Governor's online forum hits a few stumbling blocks
Governor Deval Patrick's new website was designed to transport his Internet-based grass-roots campaign network into the realm of governing, helping activists across the state engage in a dialogue with one another and the governor himself on important Massachusetts issues.
But since the website's debut last weekend, the lofty public discourse on issues such as same-sex marriage, renewable energy, and education funding has at times dissolved into a caustic and unfocused public shouting match -- about the Sept. 11 , 2001, attacks, Christianity, and the website itself -- highlighting the political pitfalls of a medium that served Patrick so well during the campaign.
But Liz Morningstar, executive director of Patrick's political committee, said that the website, despite distractions, has delivered on the governor's promise to govern as he campaigned, from the grass roots.
But the cacophony in cyberspace underscores the inherent challenge any politician faces in opening a public forum on the Internet: focusing the discussion without censoring opinion, particularly in a medium in which posters are less restrained than they might be in person.
"It's definitely a double-edged sword," said John Horrigan, associate director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Interactivity, on the one hand, is certainly a smart strategy for elected officials to use to try to reach out to their constituents. . . . What you also give up when you rely on interactivity is control."
But that, Morningstar said, is "the beauty of it."
"It is meant to be a cacophony of issues important to every day people," she said.
While the organizers' enthusiasm for the website remains undiminished, they have already had to make changes; in its original form, the site required new users to register by finding their name in a database that included addresses with house numbers, provoking an uproar among residents concerned about privacy. While designed to help users identify themselves for the purpose of registration, it could have been used to find the street address of any Massachusetts voter.
"Now that I am able to see how clearly you have violated my right to privacy, and what a terrible mistake you have made by doing so, you no longer have my defense or my support," J.B. of Plympton wrote in a message to the governor on the site.
The committee has modified the search so that it requires new users to enter their full address to register through the voter database. Users can no longer retrieve identifying information of other people by scrolling through names on the voter rolls, as they could before.
DevalPatrick.com continues to encourage first-time users to register through the database -- registering as an anonymous user is also allowed -- so that each post is signed with a user's initials and hometown.
Aides said the point of using these signatures is to make people more accountable for what they say, just as they would be in a real town meeting, as well as to provide an extra barrier against out-of-state interlopers.
"It helps us keep it honest," Morningstar said.
Patrick propelled himself to victory with help from a massive grass-roots effort, fueled by an online coordinating drive that allowed volunteers to log in and gain access to the campaign's voter database so they could make calls on Patrick's behalf.
The campaign website also helped volunteers keep track of their calls, allowing them to essentially act as mini-campaign managers. But that website was not an issue-exchange forum and did not allow general online discussion.
People using the forums on the new site do not lack for points of view. In less than a week, more than 2,400 individual users have registered on the site, according to the committee, and there are scores of posts on everything from off-road vehicles in state parks, which had nearly 200 posts by yesterday, to motorcycle parking in Boston, which had just one.
The hottest topics ran the ideological spectrum: same-sex marriage (for and against), school funding reform, rolling back the income tax, renewable energy, gun owners' rights, more funding for parks.
Patrick's aides have said the governor would keep tabs on the site and write back or even act on issues that receive a great deal of attention.
But Steve Owens, a Watertown organizer for the Patrick campaign who writes a political blog called .08 Acres (point08.blogspot.com), said the real advantage of the website for activists is not winning the most votes for their issue online, but being able to connect with other like-minded people whom they would not otherwise meet.
"The point is to get action on your issues, and the way you do that is by working with people who signed up," he said.
But the site does not yet allow coordinators, or people who raise topics, to contact those who sign on as their allies; these allies, however, can contact the coordinators. Bruce Leicher, a Harvard parent helping to organize a campaign to overhaul the school-funding system, e-mailed the network of parents he has been working with to encourage them to vote for their issue on the website.
That helped his cause become one of the most popular, but he was not able to contact any of the people he did not already know. Morningstar said that capability is on the way, but the committee wanted to take its time devising a way for people to network without getting flooded with unwanted e-mail.
Still, Leicher said he admired what the committee had done.
"This is a lot of work to put this together," he said. "I don't want to be critical of them because I think what they've done is fantastic."
Another popular topic was a discussion about whether the Sept. 11 attacks were, as one forum host asserted, "clearly a fraud conducted by members of our own government in an effort to take over the world."
That assertion provoked more indignation than support.
Morningstar said the committee would remove posts that are profane, threatening or unrelated to political discourse. But the 9/11 conspiracy theorists did not fit those categories, Morningstar said, even though she thought their views were "absolutely wrong."
"These are people that believe in what they're saying; it doesn't mean the governor believes in what they're saying," she said.
Owens predicted that over time, Patrick opponents will lose interest in the website, leaving it mostly in the hands of supporters, who would make it more focused and useful.
"The real issues will rise to the top eventually," he said. 