4ip
From Write to Reply
Contents |
Working title
WriteToReply: Supporting Document Based Public Consultations on the Web
Elevator Pitch
A community platform for enabling commentary and debate around public documents. Engagement can be at the section, sub-section or paragraph level, made on the site itself or tracked back from third-party sites.
Needs
What user need does your proposal meet (even if this need not yet recognised by the user)? What itch does it scratch and why is that itch important? Who is it targeted at?
To what extent has the growth in web usage seen an increase in public engagement with local and national government consultations? Many documents are now released in public under "open" licenses but using "closed" document formats that do not reflect the hypertext nature of the web. WriteToReply provides an easy to use web-based platform to re-publish public consultation documents and then capture, track and analyse comments on, and engagement with, those documents. The proposed platform supports on-site commenting for any type of text (reports, books, documentation, textbooks, etc.); URIs at the paragraph level so that comments on third party sites can link back to, and be tracked from, the consultation document; and content syndication, allowing document content to be republished in a trackable way on remote, third party discussion sites. Website analytics reports further allow document publishers to track public engagement with the documents. This approach achieves greater openness, flexibility, accessibility and transparency than the current public consultation process and levers modern web publishing techniques for aggregating, receiving and analysing comment from a wider variety of sources. We believe that WriteToReply addresses the needs of authors and those involved in analytics. It also meets the needs of the public by using a popular blogging platform to allow anyone to quickly re-publish a public document for consultation in a form that is easily consumed and annotated. It empowers people to solicit comment on local and central government initiatives that affect them.
Approach
How do you propose to address these needs creatively, technically; in terms of communication, community; and otherwise? How will you make a significant impact? What are the costs and what help do you want?
WriteToReply.org is built using CommentPress (http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/), a plugin for the multi-user version of the open source WordPress blogging platform specifically designed for commenting on and annotating documents. It was originally promoted through "Twitter advocacy" and comments made on blogs discussing "Digital Britain - The Interim Report". Each WriteToReply document is available for on-site or remote comment via a unique URI that identifies each paragraph. Comments on third party sites that link back to a particular section, action or paragraph result in a 'trackback' on the WriteToReply site that is included in the comment feed. Comments and documents can be extracted from the site via RSS feed, embedded widgets, email or XMPP. WriteToReply will expose all content for syndication and aggregate data so that themes and trends can be analysed. Data across all document sites can be categorised, tagged, searched, aggregated, syndicated and analysed. Web analytics for each document site can be published for use by both authors and the interested public. Funding will underwrite the costs of: gathering user requirements from groups such as MySociety and DIUS; subsequent technical development and implementation; development of a business model, potentially based on licensing or advertising agreements with local councils and government, training users, privacy features for internal documents and enterprise sign-on support, data analysis and advertising consultations; advocacy of the service within government and among public interest groups. Funding will cover: costs of staffing the service, system administration and hosting.
Competition
What are the nearest existing sites or services to what you are proposing? How is yours better?
The original inspiration for WriteToReply was the use of a similar approach on the Power of Information Taskforce Report (beta) site, (although similar approaches to paragraph level, online commenting date back at least to the days of the Dearing Report - http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/1997/08/d3e-generates-dearing-report-discussion-site/ ). The Big City Plan Talk website took a related approach in providing a plain English, commentable upon version of a consultation document about how Birmingham should be developed over the next 20 years ( http://bigcitytalk.org.uk/ ). TalkEuro.com provided a "chunked", commentable upon consultation version of the European Constitution. These sites were all set up independently and suggest that there is an opportunity for a centrally hosted site, or preconfigured "download", for people without the skills required to establish such a site, from scratch, themselves. The MySociety.org suite of projects are all complementary to WriteToReply: WhatDoTheyKnow (a Freedom of Information requests/disussion site) and TheyWorkForYou: FreeOurBills (a campaign to bring Parliamentary Bills onto the web in an appropriate form). WriteToReply generalises the POIT/Big City Plan Talk approach, and complements the MySociety initiatives by providing an appropriate technology for the web that enables interested parties to set up and monitor their own commenting sites around public documents.
Region
What region are you, the production talent and/or the production budget based in?
The creators of the original site are based in the East Midlands and on the Isle of Wight, and are happy to work with contributors from any region in the UK on a remote-working basis.
