For our regular readers (nice to have you along, by the way!), there may not be anything particularly new here but this piece by Michael Cross in the Guardian is well worth a read, partly because it’s a nice summation of some of our thinking on Parliamentary e-democracy and partly because it’s good to see these points raised in mainstream media as well as trade… read more
Quick story I didn’t want to let pass: Facebook is linking up with ABC News in a partnership that will allow users to tap into the network’s political coverage.
Three reasons I found this particularly interesting:
The November ‘07 edition of the (supposedly) monthly Delib newsletter was sent out on Monday and is available to read online at http://www.delib.co.uk/newsletter/november07.
If you enjoyed that hearty dose of e-democracy goodness and would like to get the e-newsletter delivered to your inbox every month, you can sign up for free right now - just type your e-mail address in the box below and hit ’subscribe’. We… read more
Interesting article on the BBC News site about the need for small businesses to get online and get marketing their sites. Not an e-democracy article as such, but the analogy about the need for online marketing is excellent, and very much applicable to the e-democracy world at the moment.
“Unless you have a well recognised brand name you need to have some way for people to find your site.”
“If you haven’t… read more
Carrying on my obsession with putting -ocracy at the end of words to make clever sounding blog posts, here’s a quick insight into how video’s playing an important part in US politics.
A new site www.10questions.com has recently launched allowing members of the public to pose questions to Presidential candidates. It’s got some neat functions like voting and commenting + is generally v.well produced, with a… read more
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Posted by Ben.
We’ve spent a lot of the last year making, doing and managing stuff — and, nice as that is, it’s meant that the information about what we do has fallen a bit behind the reality. (We still have postcards asking how many Demgames CDs you’d like, despite supplies having long been depleted*; outdone again by our own success).
We’re working to catch up with ourselves… read more
There’s obviously been a lot of hype about Facebook recently, with brands hailing it as the future of advertising and geeks hailing it as the future of the world. To jump on the bandwagon, I’d like to hail it as the future of democracy.
Well, maybe not the whole future of democracy, however it does really (yes really) work as an e-democracy tool, and has seen proper democratic outcomes over the… read more
Spent yesterday at the Consultation Institute’s ‘Technologies for Participation’ conference in Birmingham, and what a marvellous day out it was. I’ve spoken at a good few Consultation Institute events over the past year or two, and this was their first formal venture specifically into our home turf of e-participation.
Lots of interesting speakers at the event: Nick Hewson gave an interesting talk on the market for e-participation at the… read more
It’s taken as a given over here, or at least should be, that when a politician says ‘we need a national debate on X’, generally nothing of the sort happens. Perhaps as a result, we often look to the USA for real national debates, especially in the online sphere.
So this story is a bit of a wake up call, Hilary Clinton fielding soft ball questions planted in
As mentioned before on this blog, I wrote an article for Iain Dale’s Guide to Political Blogging on using blogs as consultation platforms. Whilst the idea of online discussion seems to have taken root in the government sphere, people have unfortunately got stuck on the idea of discussion forums, which actually miss a good number of possibilities and create needless barriers for engagement.
So, we’ve now had a chance… read more