Debategraph

Debategraph is totally awesome. (Via rohan)

Hugely interesting and thought-provoking vague-future-of-gov-on-web event up at Nesta last night, all thanks to dominic. Time is tight and parties are loose this week, and there are so many (relatively) disjointed points to break down, mash back up again, I'm going to have to get this blog back on track over Christmas... In the meantime, Rohan has a summary and some video.

Wispas or Tweets: What have we achieved today?

The recent events in Mumbai were curious from an infotech point of view - standing watching a silent screen in Specsavers, I noticed one news channel (perhaps Sky, perhaps CNN or CBS) were actually showing "live" Twitter coverage of thoughts and comments. It looks like the BBC were also experimenting with integrating "Tweets" with a "live updates" page.

The comments on the Beeb article above are an interesting and considered mix. The Independent also followed up on it proclaiming the downfall of British journalism etc. But that's a debate I'm not getting into here.

For me, the interesting thing is that Twitter is being used in this way. In America, hack the debate spliced Tweets into the US election. This would be difficult to do with blogs - content is harder to scan, and then has to be summarised to make it ready for simple broadcast. Twitter "bypasses" this. It's already all ready to just be spat out. In other words, Twitter is broadcast ready.

When investigating the power of communication media, we learn that "impact effectiveness" - how much information you can gleam in as short a time as possible - is essential when the comms channel is already rammed with a million voices. (OK, I kind of just made that up, but it makes sense.) Ideas put more simply and more effectively will take precedence when the cost of communication tends towards zero, and when time is of the essence. This blog would be dead in the water if everyone was concerned about the time taken to scan it.

Politics is ideas as well as discussion, and everyone has a lot of both. A lot of people say that Twitter is the next "fad", and for a while - when it first came along, when I first signed up - I was cautious about it for the very same reason.

But where politicians have turned to Facebook as a way of re-engaging, we must ask "What really has Facebook achieved?" The answer may come back in the form of a Wispa.

But while politics remains a hierarchical structure based on representation, networking and media attention-grabbing, it's stomping ground will be the micro-bite attention worlds that creatures such as Twitter thrive in.

New Report - Progress in Online Services

Sphereless... it lives! I've been having many ongoing thoughts buzzing round my head for a while, thoughts which would squeeze nicely into this blog's techno-leotard. Unfortunately, they'll have to wait a little.

In the meantime, to get things re-rolling, the Public Accounts Committee has published their report on Government on the Internet, concerning the progress made (or not) in delivering government services by hooking an "e-" up to them.

The Register has a handy summary. Highlights include:

• 25% of .gov organisations couldn't say how much electronic services were costing them to run, and 40% of the rest could only estimate this. (That's an inverse total - 60% of 75% of... hmm... 45% of everyone, I think, who kept track of these things.)


• One third of sites aren't up to accessibility standards. That seems quite a lot still - and I'd be interested in which sites don't meet the standards: old ones no longer under development? Particular sectors? I wonder if there's a chance of mapping these things out.


• The question of the digital divide is raised yet again, probably relevant in light of the recent announcement of some kind of inclusion strategy.


• Interestingly, the Government "aims to close 951 websites by 2011". Furthermore: "the Committee recommends that no new government websites should be set up without permission from the Government's CIO." There are some interesting questions about centrality here - control over what people want, but also over the best way to navigate through both sites and site content. Maybe that's a future blog post, right there.

One for further bedtime reading, I think.

Straddling the Democractic Divide: Individuals or Groups?

I've realised that I've got a lot of blogreading to catch up with - there are some excellent posts out there that are very thought-provoking, and many interesting links that spiral off them. This, of course, is also rather ironic in light of the following post. Information overload is something that I've always been thinking about, but maybe it's time to take it seriously... Anyway, I digress.

This follows on from my previous post on one-click politics, along with David's summary of
how the BBC are consulting Bloggers, and also Phil's thoughts on identifying semantics in information. An odd set of links, maybe, but here's where I think they tie together: consolidation - of ideas, of opinions, and of decision-making. Where they differ is in terms of how these things should be consolidated. And it's this difference that's worth exploring in more detail, as it represents a clash of principles over what sort of democracy we're going to have in 10, 20, maybe 50 years' time.

On the one hand, the "one-click" approach is a very "modern" way of doing politics. It represents an individualist approach from a bottom-up perspective, or a populist approach at a societal level. It can be considered "liberal" as it is mainly concerned with expressing an opinion rather than negotiating one. Thus, such campaigns are often either directed at one very specific issue ("we want X") because there's little to no capacity (or desire) for deliberating over alternatives. Consolidation - working out which opinions exist and matter - comes from making an opinion public, but in the light of the large scales involved, organised expressions are generally the most effective mode of publicity. See the previous post for more on this.

On the other hand, the "underdog" of democracies (in my view) is a more interactive, more deliberative democracy - closer to the perception of the Athenian method, of rhetoric and reasoning. Debate seeks to persuade people and to argue for a case both "emotionally" and "rationally". However, this means it takes more effort, leading to possible exclusion under a kind of "time divide". Consolidation is a process here, using argument to attempt to coalesce opinion around one particular point of view.

This is probably the main point of this post: we can imagine two "opposing" forms of democracy, and two corresponding perspectives on how digital democracy tools should be built. (Naturally, things are a little more complex in reality, but I think this covers a lot of how people see the development of digital democracy.)

Tech-Politics: By the Numbers

ICT clearly affects both of these in both positive and negative ways. Greater access to information makes it easier to participate in debate, while reduced social cues (e.g. more text, less inflection) may both help and hinder interaction for different individuals. Voting is made easier, but (currently, at least ) at the possible expense of security (deleting cookies is easy when you know how). However, the current climate of individualism and mass markets (in which everyone has their own of every item, including PCs and Facebook accounts) means that the populist approach is here to stay for a while. So far, the computational basis of on-line politics, combined with this populism, has meant that the success of campaigns and political issues boils down to one thing: numbers. Ultimately - in terms of affecting policy - modern social networks are more about assembling quantity than engaging people in discussion.

Even the "blogosphere" is an example of this configuration: everyone has their own blog in which their opinions are presented. Argument is possible - and somewhat common - through comments and cross-blog debate. But for most (and here the irony continues, perhaps), the links established through comments, trackbacks and blogrolls are an accumulation of like-minded individuals, ready to be called upon when support is needed. Just like social network campaigns and petitions, at the end of the day numbers and big lists matter. The value of liberalism is defined by controlling the masses.

From Quantitative to Qualitative Populism

This brings us back to Phil's post on the semantic web and, oddly, to yesterday's quote. What are we using technology for, and in what direction are we planning to take it? The Semantic Web, or even the Syntactic Web, offer one path to overcome the disjunction between individualism and deliberation. It defines the problem as that of distillation - of being able to discern an overall, "common" sentiment from the plethora of segregated (yet interconnected) forums that now exist. In other words, the (techno)logical next step, from quantity to quality, in a pluralist, populist democracy is to treat opinion as just another measurable, to be analysed by technology. It is the measured form of opinion that changes - from polls and petitions, to emotion and context.

This is why David's post, as well as some of his previous thoughts, are interesting (and why I need to catch up with the articles linked to...). Reaching out to bloggers is one thing, but what exactly is a "cross-blog conversation"? Is it an effort to raise awareness of a particular issue, and to elicit opinions that can then be aggregated somewhere else? Or is it an attempt to come to some kind of consensus within those blogs? My experience points a lot more to the former, although I welcome people to point out counter-examples. This leaves us with the question: when it comes to real decision-making, where does the power lie? Expressing opinions on a blog is one thing, but deciding between opinions is another. Is the aggregator - the conversation "overseer" - the best position to do this, or should we be encouraging greater omni-directional interaction between the individuals?

Conclusion

OK, so maybe from a political theory perspective there's not a lot new here - there have always been debates over what form of democracy is more preferable, and to what extent citizens should be involved in making decisions. However, there seems to be a huge deal of enthusiasm (and optimism. and hype.) for both ways forward under the technically networked paradigm. But what of the gap between them? I think the picture I'm laying out - that there is a conflict and an exclusivity between individuality and group-decision-making - is fairly bleak. But maybe it doesn't have to be, maybe we can have both our own voices, and participate more fully in "real" debate to explore an issue. Hopefully the next few posts will explore the 2 sides, and the gap, a bit more.

Does ICT "Tidy Up" Democracy Too Much?

There are all kinds of things I've been wanting to coalesce into blog posts recently, but for now here's a short quote that caught my eye today. It's from an chapter by Lawrence Pratchett called "Democracy Denied" (in 'Orwell in Athens').

...if anything, the symbolism of ICTs implies a clinical and rational world that emerges from their increased deployment, that has no room for the inefficiencies and inconsistencies of democracy.

This, for me, ties in with ideas about how democracy is put into practice (e.g. vote counting and quantitative representation rather than deliberation) which, hopefully, will appear in greater detail here soon.

One-Click Politics

(Warning: Ooh, wow, this one turned into a big long post...)

David Wilcox has an interesting report on Amnesty using Facebook to recruit people. I should note that I'm not a huge fan of Facebook - I have an account to see how it works, but no contacts in my list. So far, nothing on there particularly makes me want to add any, either. That said, the number of people using it clearly earmarks it for attention on a societal scale.

Two Facebook campaigns that David picks up on - Burma and bank charges - highlight the trend in "Web 2.0 politics" that is worth investigating in more detail. Whether it's worth worrying about it, of course, depends on your point of view on how democracy should work, and what kind of participation we want.

Here's the bit from each of the above campaigns, respectively, that interests me:

Burma:
The Support the Monks in Burma Facebook group has reached 300,000 members, making it one of the largest groups of Facebook, and one of the fastest growing. One thousand people are joining every hour. “We are showing that the eyes of the world are still on Burma, that ordinary people are showing their solidarity and support,” said Johnny Chatterton, the UK co-ordinator...

Bank charges:
A campaign group on Facebook reached over 5,000 members and helped lead to HSBC freezing their plans.

Now, reaching out to so many people is all very impressive. But c'mon now, is this really the modern, networked democracy we've all been looking for - one based, on the whole, on how large a number we can amass?

I think there's a good side to numbers, of course - voting and polling are examples of where they can be used to settle a decision (in the instance of an election, say) or to gauge opinion (before an election). But these are specific uses, and have specific impacts - namely, they're purely about one-way information, from the individual to the central point of data collection. There's no feedback to the individuals, and there's no interaction between individuals. It's a view of people as static individuals, not as a dynamic group.

This is also the problem I have with Facebook in general, and with other schemes such as petitions - the most visible aspect to them all is a quantity: How many people have signed up? How many friends do you have? How many widgets have you added? How many fish have you been sent today? How many campaigns are you a part of? "Participation" takes on a very bounded definition, like an economic view of consumerism. It is transformed, away from the Greek idea of democracy - rhetoric, persuasion, and exercises in evidential argument - and towards an extremely shallow, almost simulated form of populism.

Two threads lead to this, each with different effects. Firstly, the networked aspect of this is hugely influential. The comparison to polls and voting above is unfair, because Web 2.0 politics doesn't cater to individuals in the same way a survey does - it caters to connections, the links between people. Thus, when we say that X number of people have signed up to a campaign, what we may actually mean is that a social network containing that many people have signed up. In terms of the demographics and the "hierarchies" that are then part of that sign-up group, this is a fundamentally different beast. You most likely have a more homogenous group, which raises issues of representation and of organisation - are people only more likely to turn "allegiance" into "action" if their peers do so? Should a more decentralised, local-social group approach be encouraged to take advantage of this?

Secondly, the numbers-led approach encourages, I think, a lot more simplified interaction. Complex interaction paths, requiring greater thought and time, dent these numbers. In the automated, economic, on-line world, these numbers are sales, hence the hullaballoo over Amazon's one-click purchase method. In political terms, a numbers-led democracy seeks to unite the most basic of political argument - emotion - with the same technology. This can be seen in Facebook campaigns and petitions alike, where the reasons for joining in are overtly moral rather than realistic or practical (who's not going to "support" the oppressed if it doesn't actually mean doing something) and the barrier to pledging this support is as low as possible.

The only reason to worry about this trend is if it turns out to be an illusion of power. The bank fees campaign apparently changed the bank's mind. Other "campaigns", such as that to bring back old chocolate bars, support a "realistic" view of power in a network age. But in both of these, the "campaign" is little more than customer canvassing. Opinion and popular hype don't necessarily lead to "reality" - a problem that Samuel L Jackson encountered.

So popular opinion is all well and good, in some circumstances. But at the end of the day, are we setting up our politics to be an easy-riding, least-responsibility, one-click "discussion" shadow?

Debatepedia: Mapping the Rational Argument

It's all quiet on the Sphereless front... Congratulations and many thanks if you're reading this, maybe via some long-forgotten RSS subscription. I'm hoping to get a few more posts out soon, if time allows.

For now, I'm hugely excited by Debatepedia, which piggy-backs on wikis but takes a much more structured approach. The idea is very similar to something that's been kicking around in my brain for too many years now (as well as others'), so it's great to see something in the e-flesh, and that's being actively maintained. (Not sure about the name though, especially if saying it out loud...)

Have a look at an example debate - say, on file-sharing - and you'll soon get the gist of it. But for the lazy, the basic idea is that you list the "for" and "against" arguments relating to particular questions. This helps break down the discussion and present a much wider array of arguments (ooh, look, coding speak sneaking in ;) to a reader.

I think this is hugely important, as too often I think people are put off debate due to the over-emphasis on certain points. For example. terrorism and safety are often used to force certain legislation through, at the expense of other arguments, and morals other than "Aie! Save myself!" This approach would (hopefully) lead to a more rational debate, and a more "considerate" (of the argument and, perhaps, of each other) society.

The second important thing is that the arena is mostly impartial. Like Wikipedia, it works because it defines a clear set of rules, and a clear aim for what should be recorded. Wikipedia records facts, not opinion. Debatepedia is the opposite, in a way - to the point where it's the same: It lists arguments as facts, such that the whole of the "logical" realm of debate is available for all to see. "For" and "Against" are equal in a sense, and this impartiality/completeness is good for encouraging participation. Strong advocacy puts many people off participation too, I feel.

One of the interesting things that comes out of the site, then, is the way it highlights the difference between "rationality" and "emotion" in politics. Don't get me wrong - I don't think you can necessarily run a debate without involving both of these. But the current climate of "debate" all too often gets the 2 mixed up - often deliberately. Emotive arguments are often backed up by supposedly "rational" statistics, for example, and we end up going round and round in circles until we're not sure what to think any more. Perhaps by jotting down the rational side of things, we can then make more informed decisions according to how we want the world to be.

Is a wiki the best way to decide which argument is best? I'm not sure about that. It'd be easy to take a technological route and add some kind of voting or rating set-up to the system, but personally I'd much rather see this kind of thing used as a tool for informing debate. Clarifying the rational, as Debatepedia does, gives you a better way of thinking about what's involved in an issue, and helps you to see things from a point of view that was muddled or obscured previously. But the philosophy and motivation behind choosing from these options - the emotive side - is far more complex, and subject to just as much rationality and irrationality as ever (a point that the Greeks turned into Rhetoric and Democracy to begin with).

It'd be great to see a simplified version, with a hugely "dumbed down" (read "user friendly") interface, and centred on one particular issue - a small trial. "Local" instances could even be used within small groups, to map out otherwise-murky and ever-twisting discussion over the course of a day or two, for instance.

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this one.