As we mentioned recently, iCan is a new BBC project that has just emerged into beta testing, describing itself as "a website to help you do something about issues that matter to you." It provides space and tools for ordinary people to get involved with local civic campaigns and issues, and helps them start their own initiatives relating to issues that matter to them. Prompted by a Wired News article that mentioned our reservations about the project, we decided to expand upon these issues and suggest some possible areas in which iCan might be extended in the future.

Some people will inevitably question whether online civic engagement is a job for the BBC, the government, local activists, community workers, individuals or all of the above. Indeed, is it a job at all? E-democracy activist Stephen Clift addresses this when he asks:

"To what extent should online advocacy be subsidized by a public entity or the media? This is a very grey area, however, promoting more local online civic activities on issues that are less ideological might make a lot of sense. This connects with idea of "Public Net-work" where governments (and others) involve stakeholders and citizens via online means in the implementation of _established_ policy priorities. If iCan can help people navigate to online involvement activities on diverse sites, not just within their system, that might be very useful."

Clearly this is a tough one for the BBC to answer, and will be the focus of much of the discussion about the project. Under political pressure from a government for whom the corporation is regarded as the de facto official opposition, and under attack from cheaper, more populist commercial media organisations who resent its success, the BBC does not want to provide any hostages to fortune. As it stands, iCan seems to be a brave and potentially exciting project that is true to the original public service ethos of the BBC, and it certainly deserves the time and space to develop. Good luck iCan and all who sail in her.

On the positive side, the project encourages civic engagement, which is to be welcomed; but on the negative side it can be seen as slightly patronising because it thinks that we ("the people") are only interested in micro-level local issues, rather than the major national and international issues the BBC covers on its main news services.

This is perhaps a reflection of the original assumptions of the project, which seem to be two-fold: first, that people are less interested in party and electoral politics and are only concerned with local issues that affect their own lives; and, second, that mainstream politicians and the media must never again miss an important "bottom-up" story such as the UK fuel protests that took place in 2000. Matt Jones, who was one of the team that created iCan, expresses these aims in the language of the bloggerati when he says "it is all about the tail [of the power law graph depicting audience distribution]". However, the fact that in the UK alone more than two million people mobilised three years after the fuel protest in response to a complex international issue that did not directly affect most of their lives (US/UK war in Iraq) suggests these assumptions are not entirely correct.

In an age of globalisation and interdependence, the idea that "all politics is local" is patently facile. This myth is perhaps most widespread in the United States where, it could be argued, all politics is in fact international, as the lifestyle of its citizens depends upon its position in the global system and access to natural resources in other countries. In power law terms, the government and the military look after the (mostly international) issues at the head of the power curve, whilst under this protective umbrella the media encourage people to focus on the issues at the tail, which are indeed local. In the UK, we are slightly more fortunate, in that the BBC has a well-deserved reputation for covering important national and international issues, and it retains a mission to inform and educate the public. That is perhaps why we have high expectations of iCan.

The iCan project's focus on supporting civic engagement around what by implication are actually the least popular issues has already been parodied by a slightly unkind spoof site called iCan't:

"Topic of the week: Speed Bumps. We're never going to discuss anything important to anybody. So let's get you on MI5's secret list by adding your comment … "

NYU Professor Clay Shirky popularised the (often mis-used) power law perspective on audience distribution among Weblogs, but he has also written extensively about the nature of online communities and online social interaction in general. Importantly for the iCan project, he reminds us that it is users who own an online community, not the host organisation that provides the software. This point cuts to the heart of the tricky issues the BBC will face if iCan proves successful, and is the basis for some of the most obvious questions that could be asked of the beta site right now.

In a system such as iCan, control over the infrastructure is a key determinant of power in a political sense. Power does not derive only from "hits" or website viewers, but from control of the infrastructure - in this case the system, its taxonomy of issues and how it describes them. If we could represent our own issues on our own terms and in our own language, then that would mean that the users own the community. Sébastien Paquet recently illustrated just how an approach to taxonomic organisation can be a political issue, citing the example of the University of Windsor's Leddy Library collection of resources relating to the War against Iraq. If users own the community, then in an ideal system they should be able to work together to influence the way their issues are described and organised on a site such as iCan, though some kind of distributed metadata management.

Another feature of an ideal iCan-like civic engagement platform would be to link it to the news. It is widely accepted that aside from the most localised issues, many people who start campaigning are inspired to do so by what they see on TV or read in the newspapers. The homelessness charity Shelter was formed as a response to a TV documentary on the BBC. These days, the BBC would happily provide a telephone helpline to call if we found the show upsetting, but could iCan spawn a campaign to create another Shelter? Clearly there are political and legal issues for the BBC in being seen to support political action linked to its own reporting, but given that the BBC is only providing a social software platform (not funding or weapons ;-) this should surely be an aim.

Similarly, the lack of any content aggregation features that extend beyond the walls of the iCan system seems to be a notable omission. If somebody decides to take the step to create a campaign, one of the first and most useful things a system such as this can do is to scrape related content from other sites. This is probably the fastest way to establish what other people and organisations are already addressing your issue of concern. At the moment, iCan has links to the BBC's own search engine and some local information based on the old UpMyStreet system, but that is all. Online community practitioner David Wilcox wrote recently about civic knowledge management as an emerging area of focus for online community engagement initiatives in the UK, which are moving from a focus on providing online access to thinking about levels and types of participation. Civic knowledge management based on content aggregation would be a useful function for iCan, but it would need to extend beyond the walls of the BBC.

iCan is a welcome departure for a mainstream media organisation, and should prove to be a very valuable experiment in facilitating meaningful online social interaction regardless of whether it is a success or not. It is far too early to judge the project, and any criticism should take into account the many legal and political difficulties the project must have faced within the BBC to even reach beta stage. However, there are some clear limitations of the way the project is currently configured that if addressed might help iCan fulfil its stated aim of stimulating civic engagement. Most importantly, by maintaining "big story" national news as the preserve of the newsroom and restricting popular action to local issues, with the implicit assumption that these are small-scale and unthreatening to the status quo, the project may not be a solution to the particular problems it seeks to address.