Please read the article about the Police Act Review wiki project (course notes, week 8). Based on this case, or another example, discuss two challenges of using a wiki for public consultation. In your discussion, consider who these benefits / challenges relate to (the government, the public, a subset of the public, other stakeholders, etc?).
Notes:
- There is a good article on the NZ government's emerging model of online engagement here.
- You can read an article about the Police Wiki project here.
- It is not possible to access the Police Act Review Wiki as it was only available for a few weeks.
Further Notes:
- If you are experiencing problems with posting, please send me an email with the contents of your post as soon as you experience the problem. It is much better to let me know immediately rather than waiting until you're able to get the post to go through, which may be after the deadline. As a side note, it is a good idea to compose your response in a text editing program to paste in to the blogger site in case you experience login issues that result in you loosing your post. Other suggestions include using Google's Chrome browser for your posting.
- If you find that you have successfully posted but your response is not showing up, don't worry. It may have simply gotten stuck in the spam queue. I try to check the spam queue once a day over the weekend and several times on Monday, but if you find that it's been a while and you still don't see your post, feel free to drop me an email and I will check into it, but make sure to refer back to the note above.
I agree with Philip’s comment, however in terms of the Police Act Review wiki project, I believe that the two key challenges of using a wiki for public consultation are: regular comment moderation and the task of information management. Both these challenges relate to the public and the review team.
ReplyDeleteOne of the challenges in maintaining the Police Wiki is moderating any abusive or offensive comments. As Philip had mentioned, there was no registration process for participation, contributors were able to participate anonymously. This had resulted in an increase in offensive and abusive comments therefore the review team needed to continuously moderate any comments. The review team were required to moderate comments which meant removing any comments that were classified as offensive or abusive. A set of moderation rules had been developed and published on the wiki, however it did stop abusive feedback. It’s more difficult for the moderators to track down the people who post abusive comments as there is no account registration process involved. The police wiki had gained a lot of media attention with 5000 visitors in the first week. The review team found it challenging to moderate comments on a regular basis as the wiki was accessible 24/7, it had become a full time job for four members. In addition, the review team were also constrained by a budget.
Another challenge in which the review team must overcome involves the process of sorting and managing 30,000 wiki entries. This time consuming process involves printing out all the wiki entries, applying subject codes to each entry, then scanning and storing them in the electronic repository. It is clear that this process of managing information is inefficient and costly to the review team, as mentioned earlier, they have a limited budget. This challenge also relates to the task of determining which entries are of use to the parliamentary submission and which entries are invaluable.
I agree with Philip’s comment about how the Wiki ignores a potently large section of the population with ignoring people with no access to computers such as the elderly and poor. To build on that I also believe it ignores those who are illiterate which poses a big challenge as they are also tax payers and may have an opinion on the issue, but are unable to use the Wiki.
ReplyDeleteAnother challenge that is can see for the review team in moderating the Wiki could be in keeping it formal. As Wiki’s are often informal this could create a problem for the review team because they may become off topic and become general discussions. I agree with Dharmistha’s comment about the challenge in sorting all of the 30,000 wiki entries as it is a vast amount to have to sort through. This means the review team would be spending a lot of time sorting through them all.
The use of the Wiki is a good way for the review team to reach more of the public and gain input from people who otherwise would have not responded if not for the Wiki. The vast numbers of the submissions received on the Wiki shows that there are benefits to both the public and the government from having the Wiki. The ease of use of the Wiki is another bonus for submitters as they can easily go online 24/7 and make a post, they do not have to write it out and then place it in a post box. As more and more of the population are growing up using technology it seems sensible that their start to be more integration of technology into these sorts of things as it as an effective way to reach a bigger range of people.
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ReplyDeleteBasically in terms of challenged i think the 2 posts are spot on. The biggest 2 for me being comment filtering, but another for the site being a wiki itself.
ReplyDeleteWikis aren't exactly the most easiest things to use and for the average user especially older generations could find it hard to understand. They may not understand that their information once posted is completely public for anyones view and may give out personal details that in turn could be damaging.
What started out as using a free medium actually ended up costing the government to hire four people to run it. I think a fully implemented website would be better suited than a wiki.
I understand that some anonymity is good here but a way it could be improved is if they allowed a public and private option. So that some posts could be hidden and only sent directly to the moderator.
I agree with the above comments. Some challenges of using a wiki for public consultation include privacy and managing comments. There is no registration process for using the wiki to post comments so each comment is anonymous. This benefits the public and any other person or group who post comments. The problem here is for the police because they cannot track who posts comments. I agree with Stefan that a way to combat this problem/challenge could be to have a registration process before comments can be posted and the privacy can be managed by having a private and public option which will allow some post to be hidden.
ReplyDeleteThis solution will also help with the next challenge which is managing comments. Anyone can post comments nationally and internationally. There are problems with people or groups posting comments that are offensive. Without a registration process, comments cannot be linked to anyone. The only thing they can do is filter through the comments and delete offensive ones. This is a time consuming process as mentioned in an earlier post and costly.
Discuss two challenges of using a wiki for public consultation. In your discussion, consider whom these benefits / challenges relate to (the government, the public, a subset of the public, other stakeholders, etc?).
ReplyDeleteMost of the challenges have already been mentioned above. The two biggest challenges for me will have to that people are able submit a formal submission without having the register and the review team decided to use wiki.
To submit a formal submission without having to register is both beneficial and also challenging because in the case it was advise not to mention your personal details which prevents hackers from finding out such information but it does cause problems such as flooding and spam. There are people who don’t take it seriously and will submit random/unrelated topics. As mentioned in the case, there are only four people who are monitoring the wiki and with such spam coming it, it gives the workers more work and becomes a full time job.
Using wiki, users can access wiki more easily but as mentioned from all other post, not everyone has access to a computer. But by using wiki, it has gained a bigger audience and it led to input from people coming up with out-of-the-box thinking.
The comments made by Philip and Dharmistha basically cover the major challenges of using a wiki for public consultation.
ReplyDeleteThe issues of privacy and information management. A wiki can be easily affected by this type of hijacking, anonymity is there to protect users and allowing them an opportunity to voice their opinions without being criticized. The flip-side of the privacy issues could lead to greater consequences for the government or organization that has implemented the wiki, especially in the case of the Police Act Review wiki.
The task of information management when using a wiki as a public consultation tool needs to be considered very carefully. In the case of the Police Act Review wiki the way the managed information resulted in a transcript of 30000 wiki entries. This was the result after all the rules listed by the Police Act review team were implemented, removing inappropriate comments. When using a wiki for public consultation the reviews or moderators must take into account the amount of wiki entries that will not relate to the subject or will be inappropriate. Another information management issue with public wikis is that if the wikis have to be moderated and if there is a large number of entries it will go from a free source of information to a very costly one, as mentioned by Stefan.
When using a wiki for public consultation these issues need to be taken into account as they are important and need to be managed properly.
Most of the points have been well covered above.Just to reiterate on the main 2. The first challenge is manage active user participation. There is no registration process so people are able to participate anonymously. Anonymity is good to protect the participant privacy details however many can take advantage of the anonymity as was displayed in the case through abusive and offensive participation. This was dealt with through moderation rules and guidelines however this lead to the second major challenge of moderation and wiki management. The 24/7 accessibility and widespread publicity of the wiki drew a lot of interest. As mentioned by Livett and Daniel, Managing the issue required more personal who would have to monitor and moderate wiki entries. Organizing and moderating data is a challenge, with over 30,000 wiki entries. Information would have to be filtered and organized in terms of accuracy and relevance. Not all entries would apply or be valuable to the parliamentary submission. Furthermore both these challenges prove to be budgetary challenges. The review team will have to filter, print applicable entries, apply codes, scan and store them into the system. A process that is both human resource and monetary constraining.
ReplyDeleteUsing a wiki was an advantage for the government (Police Ministry) as a means to find out the public thoughts on the Police Act Review. Furthermore was beneficial to the public as a free-form method to voicing their opinions. The wiki did provide a complementary process for capturing views about the Police Act Review and for part of the parliamentary submission however the nature of the system required a lot of maintenance to negate the draw-backs of using a wiki.
The first challenge for using a wiki for public consultation in this case is that people may take this opportunity air irrelevant views which can be offensive or ‘frivolous’ in nature. As Phillip said, people might potentially target this wiki for political reasons and while of course, there would a lot of monitoring and removal of offensive content, but if other members of the public see it before they can be removed, the damage is already done. The monitoring itself would result in the employment of new people as shown by the case, where 4 people were needed just to maintain the monitoring and evaluation of the feedback processes. This would be a challenge for the Ministry of Police to manage the sheer amount of content, to monitor and sort through a pile of submissions to modify or delete every day.
ReplyDeleteThe other challenge mentioned both by Phillip and Stefan would be that wikis would ironically enough not meet the objectives of “raising awareness amongst hard-to-hear and hard-to-reach members of the community”. In rural areas where there isn’t much of a broadband coverage, how would a wiki be better than more traditional ways of communication? A wiki wouldn’t work. On top of that, what about those who are not comfortable using wikis? They need a certain level of web literacy- being confident enough in them so that they know their submission matters and of course a certain degree of writing in a clear manner. The challenge here would be for the Ministry of police again- by using a Wiki, they might be ignoring a major section of the population and only targeting a certain segment- the internet savvy, city dwelling public and yet again ignoring the lesser heard rural population and underprivileged groups who might need it the most.
Oh wow, all the challenges’ have been mentioned already by everyone else on what I would have said, so I shall not just repeat what everyone else has said. ill focus more on the benefits of public consultation in terms of government and police. Essentially public consultation serves as a means for said environment to practically listen to the public. Public consultations serve to tap the widest source of information possible which is information of the internet. This also gives more mobility of information as well. This stops the limitations of a person’s position and time it takes for their message to reach the intended people. The feedback provided can also be recorded down for future reference and for improvement of services.
ReplyDeleteOne way a Public consultation can be used is to monitor changes in either the community and to participate with the public. This can help build a consensus about the issues or changes that are happening to gather the public’s input.
In short, Public consultation gives power of voice to the people.
A major issue with a Wiki (or any technology based approach that needs to reach a population) is that not every citizen has the required client technology or the knowledge of how to use it to have their say or make the edits they wish. It is very likely that not only that this a large sector of a nations population, but also specific to certain sectors, so for example low income families and the elderly may not be as well represented as they rightly should be. This is an issue that will disappear as the average technological proficiency of the population increases, but is certainly an issue at present.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it may be difficult for an online group to come to any reasonable consensus on issues that they have a different point of view. Giving everyone a say in the issues they care about may seem to be a fair way of deciding what laws should be, but it may fail to represent weightings of different issues that may affect minorities to a greater degree. These sorts of disagreements may be impossible to come to an agreement with large and diverse online communities, and a simple majority decision may not be fair.
Another challenge of using a wiki for public consultation is the need to manage international access.
ReplyDeleteManaging International Access
I agree with livett, who in building upon previous comments said that the problem of a public wiki is that the police cannot track who posts comments. As a part of this, one of the challenges of using the Wiki for public consultation is the issue of managing international access. Although the police wanted to consult with expatriate New Zealanders, the main purpose of the Wiki was to be able to better “consult the people of New Zealand”. The challenge for the review team is that with public opinions coming from the international community, wiki submissions may represent an international view of the role of the police in society. This opinion may not be representative of the prevailing New Zealand opinion. This could create a situation where the resulting recommendations on how to change the Police Act do not represent what New Zealanders believe.
However, this is only a minor challenge which seemed to be self managed given the number of New Zealand based visitors that contributed to the wiki.
Ease of Access
As Phillip and Steven discussed, one of the benefits of having no need to register is that it protects privacy. Having no need to register also means that it is easier for the public to submit their views without the hassle of registering. This has two effects. Firstly, users are more likely to submit their view because it is easier to do so. Secondly, the ease of access improves the feedback loop (http://wiki.participation.e.govt.nz/wiki/Great_Feedback!_Online_Engagement_in_New_Zealand#The_problem_with_feedback). Because the public are more likely to submit their views, users are likely to have an attachment with the wiki. This improves what the SSC calls the feedback loop where users continually engage with feedback especially in an area where they made a submission. Therefore the ease of access may cause people to become more attached to the public consultation and would have contributed to the 30,000 wiki entries.
A challenge for using wiki for public consultation is with regards to security. Wikis are not secure and therefore, there is an underlying risk to having public consultation information stored on wikis. It is not appropriate for editing sensitive documents and anyone can edit information from wiki so this may be too open from some applications. There is no guarantee of quality because anyone can post entries and edit them, thus users can maliciously introduce wrong information. Some people may use sensitive information from users; therefore this gives stress to the security of wiki for public consultation.
ReplyDeleteA benefit for using wiki for public consultation is that there are plenty of good sources available with no cost. Users can access the wiki anywhere they have a web connection. It can help connect people with same interests and concerns that can assist them in the consultation process. The use of wiki for public consultation reduces time because of improved communication and collaboration.
Although most people have already posted this, I feel that the issue of anonymity could really harm the public's' view on how politically biased the things being posted are.
ReplyDeleteIf you think about Wikipedia itself for example, it is the largest online resource for information about everything and is also highly reliable, however because of the nature of how you can post information it still has not gained the trust of many people. I believe that the police will have this same issue.
To counter this, much like what Philip said, I believe that a 24 hour a day group of people monitoring posts should be available so that each time there is a new post they can check it as soon as its live, if there are any issues with it they can omit certain areas or remove the post entirely.
As for the issue of managing international access, while I think that this could pose threats like not being able to track who posted comments, simply barring IP addresses from countries outside New Zealand unless they have certain permissions (such as a NZer overseas) which they could get by contacting the operators. Also, I feel that even though they are not wanting to breach peoples privacy tracking solely the IP address of who posted a comment and storing it in a database might be a good idea. This would allow IP addresses known for submitting biased or wrong information to be barred from further posts, without actually naming the person/s who did the post.