@ 2gether08: Is politics big enough for the web?

Next up, is politics big enough for the web?

Politics has no choice but to change

Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole fame said politics could and should be doing much more to engage people using connective technologies, like wikis, blogs and webcasting. Policy development can take a year from conception to final delivery, but is usually without any road-testing or sampling.

"The public sector can do this kind of thing if it engages with connective technologies. I don't think this is quintessentially a left or right issue - it's about whether you buy into the decentralised model or not. Politics has no choice - it is faced with a world where its electorate have a capacity to hold these conversations whether government is in on that or not."

Government needs to take that opportunity to join that dialogue, rather than thinking abotu what it can get past the shifty eyes of the media and then past the voters.

The process should be collective persuasion

Rory Sutherland, vice chair of the Ogilvy Group, gives very good quote. The PR-driven government culture over the past few years has been incredibly damaging, he said, referring to that "extraordinary responsiveness to what will be on the front page of the Daily Mail tomorrow". He moved on to talking about questioning the credibility that we give to authority, somehow deviating into an opportunity to describe the BBC as "a business model no different to a protection racket" (you have to buy a licence or some blokes turn up at your house) and McDonalds as a business that Marx would have approved of.

That led on to what he called the inherent bias in politics. "Politicians are the people who would've been prefects in school. They see themselves as definers and solvers of problems. But those people look to legal compulsion or punitive taxation to solve behaviour rather than voluntary collective action."

The individual collective interest, if pursued, will not lead to the best outcome. When it comes to political issues, there are usually a few people who care a lot and a lot of people who care a bit. But we don't have the touchstone issues of abortion and gay marriage in the US. Local politics is the exception to that, like when a constituency is fought over the issue of a local hospital incinerator.

"We need more people like minority groups to influence debate, but there's a weird british thing where people who are very passionate about an issue tend to be very repellent to other people who don't feel quite the same. That extraordinarily absolutists attitude is very British."

Many campaigns would be more effective if they were persuasive rather than bossy: 'east less meat' rather than 'meat is murder'. (There are exceptions - like slavery, for example.) He also said that there is an inherent bias towards the numerical in all decision making - like train journey times instead of some sort of measure of comfort.

Returning to that idea of nuance, Fealty used a quote by former New York mayor Mario Cuomo: "You campaign in poetry but govern in prose."

"People run away from the complexity of turning impulses into something practical - it always has to be black and white. What is missing there is the direct dialogue. There are tools that allow that, and that's the cultural and emotional challenge to our representatives."

The cart before the horse?

Nico Macdonald said there's no point trying to find a purpose for s set of tools - there needs to be a direction and a vision so that we know the objective."At best, these tools are re-allying us to failing political leaders. We need to talk about the big issues first and then work out the tools to help us get there."

MySociety founder Tom Steinberg gave some stats on how some web-based projects had improved engagement. Demos research estimated that 1% of the public are actively engaged in political campaigning. MySociety's theyworkforyou has reached about 2-3%, the Downing Street petitions site has reached around 10% and the US election has reached... well, we don't know yet. But could it be 25% of the population?

"You don't get high engagement unless you have low engagement to start with," he said, optimistically. "We are seeing green shoots that indicate we might be able to break out of the idea that the public is either totally disengaged or one of the 1% that goes to the meetings. There's a new class, more engagement and different ways to do that.

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