Australian government turns to blogging - for consultations!

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 05:05

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The rules themselves:

"do not post any material that a reasonable person would consider:

includes any abusive, obscene, indecent or offensive language
is defamatory, abusive, harassing or hateful
that you do not have the necessary rights, licences and consents to post
constitutes spam, unauthorised advertising or solicits
contains long embedded URLs
invades anyone's privacy or impersonates anyone
is far off-topic
encourages conduct that may or would constitute a criminal offence or give rise to civil liability, or that otherwise violates any local, state, national or international law or regulation anywhere in the world, or
the comment appears to contain irrelevant or excessive links or appears to contain code"

seem designed to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible, and that should encourage the maximum participation by real people (as opposed to link spammers and trolls, both of which are all too common in unmoderated spaces).

Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, is also party to the trial.

"Given the enthusiastic uptake of online communications tools like blogging, it makes sense for Government to experiment with these new methods of engagement, particularly on a vital topic such as the future of our digital economy," he said.

You can find the Digital Economy Future Directions blog here.