Tobias Escher at the OII

Today I am very proud to announce that mySociety have published my very detailed reports on two of the most successful eDemocracy projects worldwide: You can download these evaluations of TheyWorkForYou.com and WriteToThem.com from the official mySociety site. (TheyWorkForYou.com is a website to get information about political representatives in the UK, while WriteToThem.com can be [...]

There are not many high profile research institutions in the world that focus explicitly on the social aspects of the Internet. Arguably the most prominent but in any case the oldest one is constituted by our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University with a strong focus on the legal [...]

About a good month ago, Tory MP Dominic Raab hit the news as he was demanding removal of his parliamentary email address from a campaigning website (this even made it into the headlines in Germany). The story so far The story itself is quickly told: Basically, an MP says “please remove my parliamentary e-mail address [...]

One very British radio show that I very much enjoy is Desert Island Discs, a programme on BBC Radio 4 that asks its guest which eight records they would choose to take with them to a desert island. Thanks to this concept, the presenter Kirsty Young and its selection of renowned guest one usually has [...]

Honour where honour is due: Our colleague Max Loubser got his PhD from Oxford just last week and this is really just to say: Congratulations! Well done! So  proud. And just that little bit envious Read more about Max and his work.

So there is this nice guy Jeff Gilfelt, a software developer from Reading, who has made some headlines with his iPhone/Android application called ASBOromoter which gives you simple access to government data on the number of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders that were handed out and other anti-social stuff in the area you happen to be with [...]

It is no secret that I’m a great admirer of mySociety’s work and I even try to contribute a little bit to it myself through some of the research I do for them but today I would just like to share briefly an example of how much difference it can make to research whether or [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]