Actually…

An email which has just been sent out…

Hello,

We’re writing to you because at some point in the last couple of years, you’ve been a registered user on WriteToReply. We have decided to close WriteToReply and all document sites will be taken down on the 30th September 2011. This is for two reasons: The generous donation of money towards funding from Eduserv will run out on that date and, frankly, we think the site has run its course.

We think WriteToReply has served its original purpose well and since we set up the site in February 2009, the landscape has changed a bit for the better. Central Gov depts have their WPMU sites for commentable documents, there’s http://digress.it, which we secured development funding for, and it offers much the same platform as writetoreply.org. Digress.it version 3 was released a while back and is now mature code for anyone to download and set up their own commentable document. We continue to help with the development and testing of the digress.it plugin. Together with a number of people, we’ve helped show how commendable documents might be done and helped develop the software to do it. The number of incoming requests for hosting documents on WriteToReply has also significantly reduced over the last year, which has been welcome because hosting a growing WordPress network platform can get expensive.

If you have concerns about how to continue hosting your site, please contact us as soon as possible. If you don’t care, then feel free to ignore this email. We imagine that a lot of the sites served a specific purpose at a moment in time and can safely be taken down.

We know that the National Archive have archived our first hosted site for the Interim Digital Britain report.

We’re hoping that any other government sites we’ve hosted could be archived in a similar way. If you’re working in government, please consider looking into this.

You can always export your site via the WordPress Tools menu and import it into another WordPress site. However, this will not preserve the comments at the paragraph level. To do that, you’ll need the database tables, which we can provide to you if you request them. We can also export all comments to a spreadsheet so that a copy can be filed.

Thanks again for all your support and interest in WriteToReply. It’s been a lot of fun and we’ve learned a thing or two along the way, too. We’ll continue to host the WriteToReply blog at http://writetoreply.org/actually as it is a useful document of our processes over the lifetime of the site.

Cheers

Joss and Tony

Several online consultation and review documents that engaged my interest were published recently, so I thought it might be useful to quickly compare how they’re presented and what they have to offer.

Public Data Corporation
Firstly, the Plans for the Public Data Corporation consultation. The consultation is presented as a WordPress blog (with some untidy default widgets left in the right hand sidebar) with a brief summary and list of ten (10) consultation questions listed on the front page, and then a separate page to solicit responses for each particular question:

The comments are captured using Disqus and a pre-moderation policy:

It is hard to see at a glance the extent to which people have engaged with the questions across the consultation. The premoderation policy means that there is a delay (and uncertainty) in publishing comments – so for example, the comments I posted on a Saturday morning (#bigsociety time?!;-) presumably won’t be released (if at all) until Monday morning at the earliest… meaning no on-site discussion in the comment thread over the weekend.

(See also SImon Dickson’s take on this consultation: Another Cabinet Office WP consultation.)

Where WordPress is used as a platform, single page RSS feeds and comment feeds per page are available, although it is up to the publisher to decide whether full or summary feeds are published for each page. The following Netvibes dashboard demonstrates an aggregation of single page and page level comment feeds for the PDC consultation:

This suggests that it may be possible to increase the surface area of a consultation using dashboard services, as well as developing dashboards to support the management and reactive moderation of a consultation.

Commons Committee Inquiry on Peer Review
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee have just called for a new Inquiry into Peer Review.

. Eight (8) separate issues are identified and up to 3,000 word submissions in Word format with numbered paragraphs are requested by email, with a paper copy submitted as well.

In terms of online engagement, I guess this sets the minimum possible baseline?!

“Protection of Freedom Bill” Public Reading Stage
The Cabinet Office recently released a public reading stage for the Protection of Freedom Bill using a themed WordPress site. This site offers front page navigation with the number of public comments received through the platform to date identified for each page.

Comments are supported at a page level, with partial feeds supported at the page level (using ?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1) along with full comment feeds.

WordPress comment threads enabled.

Top level navigation across the document is preserved at the page level by means of the left-hand navigation sidebar.

Despite the legalistic nature of the Bill, paragraph level commenting is not directly supported.

(See also Simon Dickson’s response to this consultation: Can Cabinet Office’s WordPress-based commentable bills make a difference?.)

Department of Health Online Consultations
The Department of Health Online Consultations Hub provides a single home for current and recently closed consultations from the DoH. Consultations are split over several pages with clearly marked out text entry forms on at the bottom of pages where feedback is requested.(That is, page level structured commenting is supported.) By providing email credentials, users can obtain a link that allows them to return to their submission to the consultation at a later date.

Resource Discovery Taskforce Request for Comments on Metadata Guidelines on JISCPress
The JISC Resource Discovery Taskforce (RDTF) request for comments on UK Metadata Guidelines was published as a multipage document on JISCPress, a WordPress installation running the digress.it theme.

Front page sidebar navigation allows access to all areas of the document and summarises the number of comments per page. Mousing over a page link on the front page loads a preview of the page in the central pane. Following a link leads to a page with floating comment box that supports threaded commenting at the paragraph level:

Each paragraph is also given a unique URI allowing it to be uniquely referenced in posts on third party sites.

Along with comments by section, comments are viewable by commenter:

[Disclaimer: I was part of the project team that proposed JISCPress and the use of the digress.it WordPress plugin and am also a member of the RDTF technical advisory group associated with this RFC.]

Summary
Wordpress appears to be gaining traction as a consultation publishing platform, with either vanilla themes (e.g. Public Data Corporation proposal) or custom commentable document themes (JISC RDTF guidelines). WordPress native comments as well as third party commenting support using Disqus are demonstrated (it would be interesting to hear the rationale behind the choice of Disqus and an evaluation of how well it was deemed to have worked). Reactive and pre-moderation strategies are in evidence.

PS One more, that I should have included the first time round, on @lesteph’s ReadAndComment platform – LG Group Transparency Programme.

Whole document navigation is available from the front page as well as from the right hand sidebar on document pages (though it’s not clear if there would be a count of comments per page?) Comments are at page level via a WordPress comment entry form at the bottom of the page:

Steph hinted I won’t like the feeds… dare I look?!;-)