Knowing your MP.

Tom is fond of quoting the statistic that something like 40% of people think they know who their MP is, and a third of them get it wrong.

Does anyone know of a survey which has asked people to say what party their MP is from and how many get it right?

Corruption and the definition of Insanity

One definition of insanity is "Continuing to do the same thing over and over, each time expecting a different result".

Lawrence Lessig, one of the people behind the creative commons, has a new target.

Both in the US, the UK, and internationally, those interested in the common good, rather than a special interest, fight the same fights again and again against copyright extension, proprietary software "standards", broadcast flags, and other initiatives designed to help specific companies at the expense of consumers and the common good.

These negotiations are often in back rooms away from the public view, and are based on the advice of people in the room rather than the common interest. When all the people in the room only present the view of their one single employer, unsurprisingly, that's the view that comes out of the room - cf the Cheney Energy Taskforce.

In the world of software, there are two "open" formats for documents (like Word documents, but standardised so there is a public reference specification that you can check it against, rather than Word documents where it might work...). One developed, designed and heavily promoted by Microsoft (pretty much exclusively), and another which has gone through the standards process and has a wide variety of groups who have looked at it and accepted it.
There is an International Standards body which oversees many technical standards, and to be recognised as a standard, you need enough countries to agree that it's a standard. In the past, this has been done by interested countries and through consensus. Now, many many countries, which previously have never shown any interest in the body have representatives appearing at meetings. Only these aren't civil servants, or even just citizens from that country, they're Microsoft employees in countries where Microsoft has almost no staff presence besides lobbyists. Guess what the new "representatives" are pushing?

In Canada, the MP who is in charge of their department of Heritage, got campaign donations to their campaign fund from the recording and film industries in the US, and then tried to suggest laws to support them at the expense of the local recording and film companies (more).

In the UK, there was an independent review of the UK Intellectual Property Framework, the Gowers review which concluded, based on all the evidence, there was no case for copyright extension, thanks to the open and even handed way the review was conducted and examined the evidence. So those in favour of extension, to increase their own profits, simply ignored it and moved on to Parliament, potentially misrepresenting the Gowers review to get it ignored.

There's also the "debate" in the UK around ID Cards where Evidence Based Policy is welcomed as long as the evidence supports the policy and those finding other evidence are bullied.

The evolution "debate" in the US where religion is dressed up as science and scientific theories are beaten down by "belief". The fight that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and friends are currently engaging in.

The examples are, unfortunately, almost endless across the countries, with some areas being worse than others.

Why does it matter? Because special interests will write a bad law in your country and then try impose the same changes on my country in the name of equivalence, what happens in your country has a significant impact on my country.

Continuing on the current tack will mean that those fighting against the special interests will eventually lose - because special interests only have to be successful once and get to pick the battles. Those fighting for the common good have to find out about the battle, fight it (often quickly), and must win every time. While those tactics can continue for a time, a longer term strategy needs to change the war. Which is where Lessig is going.


What happens when the all Environmental, open software, culture, science, reason and other activitists join together to make the playing field level for all those who want to play, irrespective of the size of their pockets?

I have no idea what will happen, but it's going to be very interesting...

Government Response to the Power of Information Review

The Government Response to Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg's "Power of Information" review is now up on CommentOnThis.com

Post-Petitions

At the mySociety pub meeting in Manchester this weekend, there was a coversation about engagement in the world of petitions.

Simple academic theory suggests that there will only be at most 1% of the population who are engaged on any issue. Petitions has shown that this is no longer necessarily true - it is possible to get more than that involved. Climate change similar may have such a reach, where there are hard decisions and tradeoffs to be made.

But in a world where that engagement is possible, with the levels, types and styles of technologies and discourse available is as it is now. Allowing a "full and free" exchange of views will generally lead to the extremes shouting at each other, and those who occupy positions in the middle generally becoming demotivated by the extremes (whether on their side or the other).

Petitions are a way of simply saying "I agree with X". There's little/no room for subtly, and it's a relatively blunt instrument. Although people are finding ways to comment on petitions even though it's something not offered on the core site.


Large scale government reviews often present a range of options to solve whatever issue was being looked into. Many large issues involve tradeoffs and have differing costs and benefits, there is, currently, no mechanism for wider engagement on which of those is deemed better by the general public. While "The Sun" may think it speaks for their audience, there is likely to be a difference there.

What if petitions was extended, so rather than agreeing with a statement, you could select from a list. So in terms of energy review, you could sign in favour of 'more nuclear', 'some nuclear, more renewables', 'no nuclear, mostly renewables', 'less coal, more renewables'. Requiring the same information from people as to sign a petition, but instead of signing a single statement, you can select however many of those you agree with (including none if you don't like any of them but want your voice heard, or all of them if you think we should do something but don't mind which).

These reviews happen anyway, and often produce a number of possible solutions for consideration - and giving everyone the chance to state their view is one way of doing engagement, based on existing, and highly successful, processes.

IDCards supporters - they actually exist!

Today was the Labour Leadership Conference in Manchester (this time they closed 3 streets round our flat to most traffic, rather than sealing 2 for the last conference). Apart from the very impressive speed that the security cordon dropped round the venue, it was pretty much a non-event (apart from the outcome).

At an Electoral Reform Society meeting this evening, for the first time ever, I met and had a conversation (more of a monologue from his side, since I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing) with someone who believes strongly that, not only are ID Cards are a very good idea, but he was very strongly in favour of them to cure all society's ills. While it may just be that I spend time in what he described as "wishy washy liberal" circles where we don't understand that "if you've not done anything wrong then you have nothing to fear", he was an example of those whom Labour ministers point to as supporters of ID Cards.

So there's at least one of them in the country; although as one of the few (3?) Labour activists in (I think) John Redwood's constituency, he seemed used to supporting lost causes.

Impact of One Laptop per Child

The One Laptop per Child project aims to be able to give children in developing countries specially designed laptops (ruggedised, etc) full of educational materials (think wikipedia and then some). As part of the investment, there'll be a connection to the rest of the planet.

What happens when one million children in Rwanda (one of the possible pilot countries, and the one I found first) suddenly have connectivity and communications? Well, lots of things. The chance of a wide and/or deep education goes up significantly. But what happens to the culture?

In many places in Africa, the main way to get there is by plane. If you don't own a plane, you travel on foot or ride. This doesn't make engagement in any form of political process particularly easy. Put a decent communications infrastructure in, and that changes very fast.

There are places on this planet with no electricity grid, no telephone network. To visit the doctor, you walk for a day or more (each way) to the "nearby" large town, only to find the doctor isn't there this week. The impact that mobile phones, which don't require cabling, have had on that individual. Making the call to check, a few seconds of communications technology saving 2 days of walking and wasted time away from work.

While the capital city may still be 500 miles away by camel, they're as close by email as anyone else. Suddenly, it's much harder to do something and have no one notice. Potentially.

Potential being the important thing. Very few countries have the democracy infrastructure of TheyWorkForYou.com or the equivalent for other countries. Some countries are starting (US, New Zealand. Georgia (the country not the US state)), and while there's some good work in Africa, in most places on the planet, there's nothing.

So what happens?

Engagement is critical, in the next couple of years when they come online.

Heattheme maps enhancements

I've added the ability to compare a second URL in the heatheme service, so if you want to compare some text or a page with another page, then you can.

have fun.

How many people do you think it takes?

Someone asked on the mySociety developers' list about a way to show "how small groups of motivated people can often put the efforts of large (and probably well-meaning) organisations to shame".

One answer to that is "how many people do you think it takes?" The core of PublicWhip was 2 people, TWFY was a core of 4, FYMP was about 5 people (if that many), mySociety is still only 5 people at the core. UNDemocracy is a core of just Julian. Directionlessgov was... erm... never mind, but is now looked after by just me. theWhitehouseSays.com was 1 person. Planning Alerts was one person.

Without necessarily resorting to Margaret Mead, how would you show it?

Who Writes To Them?

The 2006 WriteToThem.com (WTT) statistics are up (here) including a small look at who is using WTT based on the deprivation of where they live. It set out to answer one very specific question - "do deprived areas use WriteToThem less than average?". It doesn't answer, and doesn't seek to answer, other questions. It doesn't tell you much about who they are, and tells you nothing about the topics on which they write.

Contrary to naive expectations, users of WTT are not "rich people who have access to the internet" - they're pretty much representative of everyone.

Power of Information

A commentable version of Tom Steinberg's "Power of Information" review is now up for your comments on on CommentOnThis.com

Directionless Gov Games

Government makes available large amounts of numbers about other levels of (local) Government. It locks them up in boring spreadsheets, with dull tables, in much the same way it buries useful information behind the clunky direct.gov.uk portal.

Some of this data is dull, some of it is quite interesting. And when it's all made available in machine readable formats, it becomes easier to fiddle with it and do nice things which it wasn't actually ever intended to be used for - such as be the input to a card game. The aim is to win all the cards, by selecting a better metric than your opponent (the computer). Thanks to Matthew for the code

Why do this? Because we can (and I needed an example for the NeSS API although didn't end up using it due the lack of a postcode lookup file for each LA) and because it's useful to learn about the country as it is, rather than how we think it is (or we thought it was). There's much more than can be done in this area.

For that reason, I've also done one based on country information (see the iQuango announcement post (which escaped when I pressed the wrong button, so is incomplete - sorry)).

Introducing iQuango.org

iQuango.org will have two parts.

Firstly, in the same way that theUNsays.com makes what the Secretary General says alertable and commentable (like theWhitehouseSays.com and DowningStreetSays.com), we can extend that to the many, many International Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations who operate on behalf of the world community (IMF, WorldBank, IAEA et al) with substantial public interest in what they say, and potentially divergent or contradictory. The unspun announcements from the original source, easily linkable and commentable.

Once we have a few of those (starting with the easy ones and moving up) it's then possible and easy to draw together the announcements on things of interest, made by many NGO's working internationally. Many organisations work in similar geographic areas or on similar themes (or both) and put out press releases and announcements on their topics of interest, but it's not something we get to see (watch tonight's news, and see how many times Tibet is mentioned). And unless you can look across multiple areas, you get very different suggestions about what's going on in one small part of Africa - for example - and that's just 3 view points, and doesn't reflect a diverse continent. How much richer would that be with MSF, World Food Programme and other agencies included, showing what they said and when they said it.

The idea is based on Larry Brilliant's design for a global health monitoring system. This is slightly narrower in terms of inputs (english announcements from NGOs), but much simple and wider in terms of outputs (any keyword you want to search for). Not all of it needs to be (or will be) on this site - the above DSS/UNSays/WHsays/SpinDifferent model shows it can be distributed and things get pulled in. Adding an individual organisation isn't complicated and isn't time consuming - it just needs someone to care about that organisation. While some NGOs might help, most wont. It'll be faster if you help.

If you're interesting in lending a hand to cover your favourite NGO, drop me an email.

The Assault on Reason

The Assault on Reason is the new book by Al Gore, covering the fall and, well, fall, of the level of political debate in the US and the level of political knowledge and engagement of the US citizenry.

While not having the sex appeal of the environment, the topic is detailed and well tied together covering the different threads of government bound by the secrecy and ideology of the Bush administration. If you're interested in the levels of and tone of public debate, not just in the US but in the UK (or any other country) then it's very much worth reading. The examples and narrative draw together the strategies, decisions and consequences, drawing on past decisions with their outcomes, and extrapolating to potential future consequences of near-term decisions.

One thing that's missing (probably deliberately) is a suggestion or pointer for reversal of that decline. There's a discussion of the internet and the scope that it provides for enhanced debate and better engagement. But that's not particularly news. Where "An Inconvenient Truth" left off, there was a website which encouraged you to use what you've learnt and make a difference.
The fact that there isn't shouldn't be considered a weakness of the book - it's not.

Is one option something like a "Spin School" resource? Aimed at informing those working on issues to help them learn, share and steal ideas from others in areas. The large organised groups that work to further their own interests at the expense of those without the lobbyists or strategists know the focus on spin and style, but the less organised, ad hoc groups set up to counter them may not have access to the best counter-measures. While "Bad facts don't make for good spin", if the conversation stays on the things that don't matter, the things that do get ignored. And sometimes those interests will make meaningless "concessions" which are vastly overstated as large and substantial changes, or otherwise attack very close to home.