Tobias Escher at the OII

Poor Gordon Brown: There are currently 4,553 petitions open on Downing Street’s ePetitions site and all of them need to be checked personally by the Prime Minister – at least that is the impression you get. These days, if you visit the site to create a petition it will inform you that:

“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.

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 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!

From 1 – 3 April Berlin is again hosting re:publica a social media cum activist conference which is now in its third year and that attracts well over 1,000 people. This year’s line-up includes among others Lawrence Lessig (Code is Law, Creative Commons), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) und Cory Doctorow (boingboing.net).

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.

It is the time of year again where we (as doctoral students of the Oxford Internet Institute) have the sudden urge to get out from our dark, only LCD screen-lit cellars of the institute into the real world. To this end we have been organising an OII DPhil trip for the second time now whose main aims are to have the opportunity of learning something as well as to get together beyond the daily academic routine.

While last year’s trip brought some of us to Berlin, this time we stayed closer to home and made a day trip to Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes. Bletchley Park was at the heart of Britain’s successful efforts to break the ciphers used by the Germans to encode their military messages which mainly involved the Engima machine.

For people like us who are studying the various social dynamics around information technologies the destination was apt for a number of reason: First and foremost, the history of Bletchley Park provides a very tangible illustration of the crucial role of information and communication technology. What is more, it was the birthplace of the first computer and the workplace of such great (and tragic!) minds as Alan Turing. Today it also houses the National Museum of Computing which features a vast array of computing technology throughout the decades with insightful commentary by the most dedicated enthusiasts who keep this museum alive. There is also a somehow indirect connection between Bletchley Park and the OII, given that a couple of us (including me) have been beneficiaries of the PGP scholarship, a company that makes its money by providing encryption technology for everybody.

All together we did have a great day out and we do hope to make this a regular event which might even involve having someone paying for our lunch (hint hint)! 

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).

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 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.

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 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!

Last Tuesday I have been listening to a talk by Helen Boaden, the Director of BBC News. She was speaking at the eDemocracy’08 conference about the role of citizen journalism for established media such as the BBC and you can find the full talk on her blog.

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.

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 how to find out whether all these nice and exciting tools to engage citizens in politics actually make any difference.

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)

Realising that it has been rather quite on this space I felt compelled to give at least a small sign of life – which is about the only real reason to blog about a recent conference I’ve been to. Internet Research 9.0 took place in Copenhagen from 15-18 October and was the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). I presented at the Doctoral Colloquium (very helpfully organised by Professor Jensen) and got some very useful feedback.

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.