Moderation
Rule One
Use your commonsense.
All the other rules and some explanations (the fine print)
Comments will be posted live and, providing they make it through our anti-trolling and anti-spamming software, they will be posted live on the site.
Because the available software isn’t perfect it will sometimes produce false negatives and positives. So we will then moderate comments manually, both by inspecting any comments the software has placed ‘in moderation’ and deciding whether to delete, modify or publish. I expect we’ll have some hiccups with this software – most blogs do. So if something happens that you don’t like, do your nervous system and us a favour and assume that it’s a glitch, a hiccup, a snafu which will be resolved fairly quickly with good will on all sides.
Once comments are published, moderators will also browse them and delete or modify any that have survived our software but which they consider have nevertheless breached our comments policy. We hope to have the blog moderated by volunteers from our community as it grows. We will be recruiting volunteers from contributors to our blog, most particularly from commenters who are making the most worthwhile contribution to our discussions.
Especially at the outset, we realise that it may not always be possible to rely on volunteers and will accordingly supplement this with resources from our trusty secretariat whenever necessary. Moderators will be doing their best to be independent, objective, fair and as positive as possible. But having had some experience with such things, we will enter into correspondence about moderation decisions sparingly, and – with the exception of general comments on this post – privately by e-mail exchange.
A one paragraph explanation of rule one
You are free to make your points clearly and, if you disagree with someone, to say so, if you wish, forcefully. If you cross a line (which admittedly cannot be drawn with absolute precision) and become abusive, defamatory or vexatiously repetitive, or if you breach someone’s privacy, you will be in breach of the policy.
‘Off-topic’ comments can sometimes be useful. So they are not banned. But please use them sparingly. We reserve the right to remove them if we think that, on balance, they are more likely to detract from the quality of the thread – by derailing the discussion – than they are to improve it. In particular, whomever is the author of the original post also has the right to remove comments that are not on topic. If you want to propose that another topic be discussed, an alternative is to email us – see below – and propose it. Please be patient, especially early on in the process of establishing this blog.
If you wish to comment on our application of the comments policy, you are welcome to email us at contact@gov2.net.au. If you wish to comment on the policy itself please feel free to do so in the comments thread below. We’ll review the comments policy in light of comments within six weeks of commencing the task force.
If you wish to comment pseudonymously – using an alias to prevent people from knowing who you are in your day job or in some other ‘life’ – you are welcome to do so. Pseudonymous commenting is often the best way to tap into the knowledge and expertise of people who have good reasons for remaining pseudonymous. On the other hand trolls – those who deliberately provoke and disrupt online discussion – are often pseudonymous and as a result, pseudonymous commenters should realise that moderators may give them somewhat less leeway in allowing intemperate comments.
Those who are detected ‘sock-puppetting’ in a vexatious way – commenting under different assumed identities to gain some tactical advantage in a forceful debate – will be banned.
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AIIA welcomes the establishment of the Government 2.0 Taskforce and will be pleased to work closely with the group to provide wide-ranging ICT industry inputs. This is an exciting area of potential for Government and we look forward with keen interest to the progress of this initiaitive.
You are free to make your points clearly and, if you disagree with someone, to say so, if you wish, forcefully. If you cross a line (which admittedly cannot be drawn with absolute precision) and become abusive, defamatory or vexatiously repetitive, or if you breach someone’s privacy, you will be in breach of the policy.
, as will be if you breach someone’s privacy.Good luck with the taskforce. There is Gov 2.0-related event happening in Sydney on Tuesday June 30th, more info here: http://nswkmforum.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/conversation-cafe-is-there-a-knowledge-dimension-to-government-2-0-june-30/
My comments may be slightly off-topic, but why am I being censored?
Alan,
I have just checked out the system. You were not being ‘censored’ as you put it. The spam software had put your comment in moderation because of the superfluity of links to other sites. The comments, as you concede are off topic and I have deleted them from the comments system. I will quote one of two similar comments of yours below, to provide people with an example of comments that I would prefer seen discussed somewhere else. Remember, you can publish pretty much whatever you want in the blogosphere simply by visiting Wordpress or Blogger or any of the other platforms and typing away. There will also be existing blogs that discuss the things you are keen to discuss.
But on this occasion I don’t think your comment is relevant to this thread.
Moderate all you like, censor me!
The Australian Government developed a policy in 2001 to provide access to government held geospatial data. The Spatial Data Access and Pricing Policy was established in 2001 and since then over 1,500 data sets have been made available. In FY02/03 over 50,000 downloads were made and this has quickly risen to over 1.5 million down loads in FY05/06.
This is a very successful story in relation to open access to PSI, and demonstrates community interest in accessing government data. The policy is administered by the Ofice of Spatial Data Management (OSDM) and access to the list can be found at the following URL:
http://spatial.osdm.gov.au/schedule/schedule_search.jsp
The efforts of the Govt2.0 Task Force can assist in making additional spatial and other data available to the community.
Thanks Me. We appreciate your feedback, and decided to include your suggestion in the moderation policy.
I have submitted three comments on this blog post, two as replies.
http://gov2.net.au/2009/06/22/launch-speech/
I can see only one comment which is a reply. Transparent governments should not censor!
Give it some time Alan, they may not have read them yet if they’ve been caught in the spam filter.
Your YouTube URL could set it off, I get lots of those caught in my blog’s spam filter.
Correction, the comment quoted above was actually moderated from the the thread beginning with the Minister’s launch speech. Nevertheless I suggest such comments be placed on one of many millions of other blogs, not this one.