Gov 2.0 Taskforce: Annual "unparliament" at Old Parliament House?

SFU Asia Pacific Hall

At Gov 2.0 Taskforce: Ten Years On,  we are back from work-shopping actions to progress. Mine was to propose an annual "unparliament" be held at Old Parliament House.

The Simon Fraser University  Centre for Dialogue has a purpose designed circular room, the Asia Pacific Hall, for fostering constructive discussion.

OPH Senate Chamber

In contrast, Australia's Old Parliament House has two chambers with rows of seats facing each other, designed for an adversarial approach where there is a government, and opposition (with a small amount of room for others on the "cross bench). However, the old building hardware could be updated, with some mobile devices and applicaions, to allow for techniques such as deliberative democracy. In effect we would be upgrading democracy with some teach.

Guide to Democracy in the UK

Dan Jellinek's book "People Power: A user's guide to democracy" (Bantam Press, 2013) is a useful overview, but concentrates on the UK. As an Australian I found the differences in levels of government and voting systems of limited interest. However, the book got interesting just before the end, when Dan discussed the potential of the Internet to be sued for governance. I would like to see a follow-up book which concentrated on this aspect, with examples from around the world. Before reading this book I didn't know Dan had an interest in government, as I only knew him through his excellent E-Access Bulletin on web accessibility.

What E-Participation is

Professor Rachel K. Gibson, Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester, will talk on "What is ‘E-Participation’?", 4pm, 19 April 2011, at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Seminar - Professor Rachel K. Gibson - Tuesday 19 April at 4pm Professor Rachel K. Gibson, Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester

4pm on Tuesday 19 April in the LJ Hume Centre (First Floor Copland Building)

What is ‘E-Participation’?

This paper uses original survey data from the 2010 UK election to address the question of defining and measuring e-participation. Despite over a decades’ worth of research being conducted into the topic of e-participation, a clear and commonly accepted definition of the activity itself remains elusive. The talk will focus on ways in which e-participation has been studied both conceptually and empirically, drawing on the extensive literature that has examined offline participation. Is e-participation simply an extension of existing forms, differing only in mode? Or does it offer a new and qualitatively different form of political engagement. After developing a typology of e-participation we test it using confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicate that different forms of e-participation can be identified and that they have potentially different implications for mobilisation of citizens.

Government 2.0 at Parliment House

At Parliament House Canberra today, I attended the Gov 2.0 lunch with Alison Michalk on Community management . Also Professor Rachel K. Gibson, Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester, said a few words on research in the UK and Australia on use of Internet in election campaigns.

Alison Michalk on Community management

Alison, Quiip Director and Community Manager, said: "People will come for the information but they will stay for the relationships". People will be initially attracted to on-line forums for formal information, but they will only stay if the connect with interesting people.

Alison argued that the people selected for managing an on-line project are most important, the technology less so. Community managers ensure a productive on-line forum. A "leader" mitigates risk. They enforce the legal rules as well as the less formal customs and positive behaviour. As a "participant" the manager observes. It occurs to me these are the same skills we teach tutors for on-line education discussion forums (and also teach to the students). It is something we should be teaching school students. Craig commented that BangThe Table runs training for its product, but which also teaches some of the skills.

Alison pointed out that there are legal risks with user generated on-line content. One way to reduce the risk is by building loyalty and trust with participants. There are risks to the participants of the forum, as well as the organisation hosting it.

One of the audience asked why there was not a law stopping Defence personnel from posting denigrating comments on Facebook. This seemed an odd question to me, there are laws about what you can say to who, which clearly apply on-line as much as anywhere. Also there are specific rules which apply to Australian Defence Force personnel. More than 15 years ago I wrote a couple of circulars at HQADF to make it clear that such rules applied online and it was only a matter of days before I had a call from the Military Police investigating someone.

Alison recommended the flicker and yahoo answers guidelines. She warned against "sock-puppeting" where there appears to be two people having a discussion, but it is really just the one person. It occurs to me this is a modern version of the "Socratic Dialogue".

Alison recommended post-moderation in general, but there may be some higher risk topics requiring each post to be approved in advance.

There is an "Australian Community Managers" Facebook group run by Alison for those interested.

Professor Rachel K. Gibson on E-Participation in elections

Professor Gibson talked about the research she is doing with ANU on the question of if the Internet has changed election campaigns. The question is if there are "Citizens Initiated Campaigns". She is presenting a seminar on "What is ‘E-Participation’?" at ANU in Canberra, 4pm, 19 April 2011.

Rachel used the example of the "My Barack" campaign website. I was skeptical as if this was really citizen driven, or just the usual party machine applying new tools to an old centrally run campaign agenda.

It occurs to me that the sort of DIY tools in the Barack Obama campaign are online equivalents of traditional local grassroots political party tools. It may be that there will be a brief opening up of such activities until the central party machines work out how to take tight central control.

Rachel commented that green voters were more active on-line in Australia and Liberal Democrats in the UK. She suggested this was because small parties have less money and so have to make more use of low cost tools. However, I suggest that the Greens and Liberal Democrats have a less centralised structure which allows grass roots membership participation.