The appearance of inclusiveness in New York

Some of you may recall that a few days ago I posted about a bill before the New York state Senate that would prohibit anonymous commenting on websites.  While looking into the bill while I was preparing the post I stumbled across a New York state website that provides access to a copy of the text of the bill (as well as all other bills before the legislature as well as other legislative documents), as well as some additional information about things like expected fiscal implications.

One aspect of the website that stood out immediately was that at the bottom of the page they provide an opportunity for members of the public to publicly comment on the bill or give the page a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down.'  Not surprisingly, to comment they require one to sign in through one of any number common web identifiers (Ex. OpenID or a Yahoo account).  Though this hurdle is likely meant to cut down on nonconstructive comments and spam.  Once you've submitted a comment one is notified that before comments are posted for the public to see they must be approved by a moderator.

Because no one had yet commented on the bill, or at least that's how it seemed at the time, I thought that I might give their system a shot and show who their whole system worked.  And as this is the first time I've seen this option available to members of the public I thought I would try to help those responsible for implementing the system out by giving them some traffic.

I can't remember what my first comment a few days ago was, but I know it was pretty mundane.  I probably commented/asked about enforcement.  Whatever the case may be, it's now been almost a week since I made the comment on the site and it still hasn't been approved by the moderators nor have I received a notice indicating that my comment has been rejected.  Even the 'thumbs down' that I gave the bill hasn't yet made an appearance.

While I think it is admirable of the New York State Senate to try to use new technologies to encourage the participation of the citizenship in the legislative process, I fear that implementing a system that is either non-functional or incredibly slow may actually be worse for public participation.  Also, by making the terms of comment moderation unclear users aren't able to know if any comments that do make it past the moderators are really reflective of public sentiment, or if the comment they are reading are those comments favoured by the moderator/censor.  Even if the comments aren't being censored/skewed the fact that they are moderated makes it hard for a skeptical public to know that this is actually the case and that the viewable comments do accurately reflect the views of the comment posting public.

My gut is telling me that it seems likely that the level of discussion that we are seeing on these New York Senate bills will be not to dissimilar from the type of discussion we might come to find standard in a world where anti-anonymity on the internet legislation is the norm.