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.

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.

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!

The BBC has a strong track-record of encouraging user contributions via the “Have Your Say” section and she cited a number of occasions in which this traditional news organisation has relied heavily on videos, pictures and comments sent in from the general public, including the 7 July bombings and last year’s floodings. It is worthwhile noting that the BBC now has a hub for user generated content, staffed by an impressive 23 people that work there 24/7 to deal with 12,000 emails and 200 pictures send in by BBC viewers and listener on any average day.

It made me think that maybe the real future of citizen journalism does not lie with blogs etc but with its incorporation into the established media organisations. Now I have long argued that citizen journalism will not kill mainstream media as I see clearly a demand for both, the traditional, vetted, selected reporting as well as the whole array of news, commentary and discussion “from below”. I would not want to trade one for the other. At the same time I have been critical of the use of blogs etc by newspapers and TV stations as only giving yet another voice to those who we already hear loud and clear in the public sphere (see my discussion with the Guardian blogs editor).

But what made me think was that contributions by the public to established news organisations might be the most viable solution for both established media and citizen journalism to survive. For once it addresses several challenges that citizen journalism and user generated content in general face:

1. Instead of existing at the fringes on some obscure websites hardly any one ever visits mainstream media can give stories from citizen journalists the publicity they deserve.
2. Media organisations with their established routines for fact-checking can solve the credibility dilemma of user-generated content that acts as an obstacle for many to rely on this kind of news: By carefully vetting the information sent in it can relied upon by others.
3. Although as of yet the BBC is not paying their contributors I could certainly envisage a situation where citizen journalists are remunerated for stories that make it into the news (as a matter of fact they probably should be anyway) which would solve another problem of the Web 2.0 revolution: That only few can afford to contribute time (and sometimes money) in order to provide content. Also using the already existing structures means a lot less overhead for potential contributors (such as creating your own blog/news portal/whatever) and makes easier one-off contributions.

However, it is also beneficial for established news providers such as the BBC:

1. User-generated content gives them the opportunity to get quicker and better coverage, maybe even for less money although it is doubtful given the considerable resources necessary to deal with the wealth of contributions.
2. They can be closer to the people and their concerns instead of relying solely on market research to find out what their audience is interested in.
3. Eventually this could also lead to a more representative news coverage instead of a highly selective collection of stories focused mainly on “mainstream” issues although this will rely heavily on whether the population as a whole will have sufficient digital literacy in order to participate.

Summarising I could see a real potential there for the future of “old” and “new” journalism. However, this will only work if mainstream media will take user contributions seriously and not just as a fig leave for audience participation that ends in a black hole. Should they deal seriously with user generated content, then this would not be an incorporation or a buy-out of emancipatory journalism but instead could result in a more democratic mass media, thereby offering a remedy to many of the well-documented and much lamented problems of mass media that are what motivated citizen journalism in the first place.

The conference itself did stay a bit behind my expectations. The programme was huge with up to 10 tracks running in parallel. Given some of the presentations I have seen it might have been useful to apply some more rigorous selection criteria to submissions in order to have less quantity but more quality as some presenters clearly were very early days in their research. But of course criticising from the back bench is always easier than doing something yourself

All the same I had a great time meeting many interesting people researching in my area and the conference was organised brilliantly by Lisbeth Klastrup and her team from the IT University of Copenhagen which is located in a seriously nice building.

Last but not least Copenhagen is very nice too (if expensive) and I kind of met my namesake.

To this end we analysed the RSS feeds of the named news aggregators and compared

1. timeliness – how often is the feed updated with new stories (interpretation: the more often, the better)
2. continuity – how well are topics pursued within a medium, that is do stories pick up on topics previously reported or is the news agenda very fragmented and disconnected (interpretation: less fragmentation is better)

As you might have read rather too often on this blog: the results are yet preliminary but hey, this is an academic work in progress. What we can infer from the results so far is:

• The traditional paradigms still outperform all competitors when considering “World News” (ie. international affairs, etc). They update very frequently (completely new content every 24hrs) and have a broad range of topics on their coherent agenda.
• The distributed paradigms do not yet work for news not concerned with technology but for this focus they perform very well. For example Digg receives about 100 submission per hour in the technology section alone but the community applies very hard filters to these submission so that only 1% eventually make it in the popular technology category (that translates to roughly one new 1 article per hour).
• However, what becomes clear from the analysis is that the news agenda of Digg and Slashdot is rather fragmented and in addition also very narrow ie. most stories come up only once and the few topics they really focus on are covered again and again and again (think Google)
• All aggregators, even the distributed ones such as Digg and Slashdot show very clear update cycles with low or none activity at night and very little during weekends.

From these findings so far it seems likely that distributed paradigms can compete with traditional modes of aggregation provided they have a sufficient user base interested in relevant topics. So far, however, relying only on Digg and Slashdot will give you mostly unconnected technology stories (but a lot of them!) and next-to-nothing about what else is going on in the world.

There are still a number of issues remaining including our selection of news aggregators and to optimize the continuity measure but for those of you who are already interested, you can download the slides.

PS: The project did arise out of a greater research project on the Performance of distributed problem-solving networks that the Oxford Internet Institute did in collaboration with the McKinsey Technology Initiative. You can find the relevant reports here.

So what are we up to? It’s both a trip dedicated to work as well as, ahem, cultural exchange. We have been presenting at re:publica08, a conference that brings together about 800 (mostly German-speaking) bloggers, Net-activists and academics. It has been an exciting event so far and Alejandro has some more coverage on the conference.

Today we’ve also met with the people in charge of studiVZ, the largest social network in Germany with more than 5 million (mostly student) very active members (if you don’t know it, just think Facebook). It was a meeting between the ivory tower and the real-world business of running a large social network which has certainly inspired us greatly and we hope we could give something back. Oh, and they organised great breakfast

Speaking of food – we invest great energy into sampling as much food and drink as possible, certainly helped by the fact that being used to Oxford prices makes this place a cheap option. The weather hasn’t always been kind to us but it hasn’t dampened our spirits. See some more pictures on Ribo’s Flickr page.

PS: I managed to convince Christian Heise to re-use his nice logo created for the e-participation event Berlin in August.

The conference was a success for me although it is probably fair to say that the contributions were of a mixed quality. It has also a fair share of presentations on online market research which can give really valuable methodological insights buts is not quite my cup of tea. Nevertheless, there were a number of really interesting presentations (you might want to check the programme), I met a bunch of interesting people and definitely gained some useful insights. Being hosted in Germany the conference drew an interesting mix of people including some from Eastern Europe which was a nice change.

There is definitely more going on in the German-speaking academic realm than I was aware of which is good. However, compared to the US and its Berkman Center or the UK with our Oxford Internet Institute, what is sorely missed in Germany is an institution that would focus the research into online phenomena that is going on in disparate places around the country. Much of what I’ve seen and heard is sound research but suffers from being conducted within individual disciplines with little connection to other people’s work. This must change!

Apparently next year GOR will be hosted in Vienna and hence I can only suggest you try it next time.

I am happy to share with you that I will be able to present this ongoing work at the General Online Research conference 2008 (GOR) in Hamburg (March 10-12). GOR is organised by the German Society for Online Research (DGOF) but it brings together academics from around the world. It is well worth checking out the archive for the papers presented there in the past.

In Hamburg I will present in the session on Online Journalism and in the running up to this event I had already the great opportunity to discuss this piece of work with my DPhil colleagues here at the Oxford Internet Institute. The incredibly useful feedback I received from them is a true sign of what a remarkable group of people this still very young DPhil programme has brought together.

Now looking forward to get more feedback and to network with other researchers in Hamburg!

There was quite an array of opinions concerning ePetitions ranging from total happiness to more or less total dislike. The major criticism of the current system were summarized as

• no deliberative aspects
• no way for petition initiators to contact signers
• no transparency of what happens with petition
• not representative
• no actual decisions being taken
• no right to initiate a debate
• disillusionment of citizens as the unrealistic expectations raised by the site are not fulfilled (a democratic placebo)

Note that only the first three of those criticisms do actually apply to the electronic version of the petitions system in particular while most of the discussions did highlight the problems with the current petitions system in general (no accountability, no power, etc) which rather misses the point.

The usual complaint about missing deliberative elements was countered by the argument that there would currently not be a system that could support discursive deliberation on such a massive scale. What is more, in a recent conversation I had with people evaluating a big parliamentary petitions system it emerged that the discussions generated by the petitioners are hardly ever looked at not to mention systematically fed into the policy-making process.

Focusing on the positive outcomes there was some agreement that ePetitions

• can have an impact on media agenda (road pricing being the case in point)
• enable direct link from government to citizens via the two emails the government can send out
• might not achieve a mind change but have an indirect influence as they prepare for further change

What this afternoon left me with was a sense of some people being actually rather unhappy about the success of the petitions, working as it is without any of the necessities that were postulated for such a system. I would hope that in the future as academics we will be able to work together constructively to build and build upon those systems as this event has made clear that the techies don’t have the solution to everything. The gathered crowd came up with at least one tangible suggestion for improvement: that was to allow petitioners more granularity when signing a petition in order to express how much they agree with a petition and also for what reason.