As anyone who has commented on a Globe and Mail story probably knows, we have a policy on what kinds of comments are appropriate and which ones are removed, but I confess that we haven’t always done a great job of communicating that policy clearly and consistently to our readers — in part because our policy has been evolving, and continues to do so (which I would argue is a good thing).

So why and how are comments on Globe stories taken down? Why doesn’t the Globe require commenters to use their real names? Why do some comments simply disappear, while others are replaced by a message that says they weren’t “consistent with our guidelines?” Do Globe reporters ever respond to comments, and under what conditions?

These are the kinds of questions that our Community Guidelines FAQ was developed to answer. It also deals with how we approach other forms of community engagement, including live discussions (which we do using software from Toronto’s Cover It Live) and forums, which we are in the process of rolling out on our Globe Investor site, and hopefully elsewhere.

In coming up with our policies, we have looked at the way many other media outlets handle comments and community — including sites such as The Guardian (whose policies are here), the CBC and the New York Times — as well as non-media communities like Metafilter and Slashdot. Like all of those sites, we want to allow our readers to comment on issues they feel strongly about, but at the same time we want to maintain a civil tone that encourages dialogue instead of partisan attacks.

We are probably never going to achieve that balance completely, or to everyone’s satisfaction. But we are trying hard to do so, because we know that many of you look to the Globe as a place where you can discuss important topics, and we want to encourage others to do so.

The FAQ is a work in progress, so please let me know what you think, either by posting a comment here or by reaching me at @mathewi on Twitter or via email at mingram@globeandmail.com.

Some of you may have read — either here or elsewhere — about one of the social-media projects that I’ve been involved with at the Globe, a joint venture with the Dominion Institute known as the Public Policy Wiki. We started the wiki in January, as a way of soliciting input from concerned Canadians about a range of public policy issues, and the first issue we launched with was the federal budget. Almost a thousand people signed up in a matter of two weeks, and we got dozens of excellent “briefing note”-style policy proposals submitted, commented on, voted on and promoted in the forums. On the day the budget was released, we took the two most popular proposals and sent them to the Finance Minister in Ottawa.

Our second issue was Afghanistan, and while we got a lot of people reading the prepared analysis and commentary by Major-General Lewis Mackenzie and Janice Gross Stein, as well as the prototype briefing notes submitted by students at the School for Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, we didn’t get a lot of submissions from readers concerned about Canada’s role in Afghanistan. Why? That’s a good question. It could be that we didn’t get word out to enough people about the wiki, or that the issue — while important — just wasn’t urgent enough to compel people to prepare policy proposals related to it, whereas the budget was very top-of-mind for readers.

In any case, we are launching our third issue today: Climate Change. We hope that people who feel strongly about this issue on either side of the fence will come to the Policy Wiki and read the prepared analysis we have from both Dr. David Suzuki — one of Canada’s pre-eminent environmental advocates — and environmental consultant Ian Morton of the Summerhill Group, as well as an overview from Mark Jaccard of the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and former CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission.

Having read these analysis and overview pieces, readers can check out some of the links to background material, white papers, research documents and Globe and Mail commentary and news stories put together by the Dominion Institute and the tireless researchers at the Globe (thanks, Marjan!). And then they can either vote for the analysis they agree with most, comment on any of the pieces we have prepared, post their thoughts in the forum, or edit an existing briefing note and/or create their own briefing note using the wiki’s built-in tools. As we did with the budget, we will pass on the most popular proposals to the federal Environment Minister.

If you are concerned about Canada’s role in climate change, and what the federal government is (or isn’t) doing about it, please contribute your thoughts through the wiki, and pass on the URL to anyone you think might be interested. If you have any thoughts, please contact me on Twitter (@mathewi) or by email at mathew [at] mathewingram.com.

I gave a short presentation at the Podcamp Toronto “unconference” a few days ago about some of the things we’re doing at the Globe and Mail (the national daily newspaper I work for in Toronto, for those of you from elsewhere), and a number of people asked me if I would be putting the slides up anywhere, so I uploaded them to Slideshare and have embedded the presentation here in this post (RSS readers can click here to go straight to Slideshare and see them). If you want to see and hear the presentation, there’s a video link at the Podcamp wiki.

Here’s the condensed version: I introduced myself as a former reporter, columnist, technology writer and blogger for the Globe who is now the paper’s online “communities editor,” for lack of a better term. That means I am trying to think of — and follow through on — as many different methods of creating, enhancing, fertilizing and connecting with communities of readers around various topics. I went through a few of the ways we are trying to do that, as well as the rationale behind them and what we have learned from them, and then I closed with what we are hoping to do in the future.

The first big experiment was a project called the Public Policy Wiki, which we set up quite quickly and with fairly limited resources (or time), using an off-the-shelf implementation of TikiWiki, which I highly recommend as a very flexible and multi-faceted wiki platform. We deliberately didn’t over-design it, because we wanted to make it look different from the Globe — and wanted it to look sort of experimental as well, which it is. We had quite a lot of success with the first issue we tackled, which was the federal budget, but less so with the second issue (Afghanistan). We are launching a third leg soon on the environment.

One of the other big experiments has been our increasing use of Cover It Live, a live-blogging/discussion tool developed by Keith McSpurren and his team in Toronto. It provides an easy-to-use and administer platform for hosting live-blogs, with a dashboard that allows you to approve individual comments, auto-approve commenters (so their comments flow in automatically), block commenters, send private messages, post audio/video/photos, conduct polls and so on. It is easily embedded in a story page, and it has been a great tool for our coverage of things such as the budget, the CRTC hearings, a subway shooting and the Obama inauguration.

The third thing I focused on is Twitter (where I am @mathewi). We have only a handful of reporters and editors on Twitter, in contrast to somewhere like BusinessWeek, which has 50 or more, but we are gaining steam. I have been promoting the use of Twitter as a way of connecting directly with readers — not just to promote our content, but to use readers as a resource for stories and our coverage of them. It also humanizes the newspaper and its staff in a way that I think is particularly important at a time like this (my friend Duarte put that very well in this message).

As far as lessons go, you can read the slides yourself, but the things I’ve learned so far are in many cases relatively simple:

– things like the Policy Wiki don’t just draw a huge crowd without some work; there needs to be an obvious incentive of some kind, plus some good old-fashioned promotional effort, and better tie-ins between the wiki and the paper

– Cover It Live is a great way of making an event into a kind of micro-community, and many people like the immediacy; others (including some within the newsroom) find it noisy and distracting

– Twitter needs to be personal or it’s simply not going to work. And if you let it, it will suck up every spare moment you have :-)

Let me know what you think, and if you have any thoughts or questions, my contact info is on the last slide. If you like this post, click the little bird that’s embedded in the first paragraph and it will add it to Twitter for you.

With the tabling of the federal budget this afternoon (which we are live-blogging), the Globe’s first experiment in merging public-policy debate and social-media tools — the Public Policy Wiki, a joint venture with the Dominion Institute — comes to a kind of conclusion, but the discussion that we helped start about the economy will continue as long as Canadians have ideas they wish to share.

We’ve collected the data on the two policy proposals that our contributors and readers supported the most, and we’ve sent that information to the Finance Minister as we promised. But while the budget process is now complete, the economic portion of the Policy Wiki will remain available for contributions, even as we begin a new chapter aimed at discussing Canada’s policy towards Afghanistan.

During the two weeks it has been open, the Policy Wiki has attracted more than 850 registered users and almost 100,000 pageviews, and contributors have created and discussed almost 30 briefing-note style policy proposals, ranging from a proposal for fractional ownership of farmland by the unemployed to a system of regional recycling mills.

The policy proposal that got the most support — as measured by a combination of pageviews, comments and votes — was the idea of a 100-per-cent GST rebate for non-profit institutions such as charities, hospitals and universities. The next-most popular briefing note was a proposal to create a Green Infrastructure Fund, which would see Ottawa spend six billion dollars for upgrades to the power grid, energy-efficient building renovation, switching to renewable energy sources, and improvements to public transit and the highway infrastructure to reduce pollution.

Interestingly enough, while it didn’t get the most votes or comments, the most-viewed page at the Wiki (other than the home page and the resources page) was the Flat Tax briefing note. And in terms of the policy proposals that came after the GST Rebate and Green Fund in popularity, some of the top submissions were the Fibre to the Home note, the EI proposal, and one that recommended the GST be increased to create a stimulus spending fund.

As far as polls go, the analysis by Don Drummond got the most overall votes (with 79 per cent in agreement), followed by the analysis by Jim Stanford (with 60 per cent in agreement). Of those who voted on the GST Rebate proposal, 95 per cent agreed, and of those who voted on the Green Fund note, 83 per cent were in support.

There was one late entry in the process that is worth of note: A policy proposal created on the very last day before the budget, proposing a Child Nutrition effort by the government, sparked a flurry of memberships (over 150 in just a few hours) and voting that pushed the note to the number one spot in terms of votes. This was a valiant effort, and those who worked to get that kind of support out so quickly are to be congratulated.

After discussions with our partners at the Dominion Institute, however, we decided that a campaign like that, however worthwhile it might be, shouldn’t take precedence over policy proposals that had been read and voted on over the life of the wiki, and so we chose the GST Rebate and the Green Fund as the “winners” of this round. This is only a snapshot in time however, and we hope that the debate continues on some of our proposals.

Our next policy issue is Afghanistan: What should Canada’s approach to that country be, both in terms of our military and our humanitarian efforts? Should we pull our troops out at the earliest opportunity or expand them? Should we ramp up the social spending and charitable efforts we have proposed so far? We’ve got some expert input already that we will be launching with after the budget is over, including a proposal and analysis of the situation from retired Major-General Lewis Mackenzie, a veteran of nine peacekeeping missions in six different conflict areas over the course of his Canadian military service. Please come and participate in the discussion.

I don’t do this a lot, but I just thought I would point out for those who might be interested that the Globe and Mail — which happens to be my employer — has removed the pay wall that used to block access to a lot of the paper’s online content. All of the columnists are now free to all readers, as are the horoscope and the crossword puzzle (which, as most journalists know, are the features that most readers really want). As the announcement on the Globe’s home page describes it, this means that all of the paper’s columnists “can join the fray and add their talented voices to the freewheeling conversations of the Internet era.”

Why did the paper decide to drop the wall? Without going into too much detail, my understanding is that we did it for the same reason the New York Times did: while the Insider Edition (as we called it) made money for the paper, the number of subscribers who were opting to pay for that content wasn’t growing, or at least wasn’t growing quickly enough to make it a very attractive business. Eventually, I think, senior editors decided that we would be a lot better off opening the doors and allowing people to link to our pay-walled content.

I haven’t seen recent numbers, but within a few months of the NYT dropping its wall, traffic to the site appeared to have surged. Whether the Times has been able to monetize all of that new traffic — and thus make up for the lack of a pay wall — is something I don’t know. But at least now they have a chance to grow that instead of managing what had become a slow or no-growth business, and so do we (the Globe continues to have a subscription product online, now known as Globe Plus, which includes the finance site GlobeInvestorGold and an “e-Edition” of the paper; access to the archives will also still cost a fee).

It’s interesting to look at some of the more than 180 comments that have been posted on the story since it went up first thing this morning: while most are of the “thank God you finally saw the light” variety, there are some who are less than enthused. One commenter says:

“I’ve long since found online alternatives to the Globe’s old ‘insider’ features. You can’t shut us out for a few years and then expect us to come back just because it’s free. You’re not the only game in town, and you’re going to have to offer us something genuinely new and original to get us to come back on a regular basis.”

Some commenters wish that we would go even further.