Post in TheyWorkForYou campaign launches today

Mar 26 00:09 UTC

Hi All,

Some of you might already have seen this, but I thought you might be
interested in our new campaign focussed around getting Parliament to
publish bills properly.

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills/

If you'll forgive me, I thought I'd muse on the meaning of this
campaign in a way which I hope interest you a bit:

1. mySociety has traditionally worked on the assumption that it's
basically impossible to ever get any part of any government to do
anything of any real significance in the field of edemocracy, or in
the wider field of greater access to data. As a result we've always
tried to pick projects that work as well as possible for the citizen
without requiring government to do anything it didn't do before (think
FixMyStreet, or WriteToThem). Picking a project that requires a bit of
government to move a single inch in order for your project to work at
all is a sadly proven path to failure. Unfortunately, our need to
campaign today is a validation of this highly pessimistic approach. It
is absurd that this campaign is even necessary, given that we tried so
hard to do it the 'nice way' with meetings, gentle encouragement and
nicely written word documents in Whitehall-speak explaining why it was
useful and cheap and non-threatening. But where it counted the
unelected officials who hold the relevent power here just weren't
persuadable for reasons that we're having to FOI to find out.

2.  Most evaluations of edemocracy projects and the impact of the
internet on democracy in general are described in terms of what they
don't achieve, their still-small-compared-to-TV audiences, their lack
of deep engagement in the democratic process, and their inability to
extract truly transformational democratic reform. This would seem a
relevent observation if any parts of government had actually tried
very hard to change, or invested more than a single day's worth of
budget for running the HMRC computer systems into this field. But
they've not, so this sounds a bit like complaining that the monkey
you've got chained to a typewriter still hasn't written anything like
Shakespeare.

3. What we need is a new approach to studying edemocracy that focuses
on pressure points, chinks in the armour where improvements might be
possible, whether with the consent of government or not. We need a
study that is much better at picking up very subtle steps forward (ie
I was disappointed how few people spotted the unusual nature of some
of the compromises we got from No10 over the petitions design, ie
showing rejections) because the developments we're likely to see in
the edemocracy field in the near future are very small and slow - a
long way from the major online deliberation platforms hooked
brilliantly and transparently into offline policy making processes
that I know so many people had in mind when they started working in
this field. The fact that Parliament's historic Hansard is being
hosted on a non-parliament server should be considered *Big News* in a
field of small, inching improvements. We need to get better at picking
up these details, rating and sharing them, and less worried about
who's form of deliberative polling is more theoretically sound.

Anyway, if this seems like a counsel of despair, it isn't supposed to
be. I'm just saying that being realistic about the nature of actual
progress in our field (tiny, incremental, currently peaking with
things like TheyWorkForYou and Stemwijzer.nl ) makes for more
interesting, useful discussions than comparing everything to the Holy
Grail of True, Mass Scale Deliberative Democracy.

And talking of small but positive signs, check this http://snipurl.com/22kj7

ta ta,