Tobias Escher at the OII

Today we launch a new online toolkit that allows rating the difficulty of paper, online and phone-based forms (you can find infos on the launch event here). It is intended for government departments but most of the categories apply to non-government forms as well.

The toolkit is based on a guide that a team led by Professor Patrick Dunleavy from the LSE and Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Interet Institute developed for the National Audit Office and that underwent a consultation process within government. However, what I want to draw your attention to are some of the technical details of the online toolkit as in this major effort it was my responsibility to set up an interactive version of this checklist. So if you are only interested in checking how easy or difficult your form is to answer go straight to the checklist. If you are more technically inclined read on.

The whole site operates on Perl but what makes the checklist tick is Javascript. I am still used to a time when Javascript was frowned upon but with Ajax its now routinely used to make web pages interactive. It is still a pain to code until I came across the jQuery Javascript library. It extends Javascript with a variety of methods that just make it so much easier to code and adds additional functionality. In combination with a dedicated CSS framework, called jQueryUI, you have instant access to slick and beautiful features such as calendars and progress bars. Have a look here to see some examples! The latter has been incredibly helpful as I am not much of a design guru myself but by relying on the standard themes you get a rather professional looking site.

The checklist itself is a kind of interactive questionnaire that you go through page by page. It automatically calculates the difficulty score for a form as well as its individual sections and allows comparison with the difficulty scores of other forms rated by other users.

Some of the features I would like to mention are:

• The whole content as well as the structure (ie. the different sections of the checklist) are imported from an Excel file. In this way it is easily customisable and it is just one script for the three different types of forms: paper, online and phone.
• A load & save functionality – before saving the form an Ajax call checks if the filename is still available. Restoring a previously saved checklist was also tricky for a number of reasons, e.g. because the script won’t know from the save name what type of form it is but will redirect you accordingly.
• At the end of the checklist we provide feedback about the difficulty scores of forms rated by other users, in this way allowing you to compare the difficulty of your form with other forms. It is more of a gimmick really as of course these comparison have its problems but it gives you an idea.
• The whole site is using short, clean, memorable & “talking” URLs such as /paper-form/ or /saved/.
• No cookies. All necessary parameters are submitted via a html form.

The whole site is still in somewhat advanced beta stage so any bugs and problems you encounter – please let me know!

Last week someone said this:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Now of course it will be immediately obvious to most people that this is simply wrong and I refrain myself from giving more counterarguments than political activists in autocratic regimes and the type of privacy most sane people prefer for going to the toilet.

What makes this statement more than a mere nuisance but outright dangerous is that it was made by Eric Schmidt who is the CEO of Google, in an interview with CNBC on 3 December 2009. There has been an outcry already and I refer everyone to the brief and eloquent response by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The statement of Mr. Google does nothing to alleviate the fears about privacy intrusion by Google through its ever more pervasive technology and vast data retention*. I still don’t believe in any conspiracy plot by Google to take over the world – rather it is something much more dangerous: It is utter naivity and ignorance about the complexities of human society and a purely technocratic approach to life.

I believe there is only one way to help Eric Schmidt to realise the value of privacy – that is to take it away from him. Let us help Eric to come clear about what he has done and add Sunlight (as the best disinfectant)** to his life by making it public. For example, I want to know where Eric Schmidt lives. Exactly. What car he uses to get to work. When. On which route. What stuff he loves. What nightmares he has. Everything. Let’s make a crowd-sourcing effort and publish all of this on the web. Again and again. Until Mr. Schmidt starts to realize the value of privacy.

There is only one trouble with this: Eric Schmidt already knows the value of privacy. For himself at least. For when in 2005 CNet published this story with some details on the private Eric Schmidt (with data that was obtained by public Google searches only) he acted very quickly and banned Google interviews with CNet reporters for the duration of one year.

So let us call this what it is: Hypocrisy. And this is evil, Mr. Schmidt.

Maybe it is time for a CEO to step down from his position when he is severely violating his company’s code of conduct:

“Don’t be evil.” [...] But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally — following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect. [...] It’s built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct.

[...]

Who Must Follow Our Code?

We expect all of our employees and Board members to know and follow the Code. Failure to do so can result in disciplinary action, including termination of employment.

Shareholders of Google, you know what to do to prevent further damage for your company. But then I see this Reuters article from February this year:

And some say Google is inherently unreceptive to investor input. Its dual-class share structure gave three individuals — co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt — 67 percent of voting rights as of 2008.

Time to change this too!

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* Need a proof? If you have an account with Google (e.g. because you have a Google Mail address), have a look at this – your complete search history (and probably also what you’ve clicked onto) since creation of the account. In my case that were 2.5 years worth of searches – at least they allow you to delete it which is definitely a plus.

** On the issue of the sometimes questionable value of transparency see this very recommendable piece by Lawrence Lessig.

In the latest issue of UK magazine Prospect, Georgetown University fellow Evgeny Morozov offers his critical take on what the Internet will do to democracy. Under the title “How dictators watch us on the web” he gives various examples in which digital technologies have not only failed to democratise states (by whatever measure) but rather to strengthen authoritarian regimes and indeed helped to actively harm those  striving for more civil liberties.

The list includes islamist bloggers in Lebanon, increased control through social networking in Belarus, hate crime YouTube videos in Mexico and racial agitation in Russia. Now few of this is novel – technologies are (neutral?) tools that can be used to do both good and bad. But having worked on Western-funded Internet Projects in the former Soviet Union, Morozov is an insider and in the light of various (often government supported) drives to promote “democracy” through blogging, Twitter etc,  his article acts as an important reminder of all the downsides of a technology that is indeed powerful but not inherently as democratic as many people want us to believe:

Yet while the internet may take the power away from an authoritarian (or any other) state or institution, that power is not necessarily transferred to pro-democracy groups. Instead it often flows to groups who, if anything, are nastier than the regime. Social media’s greatest assets—anonymity, “virality,” interconnectedness—are also its main weaknesses.

I particularly liked his argument about the existence of a new social contract that is being formed between authoritarian regimes and their citizens. Under this new deal citizens get access to as much entertainment as they want, be it pornographic or pirated or both, just as long as they accept their narrow political freedoms. A new form of golden cage so to speak:

Authoritarian governments know that the internet could be a new opium for the masses. They are tolerant of rampant internet piracy, as in China. In many cases, they push the cyber-hedonistic pursuits of their youth. Government-controlled internet providers in Belarus, for example, run dedicated servers full of pirated digital goodies for their clients to download for free. Under this new social contract, internet users are allowed plenty of autonomy online—just so long as they don’t venture into politics.

Overall, Morozov is not quite as pessimistic as it might sound. While he heavily criticises the current approach of many Western governments to promote democracy through technology he ends his article with a number of suggestions, one of which is to fund more bottom-up, entrepreneurial initiatives instead of overly bureaucratic NGO-style project funding – an idea that is for example currently piloted by mySociety and the Open Society Institute for Central and Eastern Europe.

There seems to be a chance to hear a first-hand account of this by Morozov himself on an event next week. More information here.

Poor Gordon Brown: There are currently 4,553 petitions open on Downing Street’s ePetitions site and all of them need to be checked personally by the Prime Minister – at least that is the impression you get. These days, if you visit the site to create a petition it will inform you that:

“Submission of new petitions will be closed until 7th September while the Prime Minister is away from Number 10. You can still sign any petition during this time.”

It is the third time the website is closed for submission of new petitions after a similar summer break in 2008 and ten days over the Christmas period. While it is clear that these closures are only temporary they are objectionable still, first and foremost on the grounds that your right to petition has no “suspended during vacation periods” clause built in. At the same time you are still allowed to send your petitions by mail even though there should be no difference in how they are dealt with by the Prime Minister. So for once the offline channel is more responsive than the online one. This is not the level of accessibility for which governments have moved transactions online and which citizens can expect from online services.

Number 10 is not the only government site that is closed sometimes. There is still the famous example of Companies House, the official agency to (un)register your business. For a long time it would not allow to file a new company online between midnight and 7am in the morning although this now seems to be gradually removed.

In a time where business website strive to achieve an uptime of 99.999%, governments still like to take their time out. While this might make a lot of sense sometimes (e.g. if it would be taken to think and deliberate really thoroughly about an issue) it just does not make sense for government services that require no human interaction at the time of submission.

The silence around this blog has largely been due to my efforts of making headway with my doctoral thesis. As a quick update, the title and abstract follow below:

The Internet and the Representativeness of Political Participation

A comparison of citizen-initiated contacts with
Members of Parliament in Germany and the UK

This thesis explores the implications of the Internet for democracy, based on an understanding of democracy that emphasizes popular control and political equality of that control, re-evaluating the various claims and counter-claims that have been made for the Internet’s democratic potential. It does so by assessing whether the Internet gives a greater and more representative share of the population the opportunity to participate in the political process, thereby extending popular control and reducing political inequalities, focusing on one particular form of participation; citizen-initiated contacts with political representatives. This activity is examined over time in Germany and the UK, two stable liberal democracies with similar levels of Internet penetration and political participation but different political systems, institutions and cultures.

The research is based on analysis of survey evidence of political participation from the 1980s and today; new data collected through user surveys from two large-scale eParticipation projects that allow citizens to contact their MPs online in the UK and Germany (WriteToThem.com and Abgeordnetenwatch.de); and new surveys of and interviews with MPs and their staff to examine the practice and culture of communication between representatives and the represented.

The study assesses the Internet’s impact for political equality by measuring the degree to which those who participate online are descriptively representative of the population along politically relevant characteristics such as income, education and gender. It compares their representativeness across the two countries; with ‘offline’ participation today; and in historical perspective with participation in the pre-Internet era. If this study finds differences between the two countries then this design will allow to identify factors that shape these patterns. Should there be little differences in the findings between Germany and the UK then this would suggest that the observed effects may be sustained across parliamentary and federal systems and proportional and plurality electoral systems.

While the findings have a particular relevance to the activity of contacting, they will also allow to re-assess various claims made for the democratic potential of the Internet in the light of empirical evidence and could have important implications for the design of future online initiatives by identifying factors that can determine their success or failure.

In addition, a chapter outline is also available. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!

From 1 – 3 April Berlin is again hosting re:publica a social media cum activist conference which is now in its third year and that attracts well over 1,000 people. This year’s line-up includes among others Lawrence Lessig (Code is Law, Creative Commons), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) und Cory Doctorow (boingboing.net).

There will be a specialised track focusing on Politics 2.0 and political publics online to which I will contribute some of the findings of my recent work on WriteToThem.com. Among the variety of activists presenting for example insights from the Obama campaign it will be my role to provide some empirical data from a large and successful eDemocracy project, serving as a reminder of the fact that the problems of political participation are not easily solved by technology.

Last year doctoral students of the OII went to the conference as part of our student trip to Berlin. This year again a delegation of the Oxford Internet Institute will be in Berlin as co-located with re:publica there will be the PrivacyOS conference of the European Privacy Open Space project that is promoted by the Oxford Internet Institute.

It is the time of year again where we (as doctoral students of the Oxford Internet Institute) have the sudden urge to get out from our dark, only LCD screen-lit cellars of the institute into the real world. To this end we have been organising an OII DPhil trip for the second time now whose main aims are to have the opportunity of learning something as well as to get together beyond the daily academic routine.

While last year’s trip brought some of us to Berlin, this time we stayed closer to home and made a day trip to Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes. Bletchley Park was at the heart of Britain’s successful efforts to break the ciphers used by the Germans to encode their military messages which mainly involved the Engima machine.

For people like us who are studying the various social dynamics around information technologies the destination was apt for a number of reason: First and foremost, the history of Bletchley Park provides a very tangible illustration of the crucial role of information and communication technology. What is more, it was the birthplace of the first computer and the workplace of such great (and tragic!) minds as Alan Turing. Today it also houses the National Museum of Computing which features a vast array of computing technology throughout the decades with insightful commentary by the most dedicated enthusiasts who keep this museum alive. There is also a somehow indirect connection between Bletchley Park and the OII, given that a couple of us (including me) have been beneficiaries of the PGP scholarship, a company that makes its money by providing encryption technology for everybody.

All together we did have a great day out and we do hope to make this a regular event which might even involve having someone paying for our lunch (hint hint)! 

The Internet & Democracy workshop here in Oxford has been filled with very valuable presentations and discussions. Corinna di Gennaro, who was instrumental in setting this up, has a good summary on her blog.

I presented results from the recent evaluation of usage and users of WriteToThem.com, a website by mySociety that allows UK citizens to get in touch with their political representatives. This is part of my doctoral research into comparative political participation online and offline in both the UK and Germany. Here is a link to the presentation. The short summary is that the website suceeds in engaging people who would otherwise be inactive but it recruits those primarly from parts of the population that are traditionally more likely to participate politically (ie. higher education, higher income, etc).

Happening just now: A two day workshop on the Internet and Democracy “Lessons Learnt and Future Directions”, organised jointly by the Berkman Center, the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute.

Of course this is not the first workshop on this topic but it brings together a brilliant array of speakers who are distinguished in this field. Yesterday we already heard Matthew Hindman (Googlearchy, The Myth of Open Source Politics) but he is joined by

• Stephen Coleman (the UK authority on eDemocracy),
• Jay Blumler (a very established Communications scholar),
• John Horrigan (from the Pew Internet & American Life project),
• John Kelly (who is mapping different language blogospheres),
• Andrew Chadwick (who is heading the New Political Communication Unit over at Royal Holloway)
• Rachel Gibson (who has done a lot of empirical work on eDemocracy).

Of course I have not done justice to any of the other great minds sitting at this very table. So did the day start off with a very valuable look to the situation of Internet use (for civic activities) in Eastern Europe and more is to come so stay tuned.

At last week’s eDemocracy’08 I talked about the users of WriteToThem.com and their experience when trying to communicate with their political representatives because this is what WriteToThem is about – making it easy for people to find out their representatives (councillor, members of parliament, etc) and sending them an email.

The truly amazing finding is that people who use the site are not the ones who are already politically engaged and organized. Those are using the site too but many have never before contacted their representative and most are not politically active at all – so here we observe a clear effect of engagement as the site activates people to participate politically who have not done so before.

Another interesting finding is that many citizens make very positive experiences when using the site to contact their representatives. Given a general climate of distrust between represented and representatives many user comments indicate a profound surprise at the respect and help they receive from their politicians. Crucially we can observe that the online experiences do at times translate into political participation offline e.g. in the form of voting as the quote below nicely illustrates:

“Mr [name of representative] went above and beyond what I expected to get, I thought I would just be totally ignored, this experience has made me decide to definitely vote in the next elections”

However, of course it also works exactly the other way around which should be a clear sign of warning for many of those politicians who do rarely reply to their constituents (see for example the MP responsiveness league table) as this participant makes clear:

“What’s the point when your councillor doesn’t reply? He’s not getting my vote in the next election, nor from any of my nuclear and extended families and I’ll tell everyone at work about my lack of a reply as well. 23 of them live in his constituency.“

For more details see the presentation (pdf, 2.6MB).

The results are based on a user survey I set up on behalf of mySociety as part of a bigger project that aims to evaluate the impact of many of their by now well-known eDemocracy websites (e.g. TheyWorkForYou.com or FixMyStreet.com). There is much more to come so keep an eye on this space. Also, if there are certain questions of particular interest to you in relation to mySociety projects that you think could/should/might be answered by this research, do drop me a line or comment below!