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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last Tuesday I have been listening to a talk by Helen Boaden, the Director of BBC News. She was speaking at the eDemocracy’08 conference about the role of citizen journalism for established media such as the BBC and you can find the full talk on her blog. The BBC has a strong track-record of encouraging [...]

Under the title Effectiveness of E-Participation: Rules Of Engagement I have written a short piece for the E-Government Bulletin, a large email newsletter for practitioners and researchers interested in digital technologies and government. Given the short length and the scope of this publication it is just a brief overview about a very difficult problem, namely [...]

Realising that it has been rather quite on this space I felt compelled to give at least a small sign of life – which is about the only real reason to blog about a recent conference I’ve been to. Internet Research 9.0 took place in Copenhagen from 15-18 October and was the annual conference of [...]