Two of the highlights of last weekend's rather good Notcon conference (thanks to NTK) were the afternoon sessions Blogging with a Point and Politics on the Net. These provided some valuable food for thought regarding how ... and if .... we might try to engage people with the political and democratic process on a wider level and in a deeper way.

The Blogging with a point session saw Richard Holmes from BBC Scotland talk about a project in the Inner Hebrides, which involved providing weblogs, support and hand-holding to a small remote community in order to see how people use the technology. The project involved giving people computers and net access and then facilitating their adoption of weblogs as a tool for online social interaction and publishing. They tried a similar project in Glasgow for comparative purposes, but rather predictably the computers just disappeared. The results on the Islands were mixed, as might be expected, but they did provide a useful insight into the cultural and other issues that come to the fore when people relatively unfamiliar with technology begin using the tools that many of us take for granted. One of the most interesting observations of the project was that the most vocal community members - what you might call 'the usual suspects' - started out as the most vocal bloggers, but quickly fell away and other people began publishing and connecting more frequently. This suggests that in some cases the characteristics of blogging as an activity can amplify voices that might otherwise be drowned out in other media and social circumstances.

Notwithstanding the rather mocking tone that the chair of the panel adopted towards this understated presentation (based on prejudices about both blogging and rural areas of Scotland, it seemed), this project and others like it are worth listening to if we are to learn more about how online 'connected conversations' can be used by ordinary people.

Also on the same panel was Tim Ireland, the blogging blunderbus of bloggerheads, who believes that MPs *must* start using the internet for direct communication with their electorates. Having lost patience with their lack of progress towards this goal, with the exception of certain clueful individuals, Tim has devised a cunning plan to spur them into action. He wanted all of us to adopt an MP, set up a blog on their behalf and then post any local news about the MP in the hope of embarrassing them into action, and he provided some useful tips on how to grow an audience for these blogs and reach more people. Tim's personal project is Tim Yeo, a Conservative MP and Shadow Minister who he seems to be slightly obsessed with. If this were Sunset Beach, I might hypothesise this is a story of love child abandoned, seeking revenge, but perhaps he just *really* doesn't like him ;-)

The following session, Politics on the Net, picked up where these ideas left off. First, Tom Steinberg of Mysociety talked about the simple electoral marketing web sites of mainstream political parties, poking fun at their often comically irrelevant and patronising approach, and looking at some equally silly European sites "for the kids". Is that politics or just a poor low-budget cousin of advertising? Anyway...

Richard Sargeant from the PM's policy unit spoke in a personal capacity about government research into levels of electoral participation, trust and engagement, and he outlined some ways in which the Net can empower people to get more involved in politics. He highlighted the fact that electoral participation is declining in the UK, whilst interest in political issues is actually increasing, which illustrates the crisis of legitimacy the government is facing.

He suggested that the government is looking at potential initiatives to address this problem in several key areas:

• the political sphere


• institutional design


• public engagement
  

Richard's informative talk focused on the role the Internet - and by implication non-government actors - can play in tackling these issues. He listed some current approaches:

• informative: e.g. traditional government web sites


• analytical: e.g. public whip


• consultative: e.g. FaxYourMP, the work of dialogue by design


• conversational: e.g. UpMyStreet Conversations, Downing Street Says

But do they work? The aims are great - innovative, with nice new functionality - but does the public actually engage differently with politics? Some evidence suggests that it does because it makes this engagement simpler than previous forms, but is there formal evaluation rather than just anecdotal evidence to demonstrate this? Also, does everybody *want* to engage with either the Internet or the democratic process? Good questions for any emerging e-democracy initiative, clearly. What's next? Well, Richard offered a few thoughts including the possibility that we might create mechanisms for the easy articulation of collective preferences, rather than just the binary yes/no polling system.

Finally, came the launch of the best e-democracy project to grace these shores: the wonderful They Work For You project that has taken our boring, dry record of parliamentary debates, Hansard, and turned it into a workable device for monitoring the activity of our elected parliamentarians. Some of us here were lucky enough to be invited to test it during its private beta phase, and it seems everybody did a good job of keeping it under wraps until Notcon.

Based on an idea that I am sure has occurred to many people over the years, a talented and altruistic group of volunteers spent nine months putting together a open source tool to break Hansard down into bite-sized chunks organised by MP and debate with lots of supporting data to add context. For all its rhetoric about openness and debate, the government has been unable or unwilling to provide this service, but thanks to the e-democracy hacker ethic and some talented people who were willing to donate much of their spare time to the project, we now have access to one of the most advanced parliamentary record systems in existence. The team are inviting people to extend it - the search features are quite simple right now because they are so hard to build, and whilst the system already boasts RSS feeds for individual MPs, more feeds for search tracking and specific issues would be great. We will certainly be incorporating some of the system's content into a couple of projects we are working on, as I am sure will others - presumably including Tim Ireland's army of MP blog stalkers.

The Guardian reported some of the projects aims as follows:

We would hope that MPs, in particular, would see that there are potentially huge benefits from making Hansard more accessible and from allowing people to engage directly with what they say," explains Tom Loosemore, one of the team behind the new website. "We just want to show what you can do with the web and what that can do to the democratic institutions of this country."

The government's response? A spokesperson for the House of Commons said: "A decision regarding copyright permission will be made in due course," according to the Guardian. Hey - you're welcome, guys! The volunteers behind They Work for You deserve our thanks and respect for a superb project well executed. All of those I know on the team are very nice people who exemplify the idealistic public spirited aims of the early Internet pioneers.

Taken together, this project and the other talks at Notcon suggest ways of making the activities of our elected representatives more accessible and transparent, but although this is a good thing, what does it actually mean in practice for our democratic system? The answer to that depends in part on your view of the importance of the role of MPs. The present government has enjoyed a dominant majority in parliament, which has meant that even significant rebellions within the ruling party over unpopular policies are brushed off by an all-powerful executive. That may change, of course, if the current local elections are indicative of future results, but right now MPs are not actually central to deciding policy in crucial areas, which in turn means that our own influence over the way we are governed is minimal. In this context, even if we could operate our MPs by remote control it would not make much difference unless they were a part of the Prime Minister's inner circle.

In future, we may see more balance between parliament and the executive, especially in the event of a hung parliament. If that happens, the role of MPs will again assume the importance that it is supposed to have in our democratic system - and this will mean that initiatives such as They Work for You can contribute a great deal to our ability to engage with government. As with so many other things, the Net can make information more accessible and increase transparency, but without corresponding change in the structure and culture of government and political representation, this will not necessarily make our political system more democratic.