support the expression of the community voice. For example, one person should not be able to recommend a single post a 1000 times, thus skewing the community voice in favour of their opinion. Asking people to register to participate in the forum could increase the confidence how representative a view is; however registration could also discourage participation in the forum.
A registration process might not stop people registering more than once, however discourage people from doing so.
Registration to participate in the forum could offer other advantages such as helping self-moderate posts and encourage thoughtful comment.
To encourage the maximum participation in the blog, registration would not be required to post comments to the forum.
To ensure the interactive features of the forum reflect the community voice, registration could be required to use them.
The registration process could ask people to supply an email address, a password and optionally, an alias name, a name and contact details. An email would be sent to the email address to confirm that the person intended to register to use the blog.
If all posts were published anonymously it would protect peoples privacy, however, it could also discourage discussion in the forum as it could be difficult to follow the posts related to a discussion.
People could be able to choose to publish an alias name with their post. The alias name could be the person’s real name or not. If an alias name was used it could offer some protection to a person’s privacy whilst supporting conversations in the forum.
Questions to consider
Would you register to participate in the consultation blog forum?
If you registered, would you provide your real contact information?
Should people be required to register to recommend consultations and posts to the consultation blog forum?
What content would you consider to be inappropriate if posted to the consultation blog forum?
Is the ability to discuss the consultation in the forum a feature you would use?
Moderation of public postings
Moderation is the process of removing or preventing inappropriate public posts to the forum.
Moderation in some form is likely to be necessary as some people may choose to post inappropriate content to the discussion forum. This can have the effect of discouraging others from participating in the forum and also expose the operators of the forum to legal liability.
The moderation of posts to the forum may attract accusations of censorship or bias.
This concern may be lessened if moderation of posts were to be performed according to publicly available guidelines and the moderation process subject to periodic independent review. Draft moderation guidelines are included in Appendix A.
There are many ways in which the forum could be moderated, two options which may be used, depending on the nature of the consultation, are:
Moderation of posts before they are published
Consultation blog administrators could moderate all posts before they are published. This would ensure that people viewing the blog would not be subjected to inappropriate and offensive content.
However, this type of moderation would necessarily result in a delay between when a response is submitted and when it is published. This delay could interfere with the flow of discussion in the forum.
Moderation of some posts after they are published
People who have registered to use the forum could post comments to some consultations without prior moderation. This could be further limited to people who have established a reputation on the forum by prior postings.
People viewing the posts to the forum could notify the blog administrators of inappropriate posts to the forum. Administrators could then remove that content after verifying that the posts did in fact contain inappropriate content.
Administrators could scan the forum and remove inappropriate posts as they become aware of them.
People who register, and who demonstrate their interest by their participation in the forum, could be invited to help moderate the forum.
Technology could be adopted that would scan posts for suspicious or inappropriate content before they are published, and would divert the suspicious posts to an administrator for moderation.
This option has the advantage that posts are published immediately; however people viewing the forum may be exposed to inappropriate content before it is removed by the forum administrators.
Questions to consider
Should posts to the consultation blog discussion forum be moderated before they are published?
Would you accept posts being automatically scanned for malicious or inappropriate content?
Is it important that posts to the discussion forum are published as quickly as possible?
Should people who register, and who demonstrate their interest by their participation in the forum, be invited to help moderate the forum?
Are the moderation guidelines at Appendix A suitable to use to moderate the forum?
Should other ways to moderate the forum be considered?
Privacy
Information about a person, including their response to a consultation, would only be published with their consent. It could be assumed that people posting to the public forum wish their response to be made public, so this may be an ‘opt out’ option, the publishing of other information could be on an ‘opt in’ basis.
Others might choose to track how a person has responded to government online consultations. People could choose to control this risk by electing only to publish their response and to not publish their alias name.
The government, as part of each consultation, could ask people for permission to contact them with additional information related to the consultation. This could be the consultation report, additional consultation information or material that addresses issues raised by people responding to the consultation.
The consultation blog website will record your visit and log the following information for statistical purposes -your server’s address; the name of the top-level domain from which you access the Internet (for example, .gov, .com, .au, .nz etc); the type of browser you use; the date and time you access the site; the pages you have accessed and the documents downloaded and the previous Internet address from which you linked directly to the site. It will not identify users or their browsing activities, except where a law enforcement agency may inspect the service provider’s logs.
Any implementation of the consultation blog will consider the Information Privacy Principles as set out in section 14 of The Privacy Act 1988, (see www.privacy.gov.au/publications/ipps.html [
]). The Information Privacy Principles deal with all stages of the processing of personal information - setting out standards for the collection, use, disclosure, quality and security of personal information.
Questions to consider
Would concerns about your privacy prevent you from using the consultation blog discussion forum?
What other privacy concerns regarding the consultation blog do you have?
Security
The safe keeping of private information provided by people participating in the consultation blog would be necessary to ensure that people have sufficient trust to participate in the online consultation process.
There have been instances in other public forums where people have included malicious content in their postings that attempted to compromise the computers of people reading the posts. The technologies used to support the consultation blog should, as far as is possible, prevent malicious posts from being published. This may require that all posts are scanned for malicious content before they are published.
Questions to consider
Would concerns about security prevent you from using the consultation blog discussion forum?
What other security concerns regarding the consultation blog do you have?
2 An RSS or ‘Rich Site Summary’ or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ document summarises frequently updated content such as blog entries for people who wish to read or subscribe to the RSS document.
Contact for information on this page: consultationblog@finance.gov.au