“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.

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.