Marea With an E

eDemocracy- a new model?

I find that my mind is starting to work like the internet. I start exploring one rabbit hole and can’t stop until I either find what I’m looking for or end up nearly as mad as The Hatter or as dazed as Alice. So it was that the recent sackings at Fairfax Newspapers meant I tuned into the resultant debate about quality journalism, its place in the Fourth Estate and the part it plays in maintaining our democratic system. Eric Beecher, now editor of Crikey.com believes we are seeing the disappearance of the “big” newspaper model where organisations employ 300-400 journalists. Crikey.com employs 40 fulltime journalists which only allows them to cherry-pick stories of the day. Quality investigative journalism, the type that throws up a Wollongong Council or an Australian Wheat Board scandal, the argument goes, needs quality journalistic resources; as advertisers move to online, newspaper revenues fall and journalists get the sack.

Depressing? Undoubtedly, but Getup, an Australian independent grass roots advocacy organisation is about to launch Project Democracy as a way of getting participation back into democracy. Modelled on the highly successful UK TheyWorkForYou.com ProjectDemocracy is being described as the “ intersection of technology, new media and politics”.

How does it all work?

In “Plugged-in politics hits our shores” Ed Coper from Getup believes these sites are “redefining the relationship between the electorate and the elected”. Sites like TheyWorkForYou.com allow constituents to follow the performance of their local members in parliament via automatic emails. Coper describes “digital dossiers” where a politician’s parliamentary performance, financial interests, even their expenses are conveniently available to interested people including, I would have thought, journalists.

How did this all start?

Searching TheyWorkForYou.com quickly and easily leads you to mySociety.com and UK Citizens Online Democracy a UK charity that is funded mainly by large Charitable Trusts of the type that don’t seem to exist in Australia. The sites are run by volunteers who use open source code to develop the applications that allows a group of like minded people to link up. Whilst Tom Steinberg founded TheyWorkforYou in 2003, a number of people, including James Crabtree had explored the concept of e-democracy where citizens would be able to help themselves through mutual aid to overcome civic problems. In an article “Civic hacking:a new agenda for e-democracy” Crabtree sets out his vision about self-help through public investment and online reciprocity, about “connecting ordinary people with other ordinary people”. It seems he started a landslide and mySociety.org now has a number of projects running including No.10 Petitions, FixMyStreet, PledgeBank, WhatDoTheyknow and HearFromYourMP.

How effective are these sites in supporting representative democracy?

The numbers quoted seem impressive. The No.10Petitions website, for example, has eight million signatures with five million unique email addresses which represents 10% of the UK population. The HearFromYourMP site has been used by over 60,000 constituents and is used regularly by 160 MPs. It appears TheyWorkForYou has become a minor political institution itself with claims that seven million hits were recorded on the site in 2007. I have no idea if this volume of activity has actually changed the course of democracy but at the very least sites like WhatDoTheyKnow (“make Freedom of Information requests and read all about what other people have been asking, and what replies they’ve been getting. You can even subscribe to email alerts when other people ask about things you’re interested in”) go some way to addressing freedom of information issues that are regularly discussed in the Australian media.

What about the nuts and bolts?

In terms of useability  I found these sites to be clear and easy to navigate around. They won’t win any design awards necessarily, they are not image heavy but they are certainly fit-for-purpose. Once you register these sites generally allow users to leave comments. There are also news modules, blogs and RSS feed capabilities. You can donate to charity, suggest a petition, volunteer your services all in the name of  engaging with the democratic process and “keeping the bastards honest” to use the Australian vernacular of Don Chipp. The sites also use lots of imbedded links which gives great transparency and openness. You don’t feel like they are trying to hide behind anything. The content is also written in a very casual even humorous manner which I think would appeal to almost everyone.

Perhaps the thing that amazed me the most was the fact that a lot of the work is done by volunteers using open source code. This effort alone deserves a number of accolades. I’m not the only one who thinks so. According to politicsonline.com the UK Citizens Online Democracy is in the 2008 Top10 list.

So what’s happening closer to home?

Well, it seems Getup was a little less than transparent about YourDemocracy.

As reported by Crikey it seems that OpenAustralia.org is already operating and you can now access Hansard and current Senate debates. There is a direct link from TheyWorkForYou to OpenAustralia. However Project Democracy is now finally up and running and it is more visually appealing with an interactive model of the Senate chamber, blogs galore and background information about the Senate and how it all works. Good resource for those interested in politics I would have thought.

Wrapping up

Although I don’t plan on being an investigative journalist I’m glad I followed the rabbit hole. I’m going to bookmark these sites for future reference like any good journalist because I’m pretty sure they’ll come in handy one day. I’m also sure they are going to be used by the growing band of citizen journalists as well as the diminishing group of professional ones.

Read this

“The politician, the prat and the political idealist” for an entertaining read about the No. 10 Petition site.