If you are a public agency and you launch a blog which immediately achieves success with a high number of daily readers that leave scores of comments to discuss the posts and for the first time truly opens a public discussion on a topic what do you do next?

Shut down the blog of course!

This is the story of METROBLOG Orlando Don’t bother clicking on the link, it’s gone. Of course if you know what a Google cache is you'll be able to see some of it :-)

The following is a recap of the events that surrounded the launch and demise of a client blog. The purpose for telling this story is to help others learn. However, I can’t really say ‘learn by our mistakes’ since we didn’t make any. Nonetheless it is an interesting story.

Back-Story

METROPLAN Orlando is a regional transportation planning organization in Central Florida. From their site:

The mission of METROPLAN ORLANDO is to provide leadership in planning and promoting a comprehensive intermodal surface transportation system that will provide for regional mobility, encourage a positive investment climate and foster sustainable development sensitive to community and natural resources.

Part of MPO’s effort is to solicit public input and foster discussion on the variety of transportation issues. This includes all modes of transportation: vehicle, freight, rail, pedestrian, public transport, bicycle, train, aviation and transportation disadvantaged (handicapped). Previously this was mostly done via public meetings which often where held at times that limited public involvement. Usually only those that were very passionate about a subject would attend. The general public would normally rely upon the local media to become informed/educated about the topics. With such a critical issue as transportation though it is important to involve as many citizens as possible.

The public affairs staff at MPO thought a blog would be a great vehicle to start a truly public discussion of the issue. The idea was pushed up the chain of command with the executive commmittee being told that a blog was going to be launched. It should be noted that the MPO executive committee is made up of local elected officials that serve the counties and cities that MPO represents.

The pros and cons of a blog were discussed at length. As with any political topic there are opposing views and the blog would allow these. A few particularly hot topics in Orlando are commuter rail and toll-roads. The blog also allowed MPO to discuss transportation-related issues that were not front-page news like commuter rail.

From the start MPO was aware that the blog would allow for comments. MPO realized that by allowing comments they would be giving a forum to their critics, but the purpose of the blog was to promote discussion and discussion requires that all views be heard.

It was decided that comments would be moderated but only be removed if they contained profanity, racial or insensitive language. Everything else was fair game. Another issue that pointed to moderation was that MPO staff didn’t work on the weekends and really didn’t have the staff to monitor a blog 24/7.

Approval was given and development began.

Development

Development of the blog was rather straightforward and took less than a month. The biggest hold-ups were legal issues related to the sunshine law. Florida has a very broad public records law. In a nutshell all records of any state or local agency is open for public review. Some records can be made private, but for the most part it’s all out there. How did this apply to the blog? We had to inform all readers/commenters that any comment they left would be public record. In addition, elected officials could not use the blog to discuss an issue with each other since this would constitute a (virtual) meeting between them and would require public notice (part of the public records law).

Other standard legal language such as the privacy policy, comment policy and disclaimer were developed. MPO staff didn’t really need to research what topics to post about, the issues were well known.

During the development process we discussed the metrics they would use for success. Since MPO wanted the blog to be a location for discussion the true measure of success would be comments. The plan was to measure daily readership via the web and RSS as well as the comment volume and trackback links (via services such as Technorati and PubSub). If they had 1000 visitors per day but no comments that would not be good. Conversely 40 visitors per day with 20 comments would be great.

Launch

The blog was launched with a soft opening on Friday, August 19, 2005 followed shortly by a hard launch. Posts included a variety transportation topics. Some topics they knew would be heavily discussed (i.e. commuter rail) while other topics were related to traffic safety or lesser known issues. Every once in a while they planned to get technical with a post from a traffic engineer or to begin a discussion about flow control. At first the public affairs staff wrote the blog posts but it was soon expanded to include the bicycling & pedestrian coordinator and the traffic-flow engineer with more bloggers coming online in the future.

During the soft opening MPO staff let a few key individuals within the community know of the blog. Some of the first to be sent a ‘preview’ were some of MPO’s harshest critics. In less than 24 hours the blog was full of comments. Many of the critics wondered if MPO was truly interested in an ‘open’ discussion.

The first weekend the big ‘issue’ was moderation. A few individuals left comments and saw the ‘your comment will be approved shortly’ message. There response was ‘censorship’. On their own forums they wondered if MPO planned to ‘censor’ their comments and that it was taking more than a day to approve comments. The truth was it was a weekend and no MPO staff was there to moderate. When the comments did get posted they weren’t censored in any way. That killed the ‘censorship talk’ among the critics.

Over the next few weeks traffic grew steadily as did comments. MPO realized that they were providing a forum for their critics, but a funny thing happened. In the past the public would learn of alternative viewpoints via quotes in the paper or another third-party. In many cases this is an abridged/edited version. With a blog comment the public saw the whole viewpoint and in some cases they would be full of typos, grammatical or factual errors (or the dreaded ALL CAPS COMMENT).

For MPO and blog was ‘home-court advantage.’ They were the forum for discussion of transportation issues. Yes there were critics, but there were also citizens that would offer other viewpoints. One frequent commenter was from the Atlanta area. He would provide thoughts on how Atlanta had dealt with similar circumstances that Orlando was facing.

Over the next month readership continued to grow, the local newspaper included the rss headline feed on their site, comments poured in and MPO had already received quite a few awards and coverage within the transportation governance and public information arena for their forward-thinking initiative.

Things were going good. But that’s usually when the rug gets pulled out.

Takedown

During a routine METROPLAN executive committee meeting on Sept 14, 2005 the blog came up for discussion (it was not on the agenda). A group of the commissioners did not like that the blog allowed for public criticism of their actions. The discussion continued and turned to the ‘security’ issues the blog presented.

(As an aside I love when quasi-technical people bring up security as an all-encompassing F.U.D. for the non-technical people. Yes it is true that somebody can ‘hack’ your server and deface your web site, but chances are they’ll go after something a bit juicier like your personal records for ID theft. You might as well turn off all the computers and put them in the closet if you want to be safe)

The discussion continued, ‘What if this happened, what if this…” all of them hypothetical situations that most likely would not occur. Was it possible? Yes. Would it happen, No?

The public affairs staff did their best to defend the blog, but the decision was already made. A vote was taken and the blog was to be turned off. On September 14th, 2005 the following was posted to METROBLOG:

MetroBlogOrlando has been suspended.

Blogs are a new tool for public involvement and communication. As far as we know, METROPLAN ORLANDO was the first metropolitan planning organization (MPO) in the country to implement a blog. But with innovation and initiative come risks and uncertainty. Since its launch, a number of issues related to the blog have come to our attention. These include questions about Sunshine laws, liability and inappropriate comments.

We remain committed to providing citizens with information about transportation and involving them in the planning process. We will continue to do so through other outreach efforts.

In reality a select group of commissioners that are extremely risk averse did not like any public criticism of their actions. Many of their critics often said that these local politicians do not really want to hear public input (synthetic transparency?). Shutting down the blog only confirmed this.

Epilogue

The blog remained available online but there were no new posts and we disabled all comments. In the next few weeks the discussion continued on other blogs. The executive committee meeting in which the blog vote occurred was taped (remember the sunshine law). A local radio show played the tape and later posted a transcript of the meeting.

On October 31, 2005 the blog content was removed and the server turned off.

Epilogue II

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now (almost two months) but in the end it was better to put some distance between the closing of the blog and this entry.

One of the great things about being a consultant is that you are free to choose who you do business with. On a number of occasions I have been contacted by organizations and individuals wanting to create blogs for what I thought were nefarious reasons. I chose not to work with them. In the case of METROPLAN what we were doing was great and a first within that industry.

We worried that some of the transportation issues would be over the head of the local blog readers, but they weren’t. The public response was great. The criticisms were great. It was what a blog should be.

If you ask the public affairs staff they will tell you the blog was a positive experience and truly the future of public interaction with government agencies, unfortunately the elected officials did not feel the same way.

I have quite a few friends and relatives that have worked in local government and a common theme emerges. Within the rank and file there are great people doing great things but too often they are overshadowed by the mistakes of self-interested politicians.

Watching the end-situation unfold as their blog consultant and as a blogger was sometimes a painful experience, but a good one to go through.

What did I learn? Like I started off with, we can’t really say we did anything wrong. Even though the ‘higher-ups’ may know a blog has been created and allow it to exist for over a month doesn’t always mean that they won’t pull the plug. Perhaps we could have done a better job letting them know the types of public input they would receive, but politicians should already know this.

In the end it relates to something I pass along to students I speak to. There is always a loss of innocence early in your career when you see a positive project/idea get shot down for political reasons. You might have the greatest idea, but since the senior VP didn’t come up with it, or can’t make it their own, the idea is killed.

It’s unfortunate that there are individuals that put their own personal gain over the benefit of the company or the voters, but those people exist. Blogs are helping to break down those barriers, but it isn’t always easy.