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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Monday and Tuesday of this week saw an event happening that I have been looking forward to very much: Berlin in August, an informal summit of European eDemocracy practitioners, which has been organised by politik-digital and MySociety. The gathering took place in the former Staatsratsgebaeude (see picture) which used to house the government of the [...]