Two week review/evaluation

One of the things that bugs me most about Portland’s city government is how seldom anyone stops to look at how projects are going, or reports on what went right, what could have been done better. After twenty-five years in nursing, it’s pretty much reflex action to me, to include assessment, evaluation, and updating the plan of care, in every day’s work. Yet even when projects are completed successfully, the City rarely dedicates staff time on individual projects to reporting back to citizens on where their tax money was spent, whether the intended results were achieved, and how to repeat successes and avoid mistakes in the future.

Two weeks ago, the Thursday after Christmas, I sent out a few e-mails, saying basically “FYI, I started a blog”. Jack Bog’s blog, Loaded Orygun, and Mercury Blogtown graciously responded by posting notices on their popular sites, which generated hundreds of visitors the first day. Kari Chisholm equally kindly not only highlighted the Mercury’s information on Blue Oregon, but also added this blog to the Lefty blogs tracker, which has sent many more new readers my way. Samuel’s referral at Zehnkatzen Times brought tears to my eyes in capturing exactly what I was trying to do in my campaign. I’m not sure if The Oregonian‘s blog post was aiming at encouraging or discouraging visitors by noting “Expect a focus on land-use, development and parks from the neighborhood eye”, but thanks anyway, Ryan, I’ll try to post something on those topics soon! And there are others who helped publicize this site. Thank you all, for your good wishes as well as your links.

So two weeks later, here is some assessment information I hope you find interesting:

* The blog is attracting well over 300 visits per day. More than 400 on January 4 and 10. The most visits on a single day to my campaign web site was 277, on May 16, the last day of the primary election.

* The 40 posts evaluated from the first two weeks fall broadly into the following categories:
12 Portland/Oregon;
9 general/US/world interest;
10 on City geek issues (4 on public process, 3 on Charter review and 3 on City Council agendas);
1 on campaign financing; and
8 of my husband’s photos, up only because they’re gorgeous and make the site more interesting. Some of the other posts carried Steve’s art with more connection to the message.

* Twenty-seven new users signed up to submit comments. Anyone who was signed up on my campaign web site or has a Drupal account was already in. At least one blogger commented elsewhere that the sign-up requirement stops participation.

* The most read post, closing in on 700 hits, is Oregon, Red State in ’08. There are two comments on this post on my site, one of which is by me. Just goes to show you can’t judge a blog’s traffic by its number of comments.

* Second most popular: Moving I-5 South.

* And in a surprising third: the Nachos recipe. See, I figured folks would like it, you’re just reluctant to admit it. Update: “Abuse of public process” has now overtaken the recipe. That was unexpected, too. Apparently more people care about citizen participation than I’d thought.

Evaluation:

Jack Bogdanski is right, blogging is addictive! It’s fun, though. It makes me think more intensively, in more situations….Is this a good topic for the blog?….Would people be interested?…. Would it be right to blog about this, or is it private?…. What other questions need to be answered, to make the blog post more rounded? It’s useful, in providing a Rapid Response network and/or in publicizing good volunteer work, international issues (also surprisingly, the international posts are consistently getting high traffic), and other things that might otherwise go unrecognized.

And this blog opens another forum for discussion in Portland, one that is simultaneously more restricted and more open than some other blogs linked from here. It’s limited in requiring comment posters to register, with the stated intent of keeping the posts civil and respectful. That is offputting to those who want to be able to say whatever they want, however they want to say it; it is more welcoming to folks who don’t read/post on other blogs, because they don’t want to run the risk of getting slimed personally, or because they hear enough angry people in their jobs and prefer not to read more insulting comments in their leisure time. This blog has been termed more a “discussion forum” than an all-comments-welcome blog; I think it therefore provides a different option, that may be helpful to some.

Plan:

Keep blogging. Continue the range of topics, in approximately the same proportion of geek/local/general/awesome photos.

Stick with the current user sign-up and comment policy, at least for now.

Sometimes, blogs are simply not the best forum to discuss sensitive issues. Like it or not, sometimes it is necessary to meet, face to face, and look at body language as well as listening to words. If “positions” are already staked out and fired up ahead of time, a series of posts on a blog can make understanding and compomise more difficult to achieve.

If I were hosting a site like this as an elected official, I would have two comment streams set up: one no-rules, post anything, anonymous if you want; the other with guidelines and monitoring like this blog’s. But, to quote Ronald Reagan which I almost never do in a positive manner, I am paying for this microphone. I don’t want to lie awake at night, steamed about being insulted on my own blog, or worried that someone else will feel attacked by comments. For now at least, I will keep it with the user sign-up and comment guidelines, while recognizing that is cutting down on the number of readers willing to post.

Continue to work on cutting to the heart of complicated, seemingly dry issues, while striving to explain them adequately. For me, and probably many others, the Portland Communique was the epitome of accomplishing this goal for Portland issues. After two weeks, I know I still have a ways to go, and I’ll keep working at it.

Next scheduled evaluation after two months.

Comments welcome 🙂