Engendering trust

Placed on a government website

All commentable documents should have .gov.uk URL of the form www.govdept.gov.uk/xxxxx

If a sub-domain is used then this should be added into the appropriate XML Sitemap, so that the commentable document is easily findable through Web search engines and found for archiving by the UK Government Website Archive.

The URL used should be the commissioning department’s corporate website, wherever the service is provided, unless it is agreed to be Directgov or another central cross-government service.

Clear statements should be made about:

The aims of publishing a commentable document
The process of handling the comments
The policy for moderating comments

Clear statement of the aims

The aims of eliciting comments from the public or stakeholders on documents should be clearly articulated as ‘The aims’ on the front page. This should be done in clear, understandable and non-jargon terminology so that respondents have unambiguous expectations. In particular it should cover the following:

Intended audience from whom comments are sought
To whom the comments are intended, for example for other responders or for the public body publishing the document
Whether responders can comment on each others’ comments through threading or not
The final date when comments will be considered
The minimum time a consultation complying with the Consultation Code is permitted to be open is 12 weeks
The outcome sought by the act of publishing and seeking comments

A statement on ‘What will happen to your comments’

The process by which comments will be read, reviewed and subsequent actions should be clearly laid out. This is already covered by consultations published in line with the Consultation Code. If not such a consultation, the process will need spelling out as ‘What will happen to your comments’. Respondents should be clear about the process in which they are participating. This should cover the following:

Who will be reading the comments
What action they plan to do
A set of standards explaining how the feedback will be delivered (if they are going to be delivered at all). E.g. If a summary of the comments is going to be reported back to the public it should establish that all points of view will be represented in a fairly and balanced way.

A moderation policy

It is normal that comments are moderated in order that defamatory, vulgar, racist and such others are removed. A policy on what is expected and acceptable should be published on the front page as ‘Moderation policy’. This should cover the following:

Who is going to be able to participate (openness of the debate), e.g. limits by age or nationality
To whom the comments should be addressed when being written
Length (e.g. maximum length)
If trackbacks to other websites, e.g. for longer pieces, are going to be allowed
Whether the comments will be moderated
If so, whether they will be pre- or post-moderated or a combination of the two
Frequency of moderation. The emerging norm is for this to be twice daily during normal working days and once per day during non-working days; some choose post-moderation during non-working days.
If post-moderation, opportunity for others to request removal
If post-moderation, state the message that will indicate that comments have been removed, for example, ‘This comment has been removed by the moderator as it was deemed inappropriate’.
Rules for acceptability of comments and what will be excluded
Whether or not the moderator will write to the responder if comments are not accepted
Any appeals process for when responders are not satisfied with the moderation, including expected times to resolve the conflict to prevent casting any doubt about the transparency of the consultation exercise.

Easy navigation

The document should have easy and clear navigation with the navigation text being in easy to understand non-jargon. Where possible the design should be intuitive and engaging.

Accessibility standards should be followed so each citizen can contribute.

Closure

Once closed to comment, a statement should be placed on the front page giving the date range when the document was open for comments and that it is now closed to further comment.

If appropriate, a summary outcomes or link to one, may be included on the front page.

Archive

The commentable document should be archived along with all its published comments in the UK Government Website Archive. The National Archives should be alerted to the timescales anticipated so that an archive copy can be taken and the data should not be removed until the quality assurance process is complete. The URL address used should continue to operate and pass readers onto the UK Government Website Archive version.

Next section: Managing commentable documents

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7 Responses to “Engendering trust”

I’m slightly concerned by the line “Where possible the design should be intuitive and engaging.”

Usability, or making the design intuitive, is the most important part of design, especially as the aim of commentable documents is to make it easy for members of the public and stakeholders to take part in policy making.

Engaging can be a little more abstract because of the varied nature of government consultations, but having usability at the core of the design is imperative.

Martin Young says:
July 21, 2010 at 1:19 pm
This would surely be an ideal opportunity for COI (or the government web community in collaboration) to produce a sample Moderation Policy which departments could take as-is, or tweak to their specific circumstances. It’s in everyone’s interests for these policies to be standardised as far as possible: to save departments the effort and anxiety of drawing up their own, and to give users a common experience across all government consultations. After all, they only see one government, not 20-odd departments.

Besides, would different departments really take a different view of what constitutes ‘foul language’? Are certain swear words acceptable in certain Offices, but not others?

Anyway, the reality is that there’s already a lot of copying-and-pasting going on, with departments simply copying the one they used before, or ‘borrowing’ from another department whom they perceive to be good at this stuff. You might as well make a virtue of this. Maybe even offer a ‘policy generator’, based on a web form with dropdowns in various places, for easy tweaking (and automated comparison).

I’d also prefer to see some more concrete statements of policy, based on the significant experience we’ve now built up in this field. For example, pre-moderation has not let us down, whereas post-moderation has led to some high-profile embarrassments, including this very week: so would this not be the right time to say ‘on balance, you really should always pre-moderate’?

Simon Dickson says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:52 pm
“All commentable documents should have .gov.uk URL of the form http://www.govdept.gov.uk/xxxxx
…
“The URL used should be the commissioning department’s corporate website, wherever the service is provided, unless it is agreed to be Directgov or another central cross-government service.”

Does this mean publishing documents on third party platforms will go against guidance? For example, on WriteToReply.org we have hosted documents for DCMS and the Cabinet Office. Would that approach no longer be approved?

Tony Hirst says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:02 pm
[Moderation policy - maximum length]

The granularity at which comments are made (paragraph level, section level, document level) can influence the length of a *response* (rather than comment, per se), and also how easy it is to reconcile a particular point made within the response (i.e. a particular “comment”) back to the corresponding part of the document.

Also on moderation policy – what if only part of a comment is unacceptable? Could a moderator edit a comment to remove (and mark as removed) a fragment of a comment?

Tony Hirst says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:07 pm
“Easy navigation”
Many consultation documents have a list of consultation questions that are distributed throughout a longer consultation document. Often these are collected together as part of an executive summary, but it may also be appropriate to provide a single summary page containing just the consultation questions that is not in itself commentable, but does link through to the area of the document where the consultation question appears and is commentable.

For example, the “Questions” page on the Open Science at Web Scale report, as published on WriteToReply: http://writetoreply.org/openscience/questions/

Tony Hirst says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Re URL: presumably this is the URL that should be used in promoting the document; if for technical reasons an organisation has to host it using a subdomain or third party site, this should be permitted as long as the subdomain URL is promoted exclusively?

Steph Gray says:
August 2, 2010 at 4:17 pm

I’m slightly concerned by the line “Where possible the design should be intuitive and engaging.”

Usability, or making the design intuitive, is the most important part of design, especially as the aim of commentable documents is to make it easy for members of the public and stakeholders to take part in policy making.

Engaging can be a little more abstract because of the varied nature of government consultations, but having usability at the core of the design is imperative.

Martin Young says:

July 21, 2010 at 1:19 pm

This would surely be an ideal opportunity for COI (or the government web community in collaboration) to produce a sample Moderation Policy which departments could take as-is, or tweak to their specific circumstances. It’s in everyone’s interests for these policies to be standardised as far as possible: to save departments the effort and anxiety of drawing up their own, and to give users a common experience across all government consultations. After all, they only see one government, not 20-odd departments.

Besides, would different departments really take a different view of what constitutes ‘foul language’? Are certain swear words acceptable in certain Offices, but not others?

Anyway, the reality is that there’s already a lot of copying-and-pasting going on, with departments simply copying the one they used before, or ‘borrowing’ from another department whom they perceive to be good at this stuff. You might as well make a virtue of this. Maybe even offer a ‘policy generator’, based on a web form with dropdowns in various places, for easy tweaking (and automated comparison).

I’d also prefer to see some more concrete statements of policy, based on the significant experience we’ve now built up in this field. For example, pre-moderation has not let us down, whereas post-moderation has led to some high-profile embarrassments, including this very week: so would this not be the right time to say ‘on balance, you really should always pre-moderate’?

Simon Dickson says:

July 21, 2010 at 4:52 pm

“All commentable documents should have .gov.uk URL of the form http://www.govdept.gov.uk/xxxxx
…
“The URL used should be the commissioning department’s corporate website, wherever the service is provided, unless it is agreed to be Directgov or another central cross-government service.”

Does this mean publishing documents on third party platforms will go against guidance? For example, on WriteToReply.org we have hosted documents for DCMS and the Cabinet Office. Would that approach no longer be approved?

Tony Hirst says:

July 23, 2010 at 1:02 pm

[Moderation policy - maximum length]

The granularity at which comments are made (paragraph level, section level, document level) can influence the length of a *response* (rather than comment, per se), and also how easy it is to reconcile a particular point made within the response (i.e. a particular “comment”) back to the corresponding part of the document.

Also on moderation policy – what if only part of a comment is unacceptable? Could a moderator edit a comment to remove (and mark as removed) a fragment of a comment?

July 23, 2010 at 1:07 pm

“Easy navigation”
Many consultation documents have a list of consultation questions that are distributed throughout a longer consultation document. Often these are collected together as part of an executive summary, but it may also be appropriate to provide a single summary page containing just the consultation questions that is not in itself commentable, but does link through to the area of the document where the consultation question appears and is commentable.

For example, the “Questions” page on the Open Science at Web Scale report, as published on WriteToReply: http://writetoreply.org/openscience/questions/

July 23, 2010 at 1:14 pm

Re URL: presumably this is the URL that should be used in promoting the document; if for technical reasons an organisation has to host it using a subdomain or third party site, this should be permitted as long as the subdomain URL is promoted exclusively?

Steph Gray says:

August 2, 2010 at 4:17 pm