From the material available the app looks great and it is also a nice example of what stuff citizen can do when government data is publicly available as Jeff used datasets from the recently started data.gov.uk portal. The remarkable point I want to highlight is shown in the video below when Jeff was asked by Conrad Quilty-Harper if there is a political point to his app:

The answer is a passionate “No“. Can you believe it?

Now I was not totally surprised because some years ago I wrote my MA thesis on “Political Motives of Developers for Collaboration on GNU/Linux“. While I found that a majority of the developers in my sample did actually attribute a political relevance (whatever it might be) to their coding of GNU/Linux, it was also clear from my research and that of others, that most programmers are motivated by the fun of coding. The Free Software community of GNU/Linux might be a bit of an exception given its founding principles but it is certainly not totally defamatory to expect the bunch of Web developers for gadgets like the iPhone to be less principled.

Is there something wrong with this? On the danger of over-generalising a bit too much I would argue yes. A tool like the ASBOrometer which makes transparent how screwed up your area is – this is more than just a funny app because it shows where the government has failed its citizens. Now it won’t come as much of a surprise to most inhabitants of these areas but the app gives you simple and quick access to actual numbers and compare your situation with that of others. This might well be what triggers some people to stop accepting their fate and get up to do something about being let down by society. As much as I hate to refer to the Sun to state a point coverage of the ASBOrometer in broadsheets like these certainly emphasise that is has struck a cord with people – also underscored by the fact that within two days it achieved over 80,000 downloads. Finally, lets not forget the economic dimension (and you don’t have to be a Marxist to know that little could be more political than this) as the newspapers rightly point out that this could have a huge impact on house prices in these areas.

Of course in my opinion all this makes this app all the better but I believe it is important that the people putting stuff like this together have some idea of its potential relevance. Ideally they might have an aim for this as well (I mean one relevant for the public good, not just fun for themselves) but hey, you can’t change the world every day. But the naivety with which software developer go about their work at my best of times amazes me but at other times just outright scares me.

As it says in the Spiderman comics:

“With great power comes great responsibility”

In a world heavily shaped by information and its free flow in the form of bits and bytes, people with computing skills are a small elite, able to manipulate this flow and determine its outcomes. There are many examples in which our current technology vanguards are making use of their skills with the aim to create some benefits to citizens such as mySociety in the UK or Sunlight in the US to name just a few. But we need much more of this.

All of this comes back to the old debate about the ethics of science and to what degree scientists (as just one example of an expert elite) are responsible for what they do – a debate wonderfully illustrated in Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists. Of course the ASBOborometer is no atomic bomb and I’m not in any way suggesting programming should not be fun or Jeff has anything but good (or no) intentions. But I really think it is time that even software developers understand that no tool is neutral and start to take responsibility for their creation – or at least try to understand its relevance. Because code is law, code is political!

In my doctoral research I look at the communication between constituents and their Members of Parliament. I was looking for a simple way to judge the relevance of the mail that MPs receive from their constituents. As I found, MPs tend to refer to their “postbag” in order to emphasize the importance of an issue as e.g. the Simon Hughes did in a recent debate on climate change (see video below):

So in order to judge how often that happens, I needed to have a look at Hansard, the written record of proceedings in parliament. Now the main online Hansard record at the UK Parliament website is rather difficult and does not provide a search functionality so I turned to TheyWorkForYou.com, one of mySociety’s projects that does not only provide detailed information on MPs but also offers a nicely formatted, searchable version of Hansard, now dating back to 1935 (!).

In this way it was a matter of seconds to find out how often MPs and Lords have mentioned their postbags in parliamentary proceedings since 1935 (it was 1,621 times). A multitude of options allow to filter your search accordingly so that now I know that the majority of these mentions were made during House of Commons debates (989) and that in the current parliament Conservative MP Mark Field leads the table (with 9 references to his postbags). Finally I could quickly produce a figure showing the development of references to their constituent mail:

btw the search is intelligent enough to look for the word “postbag” as well as similar words such as “postbags” or “post bag”

I cannot start to imagine how long it would have taken to produce this figure with the limited capabilities of the official Hansard and it would not have been possible at all at the time when all this data was really only a written record in the literal sense. Not saying that this particular piece of information is a world-changing discovery but it is a good example of how the availability of data in a structured and searchable format (!) can contribute to scholarship nevertheless. In this respect the various Open Data initiatives by governments offer a huge potential for social scientists with the appropriate statistical and computational skills to offer fresh insights. See for example the Guardian World Government Data Initiative that offers the datasets opened up by various different governments in a uniform format.

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 implications of the Internet for democracy, based on an understanding of democracy that emphasizes popular control and political equality of that control, re-evaluating the various claims and counter-claims that have been made for the Internet’s democratic potential. It does so by assessing whether the Internet gives a greater and more representative share of the population the opportunity to participate in the political process, thereby extending popular control and reducing political inequalities, focusing on one particular form of participation; citizen-initiated contacts with political representatives. This activity is examined over time in Germany and the UK, two stable liberal democracies with similar levels of Internet penetration and political participation but different political systems, institutions and cultures.

The research is based on analysis of survey evidence of political participation from the 1980s and today; new data collected through user surveys from two large-scale eParticipation projects that allow citizens to contact their MPs online in the UK and Germany (WriteToThem.com and Abgeordnetenwatch.de); and new surveys of and interviews with MPs and their staff to examine the practice and culture of communication between representatives and the represented.

The study assesses the Internet’s impact for political equality by measuring the degree to which those who participate online are descriptively representative of the population along politically relevant characteristics such as income, education and gender. It compares their representativeness across the two countries; with ‘offline’ participation today; and in historical perspective with participation in the pre-Internet era. If this study finds differences between the two countries then this design will allow to identify factors that shape these patterns. Should there be little differences in the findings between Germany and the UK then this would suggest that the observed effects may be sustained across parliamentary and federal systems and proportional and plurality electoral systems.

While the findings have a particular relevance to the activity of contacting, they will also allow to re-assess various claims made for the democratic potential of the Internet in the light of empirical evidence and could have important implications for the design of future online initiatives by identifying factors that can determine their success or failure.

In addition, a chapter outline is also available. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!

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.

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!

While this is mainly a summary of the problems, in the coming weeks I will talk about some of my own attempts to find answers to this question. For some time now I have been busy working for mySociety to evaluate the usage of their main sites (such as WriteToThem.com and TheyWorkForYou.com) and I will be speaking about some initial findings from this work at the upcoming e-Democracy ‘08 conference in London on 11 November and earlier at an academic conference in Germany. If you cannot make it to either of them stay tuned as there should be more information on this in the near future and I would love to get your views.

Last but not least the article in the E-Government Bulletin naturally does not carry any references but I owe some of my insights to these people below:

• Forss, K. (2005). Evaluating Public Participation in Policy Making. Paris, OECD.
• Macintosh, A. and S. Coleman (2007). eParticipation Research Direction based on barriers, challenges and needs, DEMO-Net Deliverable 12.3.
• Macintosh, A. and A. Whyte (2008). “Towards an Evaluation Framework for eParticipation.” Transforming Government: People, Process & Policy 2(1)

The participants did discuss a stunning array of eDemocracy projects that have already made a mark in their countries although maybe not all being as widely successful as they would deserve. It definitely helped to open my eyes to a world beyond some of the more commonly known projects such as theyworkforyou.com in the UK or abgeordnetenwatch.de in Germany and to learn about a variety of other efforts. For example, who would have thought that Romania has taken such a lead in holding government and parliament accountable to the extent that they sue their politicians every time information is not made available? Or the kind of interesting results you get if you can cross-reference the voting behaviour of an MP with data on its travels (seems like some politicians can be at multiple places at once). There is a good (and still growing) list of interesting sites available on our Wiki.

You can meet some of the participants in brief video interviews (the web site is in German but they interviews are in English) that hopefully convey some of the buzz of these two days. As this was an (un)conference it was difficult to say what the outcomes would be. This actually did work quite well: We came up with a long list of good practice for transparency sites that should be the first point of call for people thinking about setting up similar sites. Furthermore the collected wisdom of the experts did identify a number of projects that a crying out to be done by someone! Most importantly, however, it was an opportunity for all to network and to learn what is going on in Europe and also beyond as Andrea Thompson and Gilberto Buffara from democracia in Brazil joined us for a session via video call.

You will find some information at berlininaugust.politik-digital.de. Note however that this is (un)organised as an ‘unconference’, meaning that this is an informal event whose outcomes are very open. So it is what the participants make of it … we will see!

So if your work touches on eVoting, ePetitioning, eDeliberation, eConsultation, eParticipation, eMOREWORDSHERE.. and you haven’t been invited but you feel like you should be there – get in touch with us asap. We might even be able to help you out with some of your travel expenses.

Studies of these communities tried to establish whether there are positive effects associated with the provision of this technology. Broadly speaking, findings indicate an increase in social capital for members that are connected to the network in these communities (e.g. people know more of their neighbours, more voluntary involvement, feeling of community etc.).

I just came across Cybermoor, a UK-grown effort that has provided broadband access, communication tools and computer literacy courses to about 400 people in the remote village of Alston in Cumbria. Although I am a bit astonished how they managed to spent between half and a million Pounds on wireless broadband, the returns seem to have justified the project: more jobs and an increase in property prices of 25%. Have a look at the nice little video below and if you like what you see and you are British: please notice that the European Union gave money for this project

Thanks to Rolf Luehrs for that tip.