Should Portsmouth Patch Users Post Only Under Real Names?

Patch brought a radical new online experience to Portsmouth: community-focused journalism and a forum where neighbors can discuss and debate ideas. But to truly live up to its promise, I would argue that Patch needs to rethink its commenting policies to ensure transparency and accountability.

In the "Terms of Use" everyone agrees to when registering to comment, all users acknowledge the following restriction: "You may not use any aliases or other means to mask your true identity." And yet, many comment threads are rife with aliases, saying things that they clearly never would without the mask of anonymity.

While this is not uncommon in newspaper Web sites or blogs, where trolling and sniping are facts of life, Patch clearly aspires to be something more. We should celebrate the fact that members of the general assembly, council, and school committee have joined in discussions of issues here. I have seen posts by Rep. Dan Gordon, Judi Staven, Cynthia Perrotti, and Jonathan Harris, and Portsmouth should thank them for their participation.  This is a genuinely new mode of citizen engagement which is direct, immediate, and powerful.

Sadly, however, for everyone brave enough to step up to the challenge of online authenticity, there are those who choose to hide in the shadows and spread disinformation. There have been enough of those, on all sides of every issue, that I think it's time to call on Patch to enforce their Terms of Use and ban anonymous accounts.

And one more thing. If Patch is truly meant to be a community forum, I would suggest that people who don't live in Portsmouth are marked as such. When we stand up in a public meeting to comment on an issue, we're required to state our name and address; this separates the people who have skin in the game from those who are just interested parties. As we say in the software development world, it separates the Pigs from the Chickens. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig) An online community should be no different: Yes, I want to hear the opinions of people from Tiverton or Bristol, but I want to know that they are not speaking as fellow citizens and taxpayers of our town.

These may seem like radical proposals, but Patch, I would argue, is a radical thing. And I mean "radical" in its original sense, that of returning to the root. Portsmouth, like many New England towns, has a rich tradition of the public meeting, where issues could be discussed, argued over, and hashed out. No, it wasn't always pretty, and it required responsibility and commitment to participate. While the technology behind Patch is new, it offers the possibility of rekindling a very old sense of shared purpose and community.

But only if we are willing to look each other in the eye. I am. Are you?

John G. McDaid