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 to get in touch with their political representatives. This is part of my doctoral research into comparative political participation online and offline in both the UK and Germany. Here is a link to the presentation. The short summary is that the website suceeds in engaging people who would otherwise be inactive but it recruits those primarly from parts of the population that are traditionally more likely to participate politically (ie. higher education, higher income, etc).

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.