One of the themes at XTech is called Open Data, and on Thursday, speakers addressed e-voting and copyright term extension in the UK and how to expand the number of people able to participate in the democratic process.
As more of our lives become digital, activists believe that digital rights will become an important part of human rights.
Technorati Tags: democracy, web2.0, XTech, XTech2007
Digital Rights in the EU
Suw Charman: one of the founders of the Open Rights Group
In the interest of full disclosure, Suw is my fiance. We blog together at Strange Attractor when I'm not blogging or writing at the Guardian.
With that out of the way, Suw started off giving a background of the Open Rights Group, which was launched after discussions amongst several digital rights activists in the UK and after someone stood up at the OpenTech confernce in 2005 and said he would pledge £5 a month to launch the group if 1000 people joined him. You can find more about ORG on their website.
The UK had local elections on 3 May, and ORG has been campaigning about e-voting. E-voting is a black box system. You can't tell if your vote is being recorded as you wish. There are concerns about preserving anonymity, security and accuracy. Problems with the pen and paper ballot tend to be randomly distributed whereas problems with e-voting tend to be systematic. E-voting doesn't improve voter turnout, and she took issue with a recent YouGov poll which said that more youth would vote if e-voting was an option.
She listed several criticisms of the e-voting system. This is live-blogging, and consequently, this isn't intended to be balanced report of the issues around e-voting in the UK but a listing of the Open Rights Group's concerns based on reports from their 25 volunteer election observers. They are issues you might to investigate further. I'm still WiFi-less for the most part or would do a bit of Google to provide some relevant links. Feel free to post some links in the comments.
The UK government decided that it would be a good idea to pilot e-voting including electronic counting and telephone voting. Five areas used e-counting machines, four areas used telephone voting and three did internet voting. Scottish elections used e-counting. The date for applying for the pilot was November 2006, and the applications were approved in January 2007. The local authorities were only given only a few months to test the system. The Electoral Commission criticised the government for the short lead time. They recommended that the pilots should be scrapped, but these recommendations were ignored.
ORG fielded 25 volunteer election observers. On the day, they sent out three observers to Scottish constituencies and the rest to constituencies in England. However, the regulations were for pen-and-paper elections not electronic elections. Observers were not allowed to have any access to the server rooms to observe the operations. They had to negotiate with individual councils, but legally, they had no right for access. Some councils did block observation. There were problems in Scotland with spoiled ballots, but there were significant technical problems in Scotland. All of the ORG observers saw problems with the voting process.
Software crashed in South Bucks. Rushmore and Swindon had security issues. Nearly all of the terminals crashed, several times throughout the day. She said that the UK national media did not report these problems. Local media had a few stories. With e-voting, this is done at home so it's difficult to see if there had been pressure placed on voters.
In one area, a Conservative candidate had a Labour rose by his name. In local elections, some people are only voting by party. They rely on the signifier for the parties for cues. It was spotted by the first voter. The system was taken down and the problem was rectified.
The councillors were given a demonstration of the system, but the candidates weren't.
In Rushmore, one of their observers was asked to leave the server room. The observer did see that they were downloading data by wireless but were unable to confirm whether they were using wireless security. USB keys were also plugged into the machines, but the observer was unable to verify what was on the keys.
She said that she is not implying that there were problems with the counting, but she also said that their observers had no way to verify the security or accuracy of the vote. One would have to assume that the software and hardware worked properly and according to design.
One candidate said to an observer: "I guess because it is not a manual process, nothing can go wrong."
ORG is compiling a full report to be given to the Electoral Commission and will also be published on 20 June.
Another campaign that ORG is involved with is copyright term extension for music. At the moment, the copyright for sound recordings in the UK stands at 50 years, but the music industry wants to extend that term with various recommendations for 75 or 90 years or perpetuity.
ORG says that there are strong economic reasons for not extending copyright. They released a report last autumn called "Release the Music" calling for copyright for sound recordings to remain at 50 years.
Andrew Gowers said that copyright term extension should not be extended, but recently, there has been a report from the Department of Culture, Music and Sport advising that it was unfair that the term of copyright should remain at 50 years because composers receive longer copyright protection. The music industry has been writing editorials about widows being left penniless.
Suw contacted Age Concern whether many musicians widows were being left in poverty. Age Concern went away and did some research and found that the loss of royalties was not a significant contribution to poverty amongst the elderly.
A Labour MP recently filed an early day motion to extend copyright for sound recordings, but Suw said that different branches are pushing for extension. She urged British citizens to write to their MPs, using a site called Write to Them to find out contact information for their MP.
Question: A person in the audience from Edinburgh said that the problem there was that there was a private company contracted to handle the vote. The count was very delayed, and he said that there was very little information in the press about the delays or problems.
Answer: Suw said that they had observers in the area, but that she had not seen the observer reports. She said that observer reports will be part ORG's full release in June.
The Long Tail of Democratic Participation
Rob McKinnon
The Long Tail is one of those terms bandied about in the Web 2.0 world. It's often talked about in terms of media in that there are only a handful of movies, say, that are blockbusters, but there are hundreds or possibly thousands of films that are of interest to a lot more people if you aggregate those audiences. There is value in the long tail. You can create a business model in the Long Tail, or in the case of Rob's work, a democratic model. As Rob says, only a very small amount of people can dedicate large amounts of time to monitoring or developing pubic policy, but there are a lot more people who are impacted by and have an interest in public policy, although usually specific policies not all policy.
Rob lived in New York for several years, leaving in 2004. Tens of thousands protested during the Republican National Convention. Some 1800 were arrested. At least 500 were not charged after being detained for more than 24 hours. The New York Supreme Court forced the city to release people.
How do we increase the number of people able to participate in established democractic processes via the Web?
- We need to make the information transparent.
- we need to faciliate social collaboration
- We need to emerge outcomes from deliberative participation.
He has been inspired by Open Society, a book written by Karl Popper, in New Zealand after being an exile in Austria. George Soros founded the Open Society institute. Quoting George Soros:
We need to create institutions for the promotion of the common interest, knowing full well that they are bound to be imperfect. We must also build these institutions a capacity to change in accordance with the evolving perceptions of the common interest.
Rob gave a quick rundown of sites that are doing this around the world. In the UK, you have MySociety.org. In the US, you have the Sunlight Foundation. Politix.nl in the Netherlands. OpenSecrets.org.
In New York, there is a conference starting tomorrow called Personal Democracy Forum.
Rob McKinnon tailored the UK's They Work For You site for his own country, New Zealand. He is proposing a Long Tail for Participation. Only a small amount of people
Media presents politics as a personality driven drama, but this turns many people off. There are several issues that people might be interested in, and Rob gave a few examples such as no software patents in Europe or free public wifi. But most people don't have the time to participate.
Hierarchies are becoming networks. Yochai Benkler wrote a book called the Wealth of Networks. For 150 years, the high cost of communications networks tended to centralise control over those networks and narrow the range of participation. The web is leading to a radical decentralisation in our communications networks which could lead to an expansion in participation, he said.
He called for unambiguous URIs for official documents. Instead of very long, non-readable URLs, Rob converted readable URLs that contained information about the subject of the documents and the date which it was released. He also included pictures of the members of Parliament. Utilising the web, we can expose the information.
He used the TagSoup Java library and the Ruby Sax parser pipeline to convert the New Zealand Hansard documents to more readable URLs and easier display. He used Ruby to add this to a relational database and then the Rails development framework to create the site. He even created some graphs - spike lines - to show relative activity on specific issues. With a little programming magic, he was able to add a lot of easily browsable, easily digestible information about the complex working of the New Zealand Parliament.
The UN Security Council uses session specific temporary URLs so you can't deep link to UN Security Council resolution n a blog post. The resolutions aren't indexed by search engines! Rob said:
I don't know if this is a cock-up or a conspiracy.
Someone has screen scraped the information of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, and is adding them to Twitter.
Upcoming.org allows people to view and add events that you'll be attending. Rob is adding something that would allow people to follow and track bills. It lowers the time needed to find bills of interest. He showed the Personal Democracy Forum Conference on Upcoming. It makes it more fun and interesting, gives people motivation to get invovled.
The bottom line is to create outcomes that represent the common interest. Whether than recording what everyone thinks on a wiki or a forum, Rob said that there is no way to consolidate this down. E-petitions might present things in terms of false dichotomies.
We need to create a system of thinking which leads to decisions around people clustering around ideas. A group called Open Strategies allows people from communities of interest to work together through a web framework in a very structured way. They have four levels of organisation: Projects, results, uses/applications and benefits.
Question: I asked a question about how to grow investment in the community or process enough so that people who like to hijack or break such systems - trolls - can't derail the process and prevent anything worthwhile from being accomplished.
Answer: Rob said that in the Open Strategies process, there were criteria for participation. It is controversial, but in the process, people must be approved and must show that they represent a community of interest.
