OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
For those of you who have griped about a long line for screening at an airport, or, alternatively, have been pleasantly surprised at the swift passage through the screening system, the Transportation Security Administration has now opened up a blog site for people to voice their opinions. The TSA seeks to create a two-way dialog with the public by opening up the system for comments. By doing this, though, the Transportation Security Administration has now opened itself up to a potential flood of complaints.
Giving your users a forum for complaints is certainly an appropriate means of communicating with them and seeking feedback; however, such an open and minimally unmoderated forum opens the TSA up to the dangers of being forced to respond to relatively minor complaints and having its agenda hijacked by a determined few who have specific issues that they wish to push.
We experienced the same social networking problem when we developed HealthStories in conjunction with MITRE. The idea behind the site was to compile patients experiences at hospitals to be able to determine trends and to get a batch of seminal stories to take to the Health and Human Services Administration to identify where technology could assist hospitals in delivering better health care. What we quickly discovered was that we needed some mechanism to determine the legitimate complaints as opposed to the people who had an axe to grind. We introduced a rating system to allow other users to vote on the relevance of contributed stories. With such a rating system, the greater community would be able to more quickly hone in on the most relevant issues of the hospital experience.
The TSA has begun the first step towards making the blog more successful–moderating the comments. In an ideal world, the blog would be unmoderated, but if that were the case here, the website administrators and bloggers would be swamped in trying to deal with agendas and answering comments which do not justify responses. Now, they can choose the relevant and salient comments and respond to them.
The TSA, though, must be careful in its moderation lest it be accused of selection bias. It has to make sure to give voice to all sides and to respond appropriately to the warts as well as the beauties lest the commenting (and the interactive aspect of the blog) become useless.
It must also make sure that the focus of the blog is to communicate the behind-the-scenes thinking regarding the TSA and reasoning why people have to suffer the inconveniences that they do. In order to do that, it needs to have bloggers with some authority. The current blogger list does not inspire me with confidence that they speak for the TSA or have insider insight that can help the public to understand whats happening in the back rooms. Bloggers gain credence by establishing credibility and by being experts. Perhaps if the bios focused on more things than “I like ice cream,” people would tend to respect the writing.
The idea is a good one. The government can use the Internet to become more responsive to its constituents. However, it needs to have voices of authority doing the interaction, and the government needs to be very careful in managing the interactions to ensure that a very small but vocal minority doesnt hijack the entire conversation.
[Edit: February 5, 2008 9:21 AM] Jake McKee gives a great list of actions the TSA should take to make the site more user-friendly. Were in the midst of redesigning the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport Authoritys website, and this article provides a great set of guidelines for us to think about as well.