Comments Coming to the First Blog?

Greetings, FedBlog readers! Thanks again to Alyssa for letting me invade her space (and yours) while she's out partying it up in Vegas stimulating the economy one of our nation's fastest growing counties.

While I'm proud to be an all-around government geek, my particular beat centers around the use of collaborative tools in government to enhance transparency, innovation, public engagement, and other Good Things in that vein. To that end, today brings some intriguing news: The White House blog is slated to receive its own comments section. (h/t gov 2.0 superstar Gwynne Kostin)

This, of course, raises the question: Why? Now, it's certainly unalloyed Cool that they've defaulted in the direction of transparency; having a comments section because there's just no justifiable reason not to. And in the case of the White House, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that every comment or even most will receive a response. But this does raise an issue that arises in nearly every example of public engagement that I've seen in government: What's the value exchange? What can people expect in exchange for the time and effort they spend providing feedback?

The challenge here is that "official" blogs work best when they're staffed by people who can plausibly be even mildly responsive. To my mind, the best example of this today is the TSA Blog "Evolution of Security." Some of the less effective blogs I've seen, by contrast, purport to be written by actual cabinet secretaries -- which is both implausible, and a little disturbing if true. ("Yes, I know we're in the midst of this key debate about regulating carbon emissions, but this guy just posted the funniest LOLcat!") Peter Orzag is a laudable exception, but in general, people would much rather get real feedback from less-senior people than canned responses from implausibly senior officials.

So, three cheers to the White House for embracing the blog format and giving folks yet another way to give government some feedback. It will be interesting to see what "they" -- meaning both the White House and citizens -- make of it.