Readers of Gatewatching may be interested in this: the call for papers for EDEM 2010, the fourth international conference on e-democracy, to be held in Austria next May, has now been released. I attended EDEM 2009 in Vienna a couple of months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it; much of the work presented there (including the paper which Jason and I co-authored, of course) was directly relevant also to the Australian context, especially in light of the explorations currently being undertaken by the Government 2.0 Task Force.

From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

Read more…

government, policy, politics, public sphere CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media

Cardiff.
Taking time out briefly from the Future of Journalism 2009 conference here in sunny (really!) Cardiff (you can follow my liveblog here), I notice that the ABC has picked up on the developing story around Joe Hockey’s tweeting from the parliament floor. This ties straight into our discussion of political uses of social media in the paper Jason and I wrote for the e-Democracy conference in Vienna earlier this week, of course. For more on this, see the ABC story, which includes some insighful commentary from Jason. But be warned: it also contains a photo of Hockey… Read more…

politics e-democracy, Jason Wilson, Joe Hockey, parliament, politics, Twitter

It’s been less than a fortnight since the federal government’s Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) - perhaps best known at the moment for its attempt to filter the Internet (boo) and its hardline stance against the corporate thugs at Telstra (yay) - launched its Digital Economy consultation blog. Foreshadowed in a number of earlier publications (in particular, a recommendation to trial blogs in the Australian Government Information Management Office’s report on online consultation with citizens, concluding a thought process begun under the previous mob, and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner’s post on his blog in The Age), the blog was introduced in a guest post by Tanner - and that post alone has generated more than 750 on-site comments to date.

So, as far as community involvement and consultation is concerned, the DBCDE blog can be seen as a success - it constitutes a new venue for the still all-too-rare direct online citizen feedback to a sitting government. That said, a majority of comments on the initial blog posts appeared to deal with those two hot-button issues - Internet filtering and Telstra’s exclusion from the broadband tendering process -, quite regardless of the blog posts’ topics themselves, and that’s a significant problem. If the point of this blog is to engage in a bit of crowdsourcing, harvesting some of the better ideas put forward by commenters on the blog, and in return perhaps also harnessing satisfied participants as virtual marketers for the government’s policies, then so far it’s not yet achieving its purpose.

Read more…

Steven Conroy, blogging, broadband, government Australia, blogging, broadband, community, consultation, DBCDE, e-democracy, government, Stephen Conroy, Steven Conroy

Opinion piece in the ABC’s Opinion section here.

With the US election likely to be decided today, it’s a good time to have a look at the way social media’s been used in this campaign. From the massive fundraising of Obama’s microdonors, to the fact checking of candidates, to the raving lunacy of the wingnut fringe, this election has really brought social media’s promises and pitfalls to the fore.

The exemplar of a successful political campaign’s use of social media is, barring a sudden upset, Obama’s campaign. Foregoing public funding and the big money of lobbyists, Obama has raised enormous amounts of money from primarily small donors, at last count over $US390 million. Obama claims this will allow him to reduce lobbyist influence in government, though inevitably, the truth is somewhat more complex than that.

Obama’s campaign has also make powerful use of social networking tools such as Twitter, MySpace-style social networking sites and even an iPhone application. This commitment to using tools to engage with a primarily younger, tech savvy audience, combined with an commitment to Network Neutrality and a progressive tech policy (Barack Obama on technology and innovation - PDF) has certainly helped his support amongst younger voters. McCain’s admission that he doesn’t know how to use a computer hasn’t helped his regain any of that support.

Read more…

Uncategorized abc, Barack Obama, democracy, e-democracy, election, McCain, Obama, politics, psephology, QUT, social media, social networking, USA

As already mentioned on this blog, I left QUT a couple of months ago to help out GetUp! with some e-democracy projects. The first iteration of the biggie, Project Democracy, is now live.

Especially over the last couple of weeks, there have been a lot of long days and nights with the awesome team I’ve been working with - Darren Loasby (GetUp!’s online director), James Ferguson and Charles Lee. A major component of the project - the technology that parses Hansard so that you can keep track of individual parliamentarians - was developed by some hardworking volunteers at OpenAustralia. And the whole GetUp! team have contributed endless ideas and support.

We’ve focussed initially on the Senate - partly because the finely-balanced Senate is a current focus for everyone concerned with Australian politics. But it’s also nice because it’s GetUp!’s third birthday, and the very first GetUp! campaign focussed on the Senate. A little bit of poetry there.

Alongside GetUp!’s traditional campaigning activities, Project Democracy represents a move towards facilitating democratic engagement - we want to help people communicate more directly with their representatives, and to understand better what they do. There’s a lot of functionality embedded in the site - people can follow their Senators’ parliamentary performances, track them in the media with tailored newsfeeds, see the whole chamber or their State’s senators at a glance, or contact their senators directly.

Also - and this is where it’s continuous with earlier projects I’ve worked on - people can sound off about how they think their senators are going on our Action Blogs. The whole thing is an experiment in combining existing capacities in a form which - I hope - will enhance political engagement and social capital.

Having said all of that, we’re really looking for feedback on the whole site, and information on the sort of functions people would like to see on the site in future, especially when we roll out the House of Reps component soon. Gatewatching readers should feel free to discuss it here, but we’re also happy to get feedback through the PD site. I think that we’ll be integrating a whole range of things, but people probably know that my interest is in building community at the hyperlocal level. Watch this space.

I’ll keep posting about this over the next little while. For now, I’m looking forward to a weekend of sleeping in, and the Cowboys at Shark Park on Saturday night.

Uncategorized e-democracy, GetUp!, Project Democracy, Senate

Thanks to a heads-up from Tim at Tree of Knowledge, I found out about this conference, the Personal democracy Forum, being held in New York City this month. Looks like they’ll be discussing some issues that have preoccupied us here at Gatewatching - the influence of new technologies on political campaigning and debate.

The debate in this area doesn’t just happen on Gatewatching The conference’s tagline is “technology is changing politics”, but Charlie Beckett (who heads up the LSE’s Polis Centre where Tim is studying) has posed the following tough questions that he’d like the conference to answer:

1. Tell me in concrete terms what the new technology has allowed you to do that is significantly different in political terms from before? Not just being faster, more connected, more responsive. Tell me what difference it has made, if any, in policy outcomes and the distribution of power?

2. Is this just an American thing? Is it because US politics was so sterile, so locked up by lobbyists and big money and ideological stasis? or can new technology unleash new democratic forces in other countries?

I’d add another - could you make a realistic comparison of the current impacts of online campaigning methods and traditional broadcast media? One of the big speakers at the conference, Clay Shirky, has said some pretty silly things lately about the place of television in our culture - I would hope that the conference would proceed with a recognition that broadcast media are still the principal information source for most voters. That’s not being cynical, just conceding that there is a long way to go, and lots of work to do, in making online engagement more generally available and effective.

Sadly I won’t be able to go - I’ll be preparing for something new (more on that later), but Tim says he’ll be liveblogging the conference (presumably over at TOK), so that’s something to look forward to.

USA Charlie Beckett, Clay Shirky, conferences, democracy, e-democracy, elections, Tree of Knowledge, USA

I got somethin’ in New Matilda today reporting on my recent travels to conferences at home and abroad. There’s a cross-post over the fold, but you should go there instead and read the other stuff on the site while you’re at it.

Read more…

UK, public sphere academic, conferences, e-democracy, journalism, Margaret Simons, MEAA, newspapers, public sphere, quality, research, Roy Greenslade, Steven Coleman, sustainability, UK

A quick addendum to my last Gatewatching post, which discussed why in the face of a journalistic environment more concerned with scoring points than reporting on the issues of the day it’s not such a bad idea if politicians choose to converse with citizens outside of the media glare: from what I’ve seen so far, quite a few of the journalists reporting on the 2020 Summit have similarly succumbed to the temptation to file lazy stories poking fun at summit procedures rather than investing the time necessary to inform the rest of the country about what’s actually being discussed.

Vacuous stories such as this one by Annabel Crabb make my point for me; all I get from this ‘report’ is that Annabel couldn’t be bothered to find out what’s actually happening, and chose instead to pick easy targets. In a further update in the comments to the story, Annabel adds in the tone of a jilted lover: “you will be interested to hear that by late morning they had closed off the Creativity group session to the media” - to which I can only say, good for them! Perhaps without interruptions by journalists more interested in what brand of butchers’ paper is being used than what ideas are being generated, the summitteers can actually get some work done.

Read more…

government e-democracy, government, journalism

There’s been a bit of discussion amongst political bloggers about a post by PollieGraph’s Rachel Hills which pointed out that Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull had her - and other journalists - on ‘limited profile’ on Facebook, because of her status as a writer for New Matilda (also noted over at Larvatus Prodeo). Some of the discussion about this has been fairly predictable - with the Libs plumbing untold lows in their approval ratings, it’s easy to engage in some gratuitous pollie-bashing - but for once, I have to say that Turnbull’s decision to keep the media at arms’ length from any online discussion with voters seems like a pretty smart move to me.

Rachel cites a Liberal Party source as saying this about Turnbull’s approach:

I don’t think there are many journos on his list at all because he wants people to be able to ask whatever they want, and for it to be natural. Well, as natural as Facebook ever can be.

If politicians are serious about consulting with citizens about their concerns, then at present this is for the most part best conducted directly between them, as an open conversation outside of the glare of the mainstream media. Importantly, real discussion and debate is not just about stating one’s own point of view, but also about changing one’s mind and accepting a superior argument when it is made. Media coverage, though, has an unhealthy tendency to report any such opinion changes - which should be part of politicians’ everyday activity as they are confronted with new information - as ‘embarrassing backflips’, ‘wavering’, and ‘caving in to pressure’ from political opponents; unfortunately, that instils a deep-set stubbornness in our pollies which is very difficult to overcome. (Even now, after a crushing defeat, many Liberals still can’t bring themselves to admit that Howard’s WorkChoices was a deeply unpopular, deeply flawed piece of legislation, for example.)

Read more…

Uncategorized e-democracy, facebook, journalism

The announcement of the Greensblog is an interesting example for the possibilities of blogging for minority political parties. Clearly drawing inspiration from Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett’s blog , it shows the value of the blogging format for discussing political positions that fall outside the easy left-right, Labor-Liberal soundbite-based journalism often found in the industrial mainstream. As Greensblog contributor Tim Hollo hopes, it will work for the Greens because their policies aren’t necessarily “soundbite-friendly”, and they welcome the possibility of consultative policy development.

This form of engagement is something the major parties should be watching. For some years now, observers have noted a trend of voters moving away from traditional party affiliations to multi-faceted political perspectives, shifting from party-political to social activism, and forming fluid allegiances that vary across policy areas.

Read more…

blogging, government, social networking academic, blogging, e-democracy, government, social networking, wiki