Secondly, the site seems strangely designed to discourage discussion. Clicking on a comment redirects a user away from the main page, and responses to comments on the bill's text are hidden unless you click over to that comment's separate page. The value of the platforms like this is that they engage people and get them talking and thinking about issues, yet Madison back-seats the discursive element of participation. Again, these issues are technically trivial and there are innumerable examples in the social web of how to do them right. The site looks clean at the expense of putting all of the meaningful participatory and discursive action out of the way and, in so doing, undermines its effectiveness.

The best way to facilitate engagement is to make the platform into a community experience where people interact. Borrowing from best practices of the rest of the web 2.0 space, they could have implemented a "reputation score" function where users gain "points" when other people "like" or respond to their comments or edits. Just as Wikipedia allows editors to give each other "barnstars" in recognition of their hard work, a successful collaborative consultation platform must have a mechanism built in where achievement is socially recognized. Myriad examples across the web indicate the remarkable lengths people will go for a "+1" or a retweet.

Finally there is the issue of dealing with defection, vandalism and trolling. Participation did not seem to be high enough for this to be a problem, but if there were higher levels of engagement in the future the issue would surely emerge. Successful systems share several features: 1) identities are static within the community, 2) expectations of appropriate behavior are clearly defined, 3) there are publically posted and articulated graduated sanctions. Reputation scores, in addition to incentivizing participation, also serve a useful role in preventing misuse of the platform. Madison fails on most of these dimensions. While identities were static, there are no clearly articulated "community guidelines" and was no posted policy on sanctions for breaching those guidelines. On top of this there is the issue of who is doing the moderation. In a platform used for democratic participation it is important that participants can be confident in the process. Transparency is the watchword here. Allegations -- whether true or not -- that certain political perspectives are being marginalized by abuse of the comment/edit moderation system could be fatal to a platform of this kind. Some form of peer-moderation system -- akin to SlashDot -- may be the best solution to this problem, because it is relatively resistant to allegations of systemic abuse.

Ultimately, the crowdsourcing process of OPEN is a promising step in using the Internet for democratic engagement in the U.S., but it is far from the "direct digital democracy" that Issa claims. As an attempt it is admirable, and its goal of participatory engagement in drafting legislation is one that hopefully others will emulate. But as a platform Madison is flawed. It is a platform designed without paying enough attention to the lessons learned and best practices developed by those already within the social web space. What its designers overlooked is that collaborative consultation online is merely a political application of already existing social web interactions. The last six or seven years have given us thousands of mini-experiments into how to do social engagement right online, and designing successful political engagement platforms need to learn from them.









Image: Wikimedia Commons.