· The road to e-democracy (and other tales) ·
In April, The Economist published a special report, The Electronic Bureaucrat.
The report is mostly about providing government services online (yikes, what a scary project that would be) but there were a few things I took from it that were relevant to online democracy and online activism.
On the government and public service's adoption of technology:
"The benefits will be biggest in countries where officials and politicians are open to pressure and where the citizens are public-spirited to start with. E-government is no magic bullet, but it gives citizens and lobby groups more power to scrutinise government and highlight waste and dishonesty."
On providing e-government to communities that do not have access to the internet:
The hardest question for government is how to deal with the part of the population that will not or cannot go online. Glyn Evans, who runs the e-government effort in Britain's second-biggest city, Birmingham, says he has to deal with a portion of households that are "transient and chaotic", whereas central government in Whitehall imagines a world of "middle-class nuclear families" who move as a single unit. One possible solution would be to give up on this section of the population. If e-government enables the most articulate and productive members of society to save time and money and enjoy better public services, that may be worth having. It may even free officials' energies to take more trouble over the rest. Many governments have adopted that approach by default, although few would admit it.
A second possibility is to try harder to harness technology. Even the poorest of the poor may be able to use a smart card or a mobile phone, giving them a louder voice and a fairer deal. Some time this year the world will pass the point where more than half its population will have a mobile phone. Although mobiles are used mainly as phones and for text messages between customers, they are also powerful computers, offering the previously dispossessed a way into business and finance—and into interacting with public services. M-government (the latest buzzword, now that e-government has lost some of its lustre) allows citizens and the state to deal with each other through pared-down web pages, barcodes sent as pictures and simple text messages.
In some countries digital television offers another way of reaching the computer have-nots. So far, digital-television applications have involved things like voting in game shows or calling up information about a programme. But in principle there is no reason why the same mechanism could not be used by citizens to interact with their governments.
On online consultation with the public:
As you might expect, the place that makes the most advanced use of technology in promoting public participation is America, where officials now invite online comments from outsiders when they draw up legislation on subjects like environmental protection. A Department of Agriculture draft on organic-food standards, for example, prompted more than 250,000 comments. Yet the expertise mostly comes from a narrow range of specialists.
According to Cary Coglianese, an American e-government expert, imagining that online consultation will breathe new life into democracy "is a bit like imagining that giving automobile owners the ability to download technical manuals and order car parts online would turn a great number of them into do-it-yourself mechanics". Greater involvement by experts may make for more sensible rules, but it will not turn the system of public administration on its head.
The final paragraph is a hard point for me to take on board, because I believe that online consultation between government and citizens will help rather than hinder this country. Don't show those figures (250,000 comments) to the politicians or they will freak out as they build a mental picture of their workload skyrocketing (or, rather, the workload of their aides and government departments). Perhaps I'm being naive here, but considering the level of citizen participation in the parliamentary process today (i.e. very low), surely a large and diverse pool of opinions can only be an improvement for democracy in this country?
Hat tip: eGov AU
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Friday June 27, 2008
Categories: Technology
· Politics and Technology forum ·
Today I attended a forum in Canberra, “Politics and Technology”. It was the most inspiring event I have been to this year on the topic of politics and online engagement because we were able to hear so many different points of view in one morning on this important topic.
The keynote speaker was Matt Bai, author and writer for the NY Times. Matt provided a US viewpoint with interesting facts. Did you know the primary demographic for MoveOn is middle-aged (I wonder if it’s the same for GetUp)? Did you know DailyKos has more readers than most US newspapers (I wonder if Crikey will become this popular)? Did you know more people watch YouTube political ads than official broadcasts (I wonder if we will see an Obama Girl in Aus)?
The keynote was followed by two panels; the first panel discussed blogging, social networks, political movements and the media, although the debate really centered around blogging and the media. Some interesting comments from this session came from Prof Peter Black from QUT who summed up what he sees as the four key players in the online politics discussion. My summary:
Bloggers – healthy but small in number, diverse, less partisan than US, focused on policy rather than machinery, struggling to gain mainstream respect from politicians or media because don’t report “breaking news” … focus on commentary.
Politicians – ignorant of new technology, aren’t keen to engage in new technology, ceased to use Facebook once election was over, lots of potential for participatory democracy.
Media – keen to jump on bandwagon, but don’t respect independent bloggers.
Public – apathetic, unengaged generally with politics. This might be changing … we hadn’t seen political alignment in Australia for a long time until the Kevin Rudd stickers on Facebook profiles.
The second panel discussed IT and the future of political campaigning. This session was awesome. While partisan discussion got in the way of the debate about politics and technology somewhat, it was a fantastic opportunity to hear from politicians about how and why they are (or aren’t) engaging constituents online.
We heard from Andrew Bartlett, Kate Lundy and Joe Hockey. Kate and Joe both made it quite clear that politicians are very busy. I have heard from other sources that ALL parliamentary staff work very long hours, and particularly the spokespeople, who are expected to take media calls at all hours of the day and night in addition to their other duties. How do they find time among the phone calls, letters, emails, public meetings and policy work to participate in online conversations? Particularly given that politicians are expected to talk to *all* their constituents, yet not all constituents have access to the internet (and many of those that do have the internet do not participate in politics online). It’s not that I’m excusing politicians for not participating online, I think that as bloggers we have to try to understand *why* they’re not participating so we can find ways to get everybody talking together.
Joe Hockey said the big challenge for politicians is that participating online appears “hugely time-intensive for the reach that you get”. Of course we bloggers would argue that there is a greater possibility to engage with *more* people online. If politicians were to do this, it would be a win-win situation: the public would feel satisfied that their ideas and concerns were being listened to, and the politicians would (hopefully) be confident that they are getting opinions from a cross-section of society.
As Matt Bai said, people will increasingly “expect to be heard and expect to get answers”. He’s right of course … I really think politicians need to move now to engage people online, otherwise they risk being seen as unwilling to listen and irrelevant.
Matt finished his keynote by saying that when leaders lead, the internet will become the central point to organise from. I like this statement, but possibly because it’s something that I want to hear rather than something that’s accurate.
Kudos to Microsoft for holding the event, for making it free so more people could attend, and for presenting it without a big promo. I’m genuinely impressed … more please :)
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Wednesday June 25, 2008
Categories: Event Technology
· Non-profits: rate your CMS ·
NTEN is gathering information from the NPTech community about CMS providers. Tell us what you love -- and what frustrates, irks, and just generally annoys you -- and we'll compile the results into a handy report. The survey only takes about 5 minutes. Plus, everybody who completes it will receive a free copy of the final report.
The deadline is midnight Oregon time on 30th April ... I think that's something like 2pm on 1st May for us. More info.
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Monday April 28, 2008
Categories: Technology
· racism makes me sick - quiz ·
Today ANTaR launched the racism makes me sick campaign.
There were two technically tricky bits for the campaign. First, we wanted a pledge that people could fill in to make a personal commitment to eradicating racism. I outsourced this to Hugeobject who have been campaign partners with ANTaR in the past. The pledge looks great and even comes with a graphic designed by Joni (a hand - to go with our Sea of Hands branding) that will fill up as we get more people to sign the pledge.
The other tricky thing we decided to do was to make an interactive quiz that would encourage people to challenge their own assumptions about Indigenous people. Part of our work is public education so this was to be an important part of the campaign. I wanted to make the quiz a widget so that people could add it onto their own websites if they wanted to promote it for us. As I was already familiar with Widgetbox, and I knew that Widgetbox supports Flash apps, I decided to make the quiz in Flash.
I was surprised to find a Flash quiz template on the Adobe website, that also comes with a tutorial, so really it couldn't have been easier to build the quiz. It took me about three days to create it, including the images (I'm not a Flash pro, but I haven't had *much* experience, so complete beginners may need longer). That doesn't include the storyboarding, which probably took another day once I discussed it with my team and we got the text just right.
The final step was to add the quiz to Widgetbox. Once the quiz was set up in Widgetbox, I made it into a Facebook application using Widgetbox's plugin. Widgetbox takes you through (most of) the steps to set up a Facebook app so it doesn't take long. Setting up the widget probably took a couple of hours at most.
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Monday April 21, 2008
Categories: Campaigning Technology
· The new way of using the interwebs ·
Ok, the "new way" of using the interwebs is actually the "old way" to anyone who knows about RSS feeds. However, my colleagues didn't know what RSS feeds were, so I gave them a quick lesson today.
I started by showing them this great introductory video by Lee Lefever:
My colleagues and I use Google Calendar for our team diary, so I figured it would be easiest for them to use Google Reader to read their RSS feeds because they already have a Google account. Also, Lefever features Google Reader in his video so by showing them Google Reader I was keeping things simple.
I gave my colleagues a few ideas about what feeds they might like to subscribe to. I suggested they subscribe to the feed on our ANTaR website, and the ABC's Indigenous feed (tip: on the ABC website you can subscribe to news feeds based on tags, which is very useful). It wasn't long before they were subscribing to feeds without my help :)
P.S. if you need to educate people at your organisation about new-fangled interweb things such as wikis, social networking and blogs, Lefever has made a pile of great films that you could point people to. Take a look at his YouTube profile.
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Thursday January 17, 2008
Categories: Technology
· Not-for-profit use of Google's OpenSocial ·
Allan Benamer has written a useful post on the take-up of OpenSocial by not-for-profit orgs. OpenSocial, Google's social networking platform, was released last week. If anybody has blogged with accurate and trustworthy advice on this matter, it would be Allan. In short: most not-for-profit organisations shouldn't bother with it for now.
What do you reckon? Leave a comment » [1]
Sunday November 4, 2007
Categories: Technology
· Making Links conference - Moblogging ·
It's the end of Day 1 of the Making Links conference ... and it was a really interesting day :)
For me, the highlight was Dorothy Waterhouse's mini-talk on moblogging (mobile blogging). Dorothy is a Senior Education Officer at NSW AMES. She explained how to moblog (she showed us both the frontend and backend). Unfortunately, we found that you have to actually have MMS turned on before you can moblog so some of us couldn't do it on our own phones (MMS is turned off by default so you need to call your mobile services provider to have it turned on). However, once you can MMS on your phone, it's really easy!
Go have a look at the Making Links moblog that Dorothy set up specifically for the conference. You can make your own moblog using Tumblr. Dorothy also explained how she's using Teltra's SMS system ... again it sounds easy to use and, importantly, you can import and export data from/to your database.
This has got me thinking ...
What do you reckon? Leave a comment » [1]
Tuesday October 30, 2007
Categories: Event Technology
· Whose side are you on? ·
A colour advert in the Sydney Morning Herald weekend edition (with photo of the monks protest in Burma):
WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Defend the right to peaceful protest.
Release political prisoners.
Help us let the government of Myanmar know that the world is watching.TEXT 'FREEDOM' TO 0427 228 767 TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT
We will contact you with further information.
www.amnesty.org.auStandard mobile network provider sms charges apply
This is the message I received from Amnesty after texting them:
Thx 4 showing your support to stop oppression in Myanmar. We will be in contact shortly. Visit www.amnesty.org.au 4 more information. Amnesty International.
A brilliant way of getting more people to join a campaign :)
What do you reckon? Leave a comment »
Monday October 8, 2007
Categories: Campaigning Technology
· A government blog? ·
TechCrunch posted an article a few days ago, "Australian Government Proves Why Blogging Is Best Left To Everyone Else".
The short story is the Government has released a white paper on how it can utilise internet technologies to better consult with the public. TechCrunch (or, rather, Duncan Riley who writes for TechCrunch) ridiculed the Government for producing a white paper on blogging, and asked why the Government didn't simply launch a blog and ask the public to comment as blog comments.
I don’t think the Australian Government can be criticised for putting together a consultation paper on this topic … they have to do this in order to receive comments from the public, it’s simply the way they operate. I think it’s great they’ve got to the point of realising that blogs would be a very good way to have conversations with the general public.
I took a quick look at the white paper. What Duncan didn’t mention is that the public (including organisations) are invited to respond to this paper before 1st December. So if you have something to say about the policy, why don’t you submit a response? If we are unable to engage with pollies on our platform of choice (eg blogs) then we need to engage with them on their platform (white papers) if we want to influence the decision-making process.
Download a copy of the white paper from the AGIMO website.
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Sunday September 30, 2007
Categories: Technology
· Overbrook report - non-profit adoption of Web 2.0 ·
A New York-based philanthropic organisation, Overbrook Foundation, has recently published a report (which you can download from the Overbrook website) on the adoption of Web 2.0 by their non-profit grantee organisations. The report was written by the author of the book "Momentum" that I reviewed recently, Allison Fine.
The report found that the majority of the organisations surveyed are using the web for information rather than as a way to interact with people. Further, the organisations generally struggle with deciding which social media tools to use.
Of the organisations surveyed, 94% accept online donations, yet only half have a blog, and only half have videos. As the report notes:
Organizations are frantically raising money and do not feel that they have time to stop and think about how they work, how they engage their constituents, and what the most appropriate approaches to social media are for them. This leads to a culture of pushing the new tools away because the groups don't know enough about them, don't have the staff to explore and learn about them, and are working in environments that are often on the wrong side of the digital divide. As one participant in the group discussions said, "I think I'm missing something really big, but I don’t know what it is or how to find out what it is."
As a campaigner rather than a fundraiser, I'd argue that the blogging and videoing and all the other online communication methods are just as important as fundraising because unless you continue to attract new supporters it's going to be difficult to increase your funding (more supporters = more donations, and more supporters = more actions taken = more influence = more donations).
The findings of the report don't surprise me at all. I am often asked by not-for-profit organisations where they should start focussing their efforts online. I find that people often repeat buzzwords they've heard such as Facebook, SecondLife, or podcast, but they don't know how these tools can be of use to their organisation (often they want their organisation to use a buzzy-sounding tool because it sounds buzzy, when often it's unlikely to help them at all).
Allison Fine suggests that not-for-profit organisations need a reliable source of information and mentoring to help them gain confidence in using web tools for advocacy. Hopefully more pro bono consultants and organisations will step up and provide these much-needed services :)
Hat tip to NTEN
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Tuesday September 18, 2007
Categories: Technology