opolitics

18 Doughty Street is a new web based internet TV channel. They won’t hide its rightwing agenda. I wonder if it will be Fox News for the UK. Discussing politics is always good for democracy in an age where civil liberties are compromised for the Anti Terror crusade. I am looking forward for the 10th of October to watch the channel. I tend to the left and currently live overseas. Good luck to the 18 Doughty Street team.

David Cameron, Conservative party leader, has launched his own vlog (video weblog) to try to get his message across to young people. Blogging is the latest PR and marketing weapon for political parties, trying to look fresh. David Cameron shows his domestic charm in the kitchen, dining room, the car and in the office. The question is will Web 2.0 help Cameron win the next elections.

Politicians must abandon the old broadcast model of communicating if they are to harness the current high public interest in ‘podcasting’ to increase citizen participation in democracy, a leading academic has warned.

Podcasting, which uses the internet to distribute audio and video content to computers and portable devices such as mp3 music players, could become a significant way for people to become politically engaged, according to Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds. But if politicians use it to distribute prepared speeches, the public will turn off, Professor Coleman told E-Government Bulletin.

“Seeing or hearing a politician just deliver a speech isn’t terribly exciting,” he said. “These new technologies only work well if they link the perspective of a politician with those of other people. If it is seen by politicians as another broadcast medium like TV or radio, they will meet with the same indifference,” he said.

Unlike in the US, few high-profile UK politicians have moved to exploit the new technology, although several MPs including Wantage and Didcot Conservative MP Ed Vaizey and Dunbartonshire East Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson are making use of a new political podcasting site ‘Politics on demand’ (http://www.politicsondemand.co.uk) to offer short talks on their work. According to Coleman, Vaizey is also considering offering a more sophisticated service by podcasting his surgeries and public meetings in his constituency.

In the US, some leading politicians such as John Edwards, former running mate to Democrat candidate John Kerry, appear to have grasped how to use the medium to communicate their personality effectively. “John Edwards’s podcast is good. He seems to understand the grassroots, person to person nature of the web pretty well for a national US politician,” leading US-based podcasting guru Brian Russell (http://www.audioactivism.org/) told E-Government Bulletin.

source:E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN - Issue 207, 20 March 2006

UK’s Hansard Society research examines the potential of political blogging
Key findings from Political Blogs - Craze or Convention? are:

• Blogging has the potential to significantly impact on political engagement and political processes as they provide an opportunity for alternative informal voices to enter into the political debate without a great deal of cost or effort.
• Blogging breaks down the barriers between public and privates spaces and allows elected representatives to put across their individuality and personality.
• The availability of low-cost, low maintenance authoring software means blogs are far easier to construct and update than conventional websites.
• The most appealing blogs are those which provide genuine debate between bloggers and visitors to the blog. Blogs that do not offer this facility give visitors little reason to return.
• At the moment, political blogging is still regarded as the pursuit of internet connoisseurs rather than ordinary members of the public. While our jury found blogs easy to navigate, they found the tone of content unappealing.
• Blogging has the potential to be of enormous benefit to MPs and other elected representatives who use it as a listening post rather than another tool to broadcast their ideas, achievements or party dogma.

See also

• Effective Political Blogging - Doc Searls, Cameron Barrett, Mitch Ratcliffe and Halley Suitt [recorded live by IT Conversations at the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In] Ross Mayfield’s Notes
• Evolution of Political Blogging - Samuel Rose
• Election 2004 - Ed Cone, Session Leader - Bloggercon III - IT Conversations. (blogged by Renee Blodgett and others)

The wikipedia definition of Open Source Politics or Open Politics combines traditions of the free software and open content movements with postmoderism, and promotes a decision making method claimed to be a more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest with respect to public policy issues.

Critera

• anyone can participate
• all participants are equals
• all actions are transparent
• all contributions are recorded and preserved
• all deliberation is structured
• all content is re/organized by participants on an ongoing basis.
• partisan behavior is limited by the format and community standards.

Underlying preferences

• decentralization of authority: giving the widest and most potent franchise to citizens is thought to minimize what economists call the principal-agent problem, or the tendency for managers to abuse authority.
• centralization of information: the use of information technology to facilitate communication challenges is key to the practicality of the process.
• equality of opportunity: anyone can participate in deliberation, with the expectation that people themselves select to participate on issues in which they have the greatest stake, expertise or both. Open politics treats the expert and the citizen as equals, implying that the experts are obliged to convince the citizens directly, rather than using representatives as intermediaries/brokers of policy. This use of peer review is emphasized as the best method to determine what is true or good (with the understanding that this should change over time).
• encouraging diversity of thought, such that multiple positions and arguments are created, refined and compared; usually the more the better, provided they are succinct.

Implementation

These criteria are generally satisfied by a wiki or some other collaborative workspace in which multiple points of view are conveyed and reviewable in “living documents” that reflect, on an ongoing basis, what the community thinks.

David Abutbul suggested that parliament meeting sessions should be held using XHTML standard while ministerial positions in government should be voted using the XFN standard.

Bugzilla
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Bugzilla is a general-purpose bug-tracking tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla Foundation. Since Bugzilla is web-based and is free software / open source software, it is also the bug tracking tool of choice for many projects, both open source and proprietary.

Bugzilla’s notion of a bug is very general; for instance, mozilla.org uses it to track feature requests as well.

Government needs it! (bug-tracking tool and track feature requests)

Oh dear, the LazyWeb, “The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)”, hit me.
I just googled LazyGov and stumbled upon the idea I posted yesterday.

Tim Jackson: “The idea would simply be to put up a web site where people - normal civilians, not think tankers or politicians — can report good ideas from governments around the world so that they can be shared and copied.”

Mark Simpkins started LazyGov.

LazyGov is based on the LazyWeb concept and the RFC (Request for Comments) process. The LazyWeb claims that “The idea that if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!)“. civil society take waky ideas and try to persuade government to implement them as laws. Usually this is a long process and at times involves protest.

On the other hand, politicians take ideas and make them into policy, after getting feedback from their constituency. Participation and peer review help discuss ideas and build a constituency.

LazyGov only works when people discuss ideas and help each other improve government.