Tangled Web(site)

Council meetings are usually entertaining and last Tuesday's was no exception. Sat through the morning show and left during the intermission (executive session and lunch break.) Didn't make it back before the afternoon show had started and I missed one of the most entertaining parts. An issue that I really have issues with: the City website.

The contract for the current city website was approved back in 2004. The current site is based on a proprietary system from GovOffice.com. It took a while for the site to get usable and I have several emails back and forth with city staff on problems and suggestions. Today, 8 years later there are still problems with features such as credit card information handling and keeping the agenda packets on the website. Public information staff has done a lot of work like connecting the city website with social media sites like facebook and twitter and work arounds like using slideshare to hold city council packets and information that won't fit on the website. City staff has done a lot of work to get information out and overcome the limits of the current website. I've also heard from staff members that use the system that it's a royal pain to deal with. I'd heard and seen enough problems with the site that I have been trying to get the city to change system and philosophies for several years. Earlier this year the city finally went out with an RFP for a new website.

In May, they came to council with a request to authorize a contract, not to exceed $40,000 to Vision Internet of California. From the memo in the agenda packet "Financial Impact: The costs for the website design, hosting, and training staff will be $40,000.00." A bit high but not totally unexpected. I remember this being presented to the city council as a complete, turnkey operation. Vision Internet would design and maintain the site, migrate everything from the old site to the new one, train staff to operate it, and host it on their own high availability servers. City council approved the following from the memo in the agenda packet.

• "a. Approving a recommendation from the Evaluation Team to award RFP: PI-01-
  11/Website Design contract to Vision Internet, in an amount not to exceed $40,000.00
  for design of a new, custom website for the City of San Angelo, and authorizing the City Manager to negotiate and execute a contract with the recommended vendor
• b. Authorizing a budget amendment for the project funds in an amount not to exceed
  $40,000.00 to cover costs of designing the new website, training staff, and hosting the
  newly designed site."

Looked like a done deal, and I  was hopeful a new website, at least a beta version, might be a Christmas present for the citizens of San Angelo. Last Tuesday, Nov. 20th, there was a budget amendment on the agenda that included $90,000 to negotiate a contract and amend the budget for the new website. Wait a minute. Hadn't this had been approved back in May? All of it including the budget amendment? And what was the extra $50,000 for? Simplest explanation would have been that too much time had elapsed and it needed re-approval. And maybe the $90k was just a typo and $40k was the real deal. I watched the video, and no, staff was saying that $90k was the true amount and that the $40k  was only for website design. The extra $50k was needed for training and new, upgraded servers to host the website. Like I said I wish I had been there but the replay on channel 17 was very entertaining. You could tell that staff was caught completely flat footed. The excuses they gave for the increase don't make sense when you look at what was in the May 1st agenda packet and what was recorded in the minutes. Training costs were included in the original proposal, and there was no need for additional servers at the city because the website would be hosted on Vision Internet servers. Package price, tax title and license $40k as approved in May. One further point I found out is that Vision Internet doesn't sell hardware. If there were additional servers and equipment required, that would need to be an additional contract, probably as part of the city's normal server upgrade program.

This highlights two problems our new city manager must deal with. First, staff has developed a habit of bringing parts of projects to city council piece meal and without complete project information. This time they tried to say that what was approved in May was just a portion of the total project and it was only last Tuesday they were providing information on the rest of the project. Earlier in meeting a similar situation happened on an agreement with SAPAC. The rental/lease agreement for office space was brought forward as an isolated, stand alone item. There have been some concerns about this agreement expressed at prior council meetings, and without some big picture information on the entire auditorium/city hall renovation project and SAPAC's involvement and contribution commitments it's hard to make a good decision. As presented to the council Tuesday the agreement does look and smell like a giveaway of a major city asset to a politically connected group. Add to that the cost overruns and confusion over whether or not the HVAC plant and landscaping were included in the original package voted on as part of the city hall plaza project and it's easy see how council might be getting a bit irritable. I'm sure they feel like they would if they were buying a new car and as the sales manager is handing the keys he says "Congratulation on your new car. I think now we might want to talk about putting tires on it." 

Now that I've wandered into mistakes made in handling the website contract so far, let me make a couple of suggestions. There needs to be a shift in philosophy by the city about the internet. Functionally, the city doesn't have "a" website. The main sanangelotexas.us address is effectively a portal into a series of other internet applications and sites. I could get long winded on this (actually did but erased it) but the city doesn't need a Swiss Army Knife type of website. What the city needs is a functional toolbox that allows people to exchange information and do business using those internet tools, and visible website is really just the box that keeps all these specialized tools where they can be used efficiently and effectively. This needs to be an open standards based toolbox so that as new tools are needed and developed we don't have to keep going back to a single source and hope they have an adequate tool.

Let's get ASU and their computer science department involved. They have expertise and equipment. They might be interested in doing the city's internet projects as a research and training vehicle. 

Get the city involved with projects like Code For America and see what they can surprise us with. 

Go with an open solution, preferably open source, that can help drive down the cost of government and give us greater flexibility to respond quickly in a fast changing world.

We need a new website for the City of San Angelo. We need an updated philosophy on how the city and its citizens use the internet. We need an honest, accurate, and complete plan for the projects that will get us where we need to be long term. What was put before council would barely serve us today and is not what we need for the future. We also need to get staff to keep up and do their homework before they come before city council and keep their story complete and straight.

Openness and modern technology

If you've been following us any time at all, you know we have been after the city government to put some additional information on their website. We have been very persistent about getting the agenda packets, which we consider an essential part of the agenda and minutes, online. They have recently been putting agenda packets up sometime the day before the council meeting recently, and taking the old one down before putting the new one up. There have also been a few problems with some of the packets not reading properly. Thought we were making some small progress towards more openness.

This weekend, I saw this notice in small print under a heading called 'New Feature' in its original type size

"As a courtesy to our citizens and the media, Agenda Packets are posted along with the respective agenda.  Due to limited space on our website, the packets are only available for that particular meeting and will remain on the website until replaced.  Every and all attempts will be made to post the packet in a timely manner before the actual meeting; however, due to the size of the packets and any related technical difficulties, we cannot guarantee this service for all meetings.

If you are interested in receiving a previous or current meeting agenda packet on a compact disk (CD), please contact the City Clerk.  Related charges will apply for this service. "

 or at a more readable size

"As a courtesy to our citizens and the media, Agenda Packets are posted along with the respective agenda.  Due to limited space on our website, the packets are only available for that particular meeting and will remain on the website until replaced.  Every and all attempts will be made to post the packet in a timely manner before the actual meeting; however, due to the size of the packets and any related technical difficulties, we cannot guarantee this service for all meetings. 

If you are interested in receiving a previous or current meeting agenda packet on a compact disk (CD), please contact the City Clerk.  Related charges will apply for this service."

I've been playing with computers for a few days, and know a little bit about space and websites. The maximum size of any agenda packet so far has been 25mb, which means that 40 of them will fit in a 1 gigabyte space (gigabyte is 1000 mb). Walmart is selling 4 gigabyte flash drives for under $10. That would hold about 160 agenda packets, which is a bit over 6 years with space left over for workshops and special sessions.  I would gladly donate a thumb drive to the our city website so than store a reasonable number of packets.

Seriously, the SAISD School Board has their agenda packets online from 2005. They also have their packets and agendas in a much easier to use format. Doing it like the school board does will take a lot of effort that should wait until the website redesign but until then I find it hard to believe they can't find the space for at least a years worth of agenda packets on the city website. Frankly, it comes across as a very lame excuse to get out of some relatively simple work.

A glimpse at our future.

We now have a small scale test of what I hope ConchoInfo will look like up. It may be a little slow and up and down a bit as I'm running it on a test server under my desk. Anonymous browsing and some commenting is allowed, but full features won't be available unless you register. News feeds, forums, stories and comments along with a calendar are all in the works. We are also working on an appropriate theme. Special purpose and private forums are also possible.

Take a look at the testbed and tell me what you think.

Standard-Times Time-out

As it happens I had just last week written the Standard-Times my quarterly subscription check, so I shall continue to find my daily supply of fishwrap on the lawn most of the summer. After Sunday's column I can't think of a reason I should continue to fund the enterprise. No, that's unfair, the local paper is always worth reading. My very first published editorial was in the Raleigh NC News and Observer, an unabashedly liberal paper whose ownership included some of the archtects of FDR's New Deal. That goes back a ways, JFK was still President when my first editorial got ink.

I would have been pleasently surprised to find a Sunday lead editorial giving us the sincerely apologetic straight story on how the "outing" of anonymous posters happened. The explanation so far provided lacks in timeliness, details or sheer believability. What I was not prepared for was to find myself and my fellow readers lectured to, admonshished like naughty children and essentially put on "time out" and probation!

I quite agree with editor Archuleta, the quality on online posts is on the decline, but whose fault is that? Look, anonymity was never an issue for me. I "outed" myself when I took Archuleta's seat on the City Charter Review Committee just to put aside any ethical concerns about advocating for that Committee's recommendations.

Those posters who trusted the Standard-Times to abide by its privacy policy, those people who expessed opinions they would otherwise have been reluctant to state for attribution, people who have legitimate concern over possible retribution on the job or in the marketplace, those are the people with a complaint. At its best, the online comment site did attract loons and irresponsible comments. In a typical "thread" from a given story with enough interest to go "hot", let's say 50 comments, I would usually see maybe half that were worth the time to read, but so what?

One soon learned to skip lightly past the sillier tin-foil hat wearing authors, perhaps take them in for amusement. Sadly, a lot of the folks whose commentary I became accustomed to looking forward to have vanished, and who can blame them? I don't know how the Standard-Times can ever regain the trust of its readers. I suspect the San Angelo Police Dept. is experiencing a bit of difficulty developing new "confidential informants" in drug cases. Similarly there, only the desperate or the deranged would put their lives on the line and trust that organization not to put their identity on the front page. Trust once betrayed is exceedingly difficult to regain, be it a marriage, a church, or a newspaper.

What I do know is that everything the S-T has done so far has been just about precisely wrong. The "leak" of user profiles had been out there for 10 days, was being actively discussed by posters whose feelings of betrayal were evident in their comments before the S-T ink-on-dead-trees edition acknowledged it. Then the article revealing it used the "outed" user profiles to out one of the high profile Police Chief candidates, compounding the betrayal of anonymity. Assuming that article should have been written and published (two separate actions, BTW), It should have gone beyond identifying Davis and mentioned that all the candidates were using online anonymity to post, if not directly, certainly through surrogate spokespersons. I caught this incident fairly early, an SAPD source gave me a heads up that lists of user profiles were circulating in the Dept. by Thursday noon, but by the time I knew about, the barn door had been shut.

Amazingly, the S-T seems still to maintain its IT people don't talk to its reporters, who have to go to out-of-paper sources for information. While S-T passes blame to "new employees" in a Tennessee division of Scripps-Howard, a check this weekend shows the other papers in the chain are managing to keep their online comments services up and reasonably well moderated. Tells me we do have a problem, and that problem is somewhere in the Harris St. building.

Newspapers across the country are realizing the old fishwrap on the lawn model is trending toward buggy-whipdom. A recent NPR interview revealed the San Francisco Chronicle, heart of the Hearst chain, is losing a $million a WEEK. I believe the ink version of the Standard- Times is down to about 25% of households. When I was a young man, no one with pretensions of caring about "things" would have admitted to not reading the paper, and a hefty chunk of them paid for morning and afternoon editions.

I don't know how significant online revenues are to the S-T overall, but I know that online edition is a revenue source. As treasurer of two local issues SPACS, I have made out checks to pay for those annoying ads. Commercial advertizers want to see numbers of "hits" and "pageviews" to justify the ad rates. One can safely predict a sharp drop there during this "cooling off" month.

My co-author makes the case well that anonymous comments have a justifiable place in public discussion. Often exactly the people with real knowledge are in a position vulnerable to pressure from employers or commercial partners, and unlikely to risk comments for attribution. This reality justifies whistle-blower statutes granting anonymity and/or legal blocks to workplace retribution.

I hope during this period the S-T will re-examine the no anonymous posts policy announced by Mr. Archulteta. Allowing anonymity does not necessarily result in a slanderous free-for-all, that's where moderation comes into play. Set rules, keep them simple, and ENFORCE them.

Speech, Freedom, and the Internet

If you haven't noticed, the Standard Times has put their web comments on hold. I understand their reasoning and concerns, and I hope they thoroughly analyze the situation and bring the comments section back in a much improved manner. Reading the column today, though, doesn't leave me with a feeling of confidence.

First off I have to admit I have been dealing with electronic forums since before the internet was public. I was on the dial up computer bulletin boards back when a 300 baud modem was state of the art. I was on Compuserve (anyone else remember them) when they were about a year old. I have watched (and sometimes participated) in flame wars. The comments on the Standard times comments have gotten extreme sometimes, but if you really want to see how it's done you need to look at usenet (easily accessible through Groups.Google.com) and pay close attention to alt.flame and the various subgroups. I won't get in to the gritty details, but one of the groups has a subtitle "looking for the ultimate flame in return", so you can use your imagination. The interesting thing is that most usenet groups and other online forums are basically civil and manage to spread information and opinion and keep the flames, spam and other annoyances and hazards to an acceptable level. And they have done it while allowing anonymous free speech.

The key to a successful forum is a process called moderation. In its simplest definition moderation is just enforcing the rules. Moderation of forums is an ongoing process. It requires diligence and the ability to enforce rules. If you want a nice, civil, forum you have to be willing to strictly enforce the rules. You have to be willing to kill comments that break the rules, and you have to ban posters who break the rules. I normally use a 2 strikes rule. First time you break the rule, you get a warning. Next time you're banned. There are a number of tools that can be used to keep the unwanted away. Blocking emails, IP addresses, and lots of other tools can be used to keep a forum under control. You'll never get it perfect but you can make it great.

If we look at the Standard Times, and its forums, they really didn't do moderation well for quite a while. Since the comments feature came on line, there have been comments that were left on that should have been pulled. There were personal attacks, inappropriate language, and off topic posts that had nothing to do with the story that were let slide up until about half way through the last chiefs campaign. They finally started pulling some comments, and they still banned very few posters. By the time the FLDS news hit the paper, the comments were completely out of control. The genie was out of the bottle. Then, in the middle of all this, there was a poorly explained problem with their website that for about a day that disclosed the given name as well as the screen name of all of those posting comments. I still don't understand how a so called system wide change to the 19 Scripps websites only seems to have caused this problem to the Standard Times, especially when all the different websites seem to have different settings on how comments are handled. The reality is that it is time for the paper to close comments until new procedures and strategies can be put into place. They need some serious introspection.

Reading todays column over, I have a number of concerns with their approach. There have been many complaints similar to that made by aj432 long before May 22nd. Why did it take so long to react? Why have responses up until now so been ineffective? Why is it that the rest of the Scripps family of websites aren't having this many problems?

I am also very concerned that "anonymous" posting might disappear. As was shown not too long ago, the Standard times doesn't have truly anonymous posting. They still maintain a given name and an email address along with a posting history. Their current policy of keeping the given name private does give a certain amount of discreet privacy, while allowing the Standard Times to contact the poster in case of problems. If they keep the current registration procedure, they really have no way to ensure that the name the poster gave while registering is his true name. I wonder how many posters named GW Bush, M Mouse, J Davis, T Vasquez, etc. are currently signed up. There are also some much more fundamental reasons that at least some degree of anonymity should be available to the posters.

We must remember that this country has a long and proud history of anonymous commentary, especially political. Before and during the Revolution, there were numerous pamphleteers publishing articles on the injustices they saw at the time. Anonymity was important. If their identity had become known, they would have been lucky to just be hanged. Many writers in the abolitionist movement wrote anonymously for the same reasons. They were putting their life on the line to state their beliefs. Speaking out can still be dangerous today. Jobs, property, and lives can still be at stake no matter if the comments are true or not.

Then we have the history of the adoption of the constitution, with the federalist and anti-federalist papers. One of the reasons they were written under pseudonyms was so the ideas would be able to stand on their own merits, not on the reputation of the writers. Granted, many insiders knew who Publius was, but most of the audience read the papers before they knew who the author was, which gave the articles a chance at a somewhat unbiased read. This is still a meaningful goal today. There are times when an activist, official, or just well known person needs to present an idea that stands on its own merits, not on the public perception of its presenter. Anonymous speech is necessary for truly free speech and a healthy community dialog.

That doesn't mean there is little the standard times can or should do. There are some basic procedures they can implement to get their comments section back on track and still have a dynamic, healthy website.

First, limit the number of posts a day a person can do. You are already doing that in the print edition by limiting letters to the editor to one every 30 days. Between using email addresses, IP addresses, and cookies for tracking, there are ways to keep people from going overboard on the number of posts. Limit each poster to 1 post per day per topic, and 5 posts per day total, and a lot of the problems will disappear. Far too many of the current posters are using the comments section as little more than a public chat room. Some don't have a life, so are posting or responding twenty or more times a day. Limit them to one good post a day, with a response being unavailable until the next day, and the quality of the postings will improve, and the amount of vitriol will diminish significantly.

Next, enlist the web community in policing of the comments. Set the software up so that you can have posters that can moderate certain sections, and then get volunteers you can trust to help moderate the comments. Set it up so that all of their decisions can be reviewed and undone by staff if need be, but there should be plenty of people willing to help.

If you can't get help in moderating a section, set a limit on the numbers of posts per day that will be allowed. 25 to 50 might be a good starting point but flexibility will be needed to get it right.

Additionally, have staff respond to posts that are getting close to the edge within the comments section from time to time. Public explanations of how a post failed to meet the rules helps motivate all posters to play by the rules better. Remind them that free speech is not unfettered, unrestricted speech. It's your soap box and you get to decide the rules.

As I stated earlier, I have been participating in online forums for over 30 years. I know that you can run a successful forum and still have anonymous, intense, active discussions. I realize that the comments are the Standard Times soap box, and that they are a business, and they have the right to take their soap box away if they so choose, but I also know that they do want a open, healthy dialog on the issues. It contributes greatly to a healthy environment and community. I hope they consider this post and my suggestions carefully. In the mean time, we at conchoinfo will be maintaining our policy of allowing anonymous posts. It takes work, but is worth the effort. We may change how we do moderation, but anonymous speech is too important a part of free speech to be eliminated without exhausting other options.