Tobias Escher at the OII

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.