In 2007, Robert Vogel and Mike Alvarez Cohen started Peak Democracy to “build public trust in government through online public comment forums that are civil yet meet government freedom-of-speech and transparency laws.” Peak Democracy’s Open Town Hall now serves more than 25 government agencies and elected officials.

Vogel and Alvarez share their philosophy and experience building Open Town Hall and helping citizens become engaged by meeting them where they are.

What problem does Open Town Hall solve for government?

Open Town Hall enables governments to provide constituents with online public comment forums that have the order and decorum of government meetings — thereby making the online forums civil, constructive, and legal.

More specifically, the problems that Open Town Hall solves for government include:

• Diversifying community feedback beyond those few that have the time or inclination to attend public hearings;
• Providing an alternative to online community blogs that are frequently filled with vitriolic attacks, dominated by a few extremists, and consequently uninviting for most constituents; and/or,
• Satisfying explicit or latent demand by constituents for their government to offer online public forums (that are civil and informative).

How do Open Town Hall online public comment forums work?

Integrating Open Town Hall into a government’s website can take less than an hour of a webmaster’s time. Peak Democracy provides an HTML snippet to the webmaster, and then the webmaster simply embeds the HTML into a page of the government’s website. The forum’s look (i.e. color, logos, etc) can be easily customized by the webmaster. All of the forum’s IT requirements are provided by Peak Democracy’s servers — including bandwidth, storage and backup, etc.

Government staff access the forums via a password-protected dashboard and backend suite of tools. Staff prepare topics, review the content, and then make the forums available to the public. The forums are then announced to subscribers and the community via email, Facebook and Twitter — as well as announcements at meetings, and other communication channels.

People visit the online public comment forums, learn more about the topics, read and support other perspectives, as well as post their own public comments.

In addition to handling all IT requirements, Peak Democracy’s software and staff monitor comments to maintain civility, authenticate participants to prevent fraud, and provide end-user support.

Government leaders can read the responses and synthesize voluminous feedback using Open Town Hall’s analysis tools. The forums can be archived for public records retention, and printed for distribution at community meetings.

What’s the pricing model, current customers, and how are they leveraging Peak Democracy?

Peak Democracy’s cloud-computing architecture, smart software and economies of scale enable the company to cost-effectively price it Open Town Hall service — as described on this web page. Pricing is based on client population, and starts at $2,400 per year of unlimited use, or $700 per forum — for communities with populations below 25,000.

Open Town Hall is used by over 25 towns, cities and counties. They have launched almost 600 topics, and have had about 50,000 people attend those online forums. All the forums include user surveys with results that are accessible to government staff. Over 96% of user survey respondents indicate that they like Open Town Hall.

Clients are leveraging Open Town Hall to post forums that range from (1) topics agendized on council and commission meetings such as fiscal budgets, annual priorities, and land-use projects, to (2) topics of general interest to government leaders and staff such as transportation studies, sustainability projects, and safety issues.

What are lessons-learned and advice you have for government when it comes to conducting online public comment forums?

Having supported almost 600 online forums from communities across the US (and Canada), Peak Democracy staff has learned a great deal about the best practices for online commuity feedback. For example, online public comment forums should never be positioned as votes or polls — otherwise they can usurp the decision-making autonomy of government leaders.

Learn more about Open Town Hall at the Peak Democracy website.

The General Services Administration recently announced it will create FedSpace, a ‘new social intranet for federal employees and contractors.’ The project will be managed by the agency’s Office of Citizen Services and the initial version is expected to launch late summer.

GSA describes it as follows:

FedSpace is a secure intranet and collaboration workspace for Federal employees and contractors. Designed to be “for Feds by Feds”, FedSpace will enable government employees to work collaboratively across agencies, through the use of Web 2.0 technologies like file sharing, wikis, a government–wide employee directory, shared workspaces, blogs, and more.

Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio has interesting thoughts as to why it’s too late for FedSpace (with spirited and substantial comments). Whether you believe the federal government should create another social network or intranet is another discussion. I understand Andrea’s 30,000-foot assessment, but disagree, mostly because an officially-endorsed government network has huge potential to cut through the open Web clutter and protect the privacy of people who just want to get their jobs done.

FedSpace was inevitable and will survive the test of time, regardless of its success. Longer term (1-2 years), if effectively executed, it will have a huge impact on GovLoop, the largest unofficial social network for government employees. To his credit, GovLoop founder Steve Ressler shared his suggestions for FedSpace.

To learn more about FedSpace, there’s a great FAQ and overview page here.

This is a great opportunity for the federal government to do something creatively epic and have a major impact on the way government works. Below are some questions and recommendations.

Questions:

• What is the budget?
• What will it be developed in?
• Will it be hosted on a government cloud?
• How many people are on the development team?
• What contractor firms are working on the project?
• Who’s the project lead?
• How will success be measured?

Recommendations:

• Change the name. Government needs to stop mimicking dot-com social network branding and get creative. Use a naming contest as an opportunity build interest. While this may seem trivial, branding is a big deal.
• Read Steve Blank’s customer development classic The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Joshua Porter’s Designing for the Social Web is a great reference for non-technical team members and will help others get more excited about the potential.
• Leverage experts outside of the government tech bubble. Smart people are working internally on this project, but engage with in-the-trenches product and marketing development experts from popular commercial networks. Bring them in for brown-bag discussions or video-conference Q&As.
• Start an open blog to chronicle your progress and solicit input. You’ll get free advice and feedback from all sectors, increase project visibility and create a resource for state governments looking to do the same.
• Get serious about marketing it. Its usefulness will determine long-term success, but short-term, you’ll need to get very creative to get 2 million employees actively engaged.

NOTE: Site is very much in beta. Pricing and Web copy still needs updating.

What is PageFreezer?

Government websites are actually public records and need to be archived. PageFreezer is a Web service that archives websites, so they can comply to public records laws. However, in case of a legal claim, archiving is not enough. You need to provide proof of data integrity and authenticity. You need to prove that a page was archived on a specific date and that the archived page hasn’t been changed over time.

What problem does it solve?

Government websites, in accordance with the Public Records Law, are considered an official government publication. Information on these sites influences decisions of citizens and businesses. Governments can be held accountable for the information they publish on the Web. Tracking changes on Websites with PageFreezer offers governments trusted, non-refutable evidence in case of liability claims.

What’s the technology behind it?

It’s pretty complex and we’ve been working on it for more than 2 years. PageFreezer uses crawling technology, similar to that of Google, to take snapshots of your website. Archiving is an automated process. Only new pages and changes are archived, saving storage space.

Each page is time stamped with an ANSI X9.95-compliant Time Stamp Authority securely synchronized with the certified atomic clocks of a Stratum-1 Time Server. This trusted, non-refutable time that cannot be altered without detection provides legal proof when the page was actually archived.

For Drupal geeks:

Go.USA.gov is open source, and was developed in Drupal using the theme base Blueprint, Drupal Core, Shorten, Short URL, and TLD restriction modules.

User activity will be monitored to better understand citizen interests and needs. According to GSA, more than 700 public servants across all levels of government have registered to use the service, and more than 3,000 URLs that have been clicked over 450,000 times.

Cowan-Sharp shares what inspired them and how they did it.

Why did you create OpenGov Tracker?

In its own way, the public consultation process happening on IdeaScale right now is a historic activity, but so few people know about it. We thought that a single access point would give a sense of the participation on all the different sites, a window into the discussions happening, build some excitement, and inspire people to participate. We also thought maybe a bit of healthy competition would emerge between the different agencies, spurring additional participation. Finally, we wanted to call out and celebrate the ideas of those people who have made valuable contributions, so we promoted the most popular ideas across all agencies.

What’s the development story behind it?

When we realized the IdeaScale site had an API, we grabbed the ideas for the NASA site and started playing around. Seeing that each idea object included counts of comments, votes and lots of other information, we realized it would be easy to pull out those basic stats, calculate a few additional ones and aggregate them for all the agencies. So, we started building. The way the sites are set up, you have to register separately for an API key for each of the agencies, which wasn’t so bad– but of course then it turned out that although each agency has the same set of nominal categories, each is represented by a different category ID in the backend. This makes sense when you realize that IdeaScale is used to supporting multiple, completely stove-piped clients. But that was a fun hour or so of tediously building an index to match up the category names with each agency’s numeric category IDs.

As the number of ideas started going up, we realized that our numbers looked wrong. Upon closer inspection it turned out that the API was truncating result sets at 50. We were worried that as soon as any agency had a category that went above 50 ideas, the site would basically be useless. But IdeaScale was really helpful, and lifted the limit for us. We really appreciate that.

Of course a few agencies chose their own route instead of IdeaScale, so we haven’t included them. I’m of two minds on this. I think it’s great if agencies have their own vision for things and do something different and unique to them, since it shows they’re interested. At the same time, as a developer, it really helps us promote your stuff when there’s a common interface for accessing it. It would be neat to see us collectively put some thought into common interfaces, where feasible, for data objects on government sites and projects.

I always fail to appreciate how time consuming presentation is. Pulling out the data was much easier and faster than tweaking the layout and style. But it’s important you do that well, or obviously no one will stay on the site long enough to look at those numbers. Thankfully, Robbie’s pretty good at that part!

The site is built in using Python with Tornado as the web framework. We’re in the process of adding in MongoDB as a backend data store. It took about two evenings and two full days before we deployed it.

What features do you plan on adding in the future?

Right now the site focuses a lot on numbers. We’re working on a few additions that will bring out more of the actual content to highlight the diversity of contributions. I love looking over the tags and the titles, and appreciating how different the ideas are, how different the focus of each agency is, and how each one has its own microcosm of terminology, challenges and touchy issues. It’s actually really educational to scan the lists of ideas and learn what’s happening in the different agencies.

When we first released the site, it was just what we call a “tinyhack,” a quick and dirty project to get something useful up and running. We weren’t even saving the data. But a lot of people have asked for the ability to look at contributions over time, so now we’re growing up the code a little bit, adding a proper data store on the backend. That will also enable us to easily display trend lines, pull out more content, etc.

But there’s only another 25 days to go, so we need to optimize value provided and time to deployment. That said, we’ll make sure the data continues to be available after the consultation process is over so more fun stuff can be done by those who want to.

The service is free to use for reporting and monitoring issues. Upgrade versions include SeeClickFix Pro, available for $38 a month, SeeClickFix Plus, a mobile version that lets users customize the application with logo and theming, and SeeClickFix Connect that includes CRM integration.

Houston, Philadelphia, Tuscon, New Haven, City of Bainbridge Island and City of Manor are some of the municipalities using SeeClickFix. Participating news outlets include the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, Boston.com and Philadelphia Inquirer.

• SeeClickFix iPhone app
• SeeClickFix for Government
• SeeClickFix for Media

SeeClickFix demo:

Founder and CEO Ben Berkowitz’s Gov 2.0 Expo demo: