Friday Round-Up, August 13, 2010

From John Kamensky: 

Gov Exec: 2010 Census, after all the hoopla:  “On time and under budget” 

Gov Exec: Defense abandons insourcing efforts: “we weren’t seeing the savings we had hoped for.” 

Gov Exec: Gates Announces DOD Cuts: Business Transformation Agency, Joint Forces Command, the CIO’s office all get the axe. 

The Center for American Progress released a summary of the panels and transcripts of the presentations from last week’s “Doing What Works” conference featuring three secretaries and two deputy secretaries, among others. 

From Gadi Ben-Yehuda:

I've been thinking a lot this week about how best to encourage an active but polite online community.  A lot of sites seem to be struggling with this issue, and these three articles speak to different persepctives.  The Gov Gab comment policy is instructive, but for some communities--especially those that are very active and staffed by few people--moderating all the threads internally may be difficult, if not impossible.

Salon: Why I like vicious, anonymous online comments

This article argues that we're all trolls at heart.  That Bruce Wayne is the mask that Batman wears, not the other way around.  A very Victorian weltanschauung. 

Salon: Online comments need moderation, not "real names"

The author asks, pithily: 

The great mistake so many newspapers and media outlets made was to turn on the comments software and then walk out of the room. They seemed to believe that the discussions would magically take care of themselves.

 

If you opened a public cafe or a bar in the downtown of a city, failed to staff it, and left it untended for months on end, would you be surprised if it ended up as a rat-infested hellhole?

Well, the guys at the Baltimore Free Store might (NPR piece about them). . . .

Slate: Not Sarah Palin's Friends

Now here's a woman who knows how to curate her community.  But the critical component is that she has staff dedicated to the task.

Gov Gab Comment Policy (emphasis mine)

We welcome your comments and expect that our conversation will follow the general rules of respectful civil discourse. This is a moderated blog, and we will only post comments from bloggers 13 years or older that relate to topics on Gov Gab: Your U.S. Government Blog. We will review comments for posting within one business day. You are fully responsible for everything that you submit in your comments, and all posted comments are in the public domain. We do not discriminate against any views, but we reserve the right not to post comments. We do not post comments that are off-topic, spam, or overtly self-promoting.