The Political Issues Analysis System (PIAS) project sought to investigate how citizens in Melbourne, Australia used the Internet to seek political information about key political issues. It also sought to understand how citizens contacted their elected representative about these issues. Through workshops, case studies, and the development and testing of a prototype, the research uncovered some notable trends in terms of engagement with components of the formal political system online”.

http://broadband.unimelb.edu.au/resources/IBES-political-issue-analysis-system.pdf

Cyber radicals are harnessing the power of the internet to promote social change. Illustration: Lynsey Irvine and Peter Storey for the Observer

…20 years ago, set the agenda for far-reaching transformations in the political sphere, in economies everywhere, in social interaction, even in concepts of our own identity. And Berners-Lee succeeded in doing so for one reason: he released the technology for free.This simple decision, taken by a computer scientist used to working in environments that promoted openness and transparency, eclipses any hype about subsequent Twitter revolutions, Facebook campaigns or political protests ascribed to the platform since (link to story in the Guardian by Aleks Krotoski)

This story by Aleks Krotoski is OK, if not a little dated. There are lots of links on this blog about the use of the web for political purposes dating back about a decade. But I do like the way in which Krotoski (from the BBC series on the history of the internet) highlights the importance of free, open infrastructure for everyone. How lucky Australians are to have such a large public investment in a national Broadband network and such solid investment in the broader eResearch agenda (soon to include the humanities I hope!)

• Melbourne Indymedia
• http://indymedia.org.au/melbourne
• S11.org(ant-globalisation protest movement website…on the Pandora Archive)
• http://pandora.nla.gov.au/parchive/2000/S2000-Sep-14//www.s11.org/
• Realjeff.com (1999 Victorian State Election…on the Pandora Archive)
• http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-arch/1999/Z1999-Sep-24/http://www.realjeff.com/index.htm
• Engage Media (Local Melbourne activist group using ‘Web 2′ techniques)
• http://www.engagemedia.org/
• The Death of Ian Tomlinson (London 2009)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECMVdl-9SQ
• Mash-up Australia (data sources)
• http://mashupaustralia.org/data-sources/
• Suburban Trends (one of the winners from Mash-up Australia)
• http://mashupaustralia.org/mashups/suburban-trends/
• They work for you (UK Mash-up of Hansard)
• http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
• GetUp (Melbourne activist group)
• http://www.getup.org.au/
• Major Parties
• http://www.alp.org.au
• http://www.greens.org.au
• http://www.liberal.org.au

UK.gov is calling on developers to consult the Cabinet Office on its prototype website that will open some government datasets to the public.

It wants the developer community to get involved in shaping what apps, data sources and features the website should contain.

“With over 1,000 existing data sets, from seven departments (brought together in re-useable form for the first time) and community resources, we want developers to work with us to use the data to create great applications; give us feedback on the early operational community; and tell us how to develop what we have into a single point of access for government-held public data,” reads a post on the government’s digital engagement blog (link).

I attended the Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 on Friday (18 September) at the Said Business School. The theme of the Convention was ‘assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media’; a fairly monumental tasks for a one day convention with speakers from both sides of the Atlantic and from the Academy, business, media, and politics. The Convention was ordered around panel discussion with a lot of participation from the audience. At times subversive and always humorous ‘tweets’ from the audience were also projected on the wall behind the speakers (we voted to do this earlier in the day).

Rather than divide my time between all the speakers, I will concentrate on two of the most distinctive speakers that hopefully convey the timbre of the conference. The first speaker is Mathew Hindman, an academic at the University of Phoenix and author of the recently published ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press; 2009). The other speaker I will discuss is Kara Swisher, the Technology Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Hindman was on the panel titled ‘Social Media so what? Assessing the impact of blogs and social media?’ The main thrust of his argument was that the Internet isn’t inherently democratic and that it is not so much about the medium, but how the medium is institutionalised that makes it democratic. He discussed democracy in the broader sense and asserted that there are a lot of democratic values and they aren’t all about the web. Publishing is an important part of political expression, but as the barriers to publication are so low on the web, anyone can publish creating a cacophony of noise. In other words, a lot of people are publishing but who is listening? Hindman claimed that the very volume of data on line necessitates the need to filter and this may create a new set of ‘gate keepers’ rather than usurp the older gate keeping mechanisms of industrial media. He also discussed (as he does in his book) that the Internet hasn’t partially empowered a new political class and that unequal political expression and organisation remains. The most important lesson from Hindman is that technology is not good nor bad nor is it neutral and that all technological advance isn’t towards the removal of privilege. All technological advances create winners and losers and the increased use of social software isn’t necessarily good for democracy; we must make it good for democracy.

Kara Swisher, on the other hand was a technological determinist. She was on the panel ‘Blogging at 20? The future and potential of social media’. It may have been that it was the end of the day and people were grappling to find anything more to say about blogs (I have been blogging for 10 btw), but the discussion descended into the usual gee-wizz, determinist clap-trap. Swisher embraced the technological determinists’ narrative in a vigorous gravitas that I haven’t heard since the superstitious days of the late 20th Century. She performed brilliantly claiming that politicians and the rest of us don’t use social software such as Facebook then they will become redundant (not sure what ‘redundant’ means here). She made an historical and metaphorical leap that made me dizzy and claimed that as people learned to drive cars and left their ponies behind, democracy must do the same (no donkeys!). The usual catalogue of new gadgets was brought to the fore with the only argument it seems; that if we don’t embrace them then we are doomed!

I twitted a message that was projected on the wall behind her head ‘technological determinism bad; technology good!

In ending, the Convention shouldn’t have concentrated on Blogs so much; they are really not that interesting. Also I would have liked to see a speaker or two from China and other countries as the US and Britain were over-represented. Plus, I would have liked to see more evidence presented (as Bill Dutton; the Director of the Oxford Internet did), as Conventions such as this are in danger of being hijacked by trivia dressed up as revolution. As Dutton argued, the Internet reconfigures rather than changes, it has always been social and even wondered if it is possible to have an overview at all now.

But still, in the words of Bill Thompson, Technology critic, BBC News Online, people will do remarkable things if you remove the need for them to ask permission.

(Follow what others had to say…)

Matthew Hindma

HeadsUp is a moderated, online space for under 18s to debate the political issues important to them. Young people share viewpoints with their peers and decision-makers up and down the country (link).

Lords of the Blog is a collaborative blog written by Members of the House of Lords for the purposes of public engagement. The aim of the blog is to help educate, raise awareness and engage with the public on a range of issues relating to the role and business of the House of Lords. The blog is authored by a group of Members from across the House. Each Member has their own profile and personal section of the blog. A ‘homepage’ provides an at-a-glance digest of the latest post from each Member

(An initiative from the House of Lords and the Hansard Society).

This field report traces how a committed group of volunteers harnessed the micro-blogging tool Twitter to create innovative public media 2.0 experiments—first to actively engage users to report on their voting experiences in the 2008 U.S. election, and then to document their experiences of the 2009 presidential inauguration. Along the way, these two projects demonstrated how journalists and advocates can effectively leverage a range of both commercial and open source social media tools to organize, publicize and implement citizen reporting projects, creating infrastructure for related future projects. Organizers have since worked to archive and repurpose the code and collaboration materials from these efforts for use in 2009 election monitoring initiatives in India and Iran (link)