Writing governance statements for e-participation projects
From:
Carol Hayward
Date:
2007 Jun 15 08:00 UTC
Short link
In Bristol we originally took a similar stance to Geoff on our main Ask Bristol
forum and started with very simple and easy conditions of use. We've been going
for 2.5 years now and from memory have only removed 2 comments - one as the f
word was used and the second as it was offensive to another person and I needed
to send an explanatory email to the perpetrator.
When we originally went live, I spent some time researching how other people
did it - drawing reference from the BBC forums and any other forums I came
across. We've recently reviewed them as we're incorporating video (through our
DCA/Ministry of Justice funded e-innovations project Viewfinder) and checked
YouTube's site to see how they did it and so for this site the conditions of
use has grown quite considerably - also partly as we were encouraging younger
people to participate and we thought it would be useful to add some safety
information.
http://www.viewfinder.public-i.tv/tandc.php
For Ask Bristol/Viewfinder we allow self-determined user names as we felt that
would encourage participation and I think that's worked fine.
However, we also have been setting up neighbourhood issues forums and are
generally following e-democracy.org's guidance on encouraging people to use
their real names. I think part of the difference is that we understand there is
a lack of trust between the council and its citizens so people might feel more
comfortable being anonymous. However, for the community-led neighbourhood
forums, a spirit of openness and accountability is being encouraged.