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Talk About Local Update

It's been a while since I've Talked About Local. 4iP, Channel 4's digital media investment fund, announced it's investment in Talk About Local in June 2008. As investments go this is one sits firmly in the public service camp. I'll talk more about how we spread our bets between public service and commercial investments in a later blog post.

To refresh your memories, Talk About Local is a project to give people in their communities a powerful online voice. Their aim is to teach people around the country to communicate and campaign more effectively using all forms of social media. Through web and face training they're empowering people to influence events in their local area.

Now that the project has been up and running for four months I thought I'd summarise some of the excellent progress made and show where this initiative is having a real effect on the ground.

• Excellent team hired: Not even the all conquering Will Perrin can run an initiative as ambitious as Talk About Local on his own. So he scoured the land and hired the wonderful Nicky Getgood (@getgood) the talented Mike Rawlings (@mike_rawlins) and super-sharp Clare White (@ClareWhite). Nicky lives in Birmingham and runs Digbeth is Good a site covering the news, activities and interesting happenings in the Digbeth area of Birmingham. Mike is one of the team behind Britain's best council chasing website Pits'n'Pots in Stoke on Trent. Clare also hails from Stoke and is an all round social media activist and guru.Clare also manages projects for WEA and for Stoke's Community Health Project. It's great to have such a talented team on board.

• Incredible un-conference held: At the beginning of the month TAL held their first of many official events. Hosted by Staffordshire University Faculty of Arts, Media & Design the event tempted over 100 people to leave their bedrooms, home offices and local community halls to share ideas face to face on how best to run community websites and locally orientated digital services. Sadly, I couldn't make it myself but judging by the tweets, blog posts and coverage from traditional media it is clear that enthusiasts, both professional and amateur, are cooperating to pool their resources and knowledge.

• Pilot Sessions Running: Rolling out a national programme involving thousands of people course requires time, effort and lots of tweaking. The trial Talk About Local sessions are being held in and around the West Midlands. Highlights include 2 sessions in Kington, Herefordshire, which resulted in the Kington Blackboard site http://kingtonblackboard.org/. An early paying customer lured talkaboutlocal out of the West Midlands which led to w14london.ning.com. In the last couple of weeks the team has trained over a dozen trainers to deliver tal sessions in uk online centres embedded in deprived communities.

It's early days but the signs are encouraging. In the next update I'll update you on the Talk About Local business model and how it's progressing towards sustainability.

The Rise of Transparency

In late January President Obama published an Memorandum on Transparency.  Here it is (I've added the bold):

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Transparency and Open Government

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

Last week the UK Government published a new document called ‘Working Together - Public Services on your side’ outlining its vision for public sector reform.

This contains the comments below in the Strategic Government section which refer to the Power of Information Taskforce report:

Delivering transparency

A focus on outcomes is only meaningful when it is combined with clear and reliable information on performance. Transparency that delivers accessible and useful information on the performance of services and the outcomes they achieve is at the heart of our strategy for improving public services.

The independent Power of Information Task Force published its report on 2 March. The report contained 25 challenging recommendations to government aimed at improving the use of information in this new world. The Task Force’s work has been recognised internationally as providing a cutting-edge vision, with examples of what modern public service delivery might be.

The Government welcomes the task force’s vision, accepts its overall messages and will be responding on the detailed recommendations shortly. We are already taking steps to implement this vision and in 2009 we will seek to deliver the following:

Open information. To have an effective voice, people need to be able to understand what is going on in their public services. Government will publish information about public services in ways that are easy to find,easy to use, and easy to re-use, and will unlock data, where appropriate, through the work of the Office of Public Sector Information.

Open innovation. We will promote innovation in online public services to respond to changing expectations. The Government will seek to build on the early success of innovate.direct.gov.uk by building such innovation into the culture of public services and public sector websites.

Open discussion. We will promote greater engagement with the public through more interactive online consultation and collaboration. We will also empower professionals to be active on online peer-support networks in their area of work.

Open feedback. Most importantly, the public should be able to have a fair say about their services. The Government will publish best practice in engaging with the public in large numbers online, drawing on the experience of the www.showusabetterway.com competition and the www.londonsummit.gov.uk, as well as leading private sector examples like www.ideastorm.com.

It's amazing just how much political currancy and baggage is now hanging on the word transparency. Sunlight's London based designer, Kerry Mitchell, has come up with this brilliant visualization that shows the mentions of the word “transparency” in The New York Times from 1990 until 2009.

Think of it as a clock. 1 o’clock would be the early ’90s and 11 o’clock being 2008/2009. As you go around the clock the instances of the word increase.  Each line is a month of time.

Kerry didn’t write the code that generates the image. The visualization was created with Processing, and makes use of The New York Times Article API. The Processing code comes from a tutorial available from blprnt.com.

Mr Hacker goes to Washinton

"We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington, and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago."

From Barack Obama's campaign platform on technology

It's the final day of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and time to draw some early conclusions. This year's conference focused on how the way we live is changing - through policy, technology and ideas with the schedule loosely following tracks like: city tech, developing markets, geo-location, health, materials, mobile and wireless signals.

While not a theme in it's own right I've detected a strong sense of civic duty and public service flowing through many of the plenaries and sessions. The USA's strong sense of identity and patriotism seems to more than make up for the lack of public service funding. However, if the ETech programme organisers are anything to go by (and in my book they most certainly are) the context for a project like 4iP couldn't be better. These are tricky times and digital public service media has an important role to play in addressing some of the problems we face as a society.

I won't reiterate the importance of working on stuff that matters but only empress the sense of urgency I now feel. The intergalactic radioactive crisis cloud we face today is an opportunity to do things differently and to change the way we live, work and play. Barack Obama's presidency and the amazing fact that 30% of the civilian work force in the US Gov Executive are retiring in the next five years offers an unequaled opportunity in the US. Clearly the political landscape and timetable is different in the UK but we're probably subject to similar time pressures. Practically speaking, we have two years to get it right and two years to implement before the naysayers regroup.

Encouragingly fixing democracy was where the drive and ambition was most tangible. Tim O'Reilly announced the inaugural Government 2.0 conference and there have been sessions from Greg Elin of Sunlight Foundation, Mike Mathieu of Front Seat and Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices. If you want to get things done quickly there's probably no better audience than a room full of hackers and alpha-geeks - all Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes.

Broadly speaking Sunlight Foundation and Front Seat represent the two major works streams in the e-government and democracy space. The Sunlight Foundation are principally concerned with release of public / governmental data while Front Seat build web 2.0 technologies and social media services that facilitate better engagement between the government and it's citizens.

Greg Elin's talk provided a whirl-wind tour of how opaque yet surprisingly accessible US federal government is along with a buffet of action-able resources, initiatives, and activities.

There are times when hackers, coders and campaigners rightly get agitated with governments hiding data that should be in the public domain. But Greg reminded me that governments doesn't just have legacy systems, they *are* a legacy system.

Governments are an application designed for one user at a time, with the elected official as that one user. I won't even go into just how much of the US Government is paper based suffice to say that we won't find ourselves sticking bills into subversion anytime soon. In some ways both the US and UK Government have suffered from being an early adopter. Like the London Underground and NY Subway they suffer from all the first mover problems with prehistoric technology falling apart and patched together because so many things came online before the current situation.

But things are changing. Greg sees organisations like MySociety, FrontSeat , Stamen as creating alternatives that force government to adopt another model. He mentioned the awesome Apps for America, Sunlight's annual development contest where prizes go to developers who can use data from Sunlight and it's partners to make Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent. This is practically identical to some of the work 4iP is funding / wanting to fund in the UK. Ironically, being Channel 4, our branding isn't quite as sexy.

So the Sunlight view is an optimistic one. People at all level of government are starting to understand that making things public means putting them online *forever* in a format that's both human and machine readable. Papers like the Power of Information and initiatives like Show Us A Better Way give me reason to be optimistic in the UK too.

Work on stuff that matters

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

From "The Man Watching" by Rainer Maria Rilke

This week I'm on holiday in San Jose, which has to be one of the most boring cities I've ever had the misfortune to visit. Luckily I'm not here for the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium or History Park but for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference which continues to be the most thought provoking and brain stretching of conferences.

On the opening night Tim O'Reilly gave his traditional radar keynote but unusually and unlike previous years he seemed less concerned with the future or emerging opportunities but focused on the demands of today.

These are tough times and Tim urged us to take on the current economic crisis and take advantage of a new administration at the White House. While his talk was very US focused it helped me think in more depth about the types of challenges we should be trying to tackle through 4iP and more broadly about the role of UK public service media on digital platforms.

Work on stuff that matters

The time has come for UK broadcasters with digital ambitions and anyone involved in digital to think more deeply and work on stuff that really matters. I agree with Tim when he says 'we have greatness in us' but 'we've wasted it on so much'. Now is the time to move onto really big thinking. This goes to the heart of why 4iP was formed.

Tim told the story of Shai Agassi who quit his job as a software executive at SAP to rethink the business model for the electric car. Granted this is a huge challenge and he might not succeed but that's partly the point. Shai's company Better Place might not achieve sustainable transportation, global energy independence and freedom from oil but we'll almost certainly learn something important in the process.

Through it's funding I hope 4iP can encourage people to start something not necessarily to get rich and famous but to work on something really hard and something that matters. I love the story of the developer who quit is job at Google to go work for an organisation trying to make solar cheaper than coal saying he thought it would be fun because the maths was harder. Jobs working on stuff that really matters that's really hard is really fun.

So as a commissioner and as a team we have to accept that the ideas we fund might not work and accept that we're unlikely to crack some of the really big problems first time. But let's remember the importance of having a go. As I've seen on the web for over ten years now pioneering generates momentum and waves that can propel others forward. Together we mustn't be afraid to dream big.

It's not all about non-profits

Because of it's public service remit people continue to think 4iP is about non-profits or maybe social ventures. From time to time 4iP might fund a non-profit but I don't think we should relegate everything important to non-profits. Generating revenue above and beyond sustainability is an important part of the answer. However, to focus too much on the bottom line is more of a problem.

Tim uses a lovely metaphor of going to on a road trip when talking about business and business models in this space. When you're on a road trip you need to pay attention to the gas tank just like when you're running a business you need to think about revenue. But the 4iP  road trip is not a tour of gas stations. I definitely think its more important to think about what you want to accomplish not weather or not it's going to financially succeed or not.

Alongside this comes a bit of personal advice that you can take or leave. Find something that matters to you that's worth more than money. Passion for your subject goes a long way in my book when I'm looking through the submission system. Passion stands out on the page.

If you're weighing up weather or not to submit a 4iP proposal against taking the road to fame and fortune by developing the coolest Facebook or iPhone application consider this. If you're working on a project for the money and you fail you're probably going to feel like you've wasted your time. On the other hand, if you work on something you love that delivers some public good and you make a small improvement in the world because of what you care about then that's going to feel a whole load more worthwhile.

Take the Long View

Part of what we need to do when working on big challenges is to take the long view. A good example here is the good folk at MySociety who have been working on e-democracy and government transparency for many many years. It wasn't popular in 2003 like it is now with conferences and think tanks popping up all over the place.

Sometimes, just like in science fiction where you can travel at the speed of light, you need to set things in motion and then go to meet up with them five or ten years later. At 4iP we shouldn't need to be sure of the outcome or know the future but we should rise to meet it.

Many of today's economic, environment, social and organisation problems haven't crept up on us but we've been too concerned with the present and hooked on immediate success to notice them or tackle them effectively.

Create more value that you capture

There is probably no better example of too much value being captured than the current world banking crisis. Many of those involved in the management of banks were seemingly complicit in the failing of the economy because of their drive to capturing value for themselves or their organisation. Greed had become systemic in the economic system. 

In contrast, Tim Berners Lee created the the web as a simple system and let it evolve to create enormous amounts of value. The web set a few rules and left the rest for us to do. Twitter, Google Maps and Wikipedia were built on similar principals and have created enormous value.

Generosity is at the heart of generating value rather than capturing it. 4iP needs to be generous and not just in a fiscal sense. We must try to create more value than we capture by helping you to build your ideas and tell your story.

Ultimately, that's 4iP's raison d'etre. We must work to helping you take on those giant challenges that matter to you. The world is full of big crunchy problems - find a place where you can make a difference and send it in.

Code for a better country

Rewired State Hacking Room, originally uploaded by Ben Dodson.

On Saturday Tom and I went along to “Rewired State: National Hack The Government Day” at The Guardian's super swanky new offices in King's Cross. The brainchild of James Darling, Richard Pope and Emma Mulqueeny it set out to demonstrate creative uses of public data and how the government might make better use of internet to engage and empower it's citizens. Showing the government what's possible in this space sits at the heart of the 4iP agenda.

But to cut to the chase, if you only remember one thing about this post it should be that if / when this event is repeated you need to cancel whatever you have planned to be there. Both Tom and I were blown away by the quality of the ideas and by how much everyone achieved in just eight hours coding time. All the demos were a credit to the incredible talent in the room and the skilful way the day was organised.

Sitting at the side of the room watching the final presentations was an inspiration and it was hard work tapping out notes and thoughts fast enough. There were a plethora of imaginative, innovative and fundable ideas and I hope we see more than a couple come into our submissions system.

A personal favourite was Job Centre Pro Plus which allowed you to search, set email alerts and subscribe to RSS feeds for vacant jobs listed in your local area. This idea combined with others like Moving There could be combined to generate a better sense of place than currently provided by most property sites and local aggregators.

A satellite workshop in Brighton developed an idea I'd love to hear more about. The Transparency Machine is an app to encourage more local-government interaction. The app reads in PDFs from council meetings, sorting by date, and the makes them available with details of minutes, agendas for future meetings, and a feedback form to allow residents to ask for items to be placed on the agenda. It's live so you can check it out in action.

I was with the rest of the room in admiring Companies Open House which provided restful Companies House look-up for a company's basic registration information. Unbelievably, the government's Companies House website doesn't have a permanent URL for each registered company, and is shut between midnight and 7am!! Companies Open House is an app that parses company data and gives you a nice page with all of the basic details about each company at a permanent URL. Companies Open House is open 24/7 and you can use each company's permanent URL as a reliable and stable link when making inferences about a company on the Web. It would be interesting to see if the richer 'subscription' data might be set free or derived from other sources to make an awesomely powerful service

But at the the end of the day 4iP had the tricky job of having to pick a few winners to take forward. After a quick huddle we named our favourites as Who Voted Which Way and Foafcorp. Who voted which way, is a twist on They Work For You that allowed you to search by policy as opposed to by MP. They demonstrated how it could be used to create a map that show sthe geographical spread and patterns of the UK's controversial fox hunting bill.

Foafcorp, revives an interactive SVG app by Dean Jackson which shows you links between companies and their directors. Originally based on US originated theyrule, the idea here is to use UK Companies House data.

We're really looking forward to talking to both you guys and anyone else who'd like to put their idea through our submissions system.

See the videos on blip.tv

See Ben Dodson's awesome flickr set

Obama: Professor President

Download file

Starts 2 minuets in

Utterly wonderful BBC Radio 4 documentary where philosophy Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah investigates Obama's academic career before his election to the US Senate in 2004. From 1992 to 2004 Obama held down a distinguished post at the University of Chicago as a professor of constitutional law.

He examines the intellectual ideas which influenced him during his time as a student at Harvard and later as a law professor at the University of Chicago, and considers what effect they might have on his policy-making as president.

First heard this while driving back from my grandparents after new year and could well be an early contender for my radio programme of the year.

Building participatory democracies

Last week, I went along to see the awesome Clay Shirky talk LSE. Clay's book Here Comes Everybody wasn't just one of my favourite books of last year but one my favourite web books of all time. It's as readable as it is informative and beautifully articulates all the things you knew about group participation on the web but were never quite able to put into words. Clay's one of those rare talents; gifted at both writing and speaking. It must be the premier form of recommendation to know that most of the audience are repeat visitors.

Clay's talk stayed true to the central premise of the book that group action is easier but he brought some of the stories up-to-date and made some interesting comments on the Obama presidential campaign. What made the evening for me was the standard of questions from the audience some of which had Clay thinking on his feet, revealing new insights and directions in his thinking and work. I won't go over stuff that's in the book but I'll pick up on a few new titbits and draw some of my own conclusions.

Don't always deliver an optimum user experience

Clay referred to Obama as being one of the first successful platform candidates mirroring some of the thinking we've been doing at 4iP. I won't dwell on the now well documented way in which Obama tailored his message to be portable and re-mixable but on how Clay saw Obama's site as a deliberately unsatisfactory experience. It did just enough to engage people, an on ramp for participation, but deliberately stopped short of delivering the full participatory and organisational power of the network. 

Their motive for this was simple. To ensure a successful outcome team Obama still needed people to do things, real things in the physical world. They needed supporters to haul themselves up from the sofas and screens to knock on doors, attend rallies and most importantly vote. The Obama site had to get you onboard but leave you hungry wanting to do more. The Obama site was designed in such a way as to neuter users' ability to actually lobby the presidential candidate on minority or specialist issues. Groups were designed to facilitate users' organising in the real-world and fund raising. They offered little to engage the electorate on policy.

But history shows us that users always find a way of subverting sites intend use. Facebook's groups were probably never designed as a mechanism for protesting against large corporations or lobbying broadcasters but the users' will use it to satisfy their needs regardless. In this case, users of MBO simply used the site to organise a protest against his actions on telecom immunity. While the tools were basic users' used the simple act of joining the group as an act of protest making it the largest group on Obama's own network with over 22,000 members. Obama didn't back down but the collection action of the users' on his own site forced him to issue a policy statement on the subject.

Don't always let your users organise you

Obviously the campaign was a success but if a campaign is fully grassroots and participatory it's going have problems when in power. Once you've been a platform candidate and called to account by the users' can you govern in the same way? Right now the answer's probably no. The tools with mainstream adoption aren't refined enough to allow the users' read/write access to the president's diary.

Sure enough, within days of being elected special interest groups had hijacked the transition site. With the economy in meltdown and the US in the middle of two wars it seems reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of the US electorate wouldn't want Obama to focus on the legalisation of medicinal marijuana. Nevertheless, the question asked by the most number of users after voting on the Open for Questions ended was: 

'Will you consider legalising marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the US'. 

This clearly raises the inevitable question of under what circumstances do you take advice and under what circumstances do you ignore users? What are the checks and balances needed to facilitate and legitimise the outcomes of participatory government? There's got to be more than a couple of 4iP projects in there and I hope that 2009 will be the year we test out some of the thinking needed to allow a large number of users to participate effectively.

Decentralise and empower

The marijuana example stands in stark contrast with MySociety's successful campaign to force the British Government to keep their work expenses transparent. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of justifying MySociety's success by believing the expenses carried issue carried more gravitas than marijuana one without really investigating why. Why was it that one government chose to listen to a set of users and another chose to ignore a large number of users?

Part of the answer lies in the user experience and the process utilised by MySociety. There were almost certainly not as many users as in the marijuana example but each user was vastly more more effectual. Instead of trying to produce a leviathan product, like change.gov, that tackles central government head on MySociety have produced a service called WriteToThem that capitalises on the decentralised nature of the UK parliamentary system. 

Writetothem is simple tool that makes it easier to send a message to your locally elected parliamentarian. While MPs aren't obliged to respond they many would have received personalised correspondence from their own constituents asking them not to approval the bill. According to Tom Steinberg, Director of MySociety, "users sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs".

In this nascent phase of digital democracy it would be hard to see how a Facebook style group could topple a government but the network effect of each locally accountable MP being individually digitally lobbied by their electorate might. If the Obama team really wanted to grow participatory government they might do well to focus their efforts on a product that first tackles Congress rather than at the White House itself.

Writetothem carries more weight simply because it's not designed for mass participation like Facebook and Change.gov. It would be wrong to call it a sub-standard user experience but certainly more effort is required by the user and as a result the actions carry more weight. This, fused with the the efforts to authenticate the users with postcode and email information, makes the correspondence generated more credible and identifies the users as actively engaged.

Finally, Writetothem is not produced instead of a Facebook group. On the expenses issues you could join a group to 'passively' register your disapproval but you were encouraged at every opportunity to write to your local MP. Just like most web experiences users should be offered a spectrum of interaction and engagement. Think levelling up in games.

There's certainly much more to say on this and on the subject of mass participation and the web and we're a way from genuinely building an effectual participatory democracy in the digital space. I agree with Shirky when he says that the most interesting things and important progress won't be at a national level in 2009. Instead it pays to keep an eye on the small, passionate and focused groups starting to solve some of these issues from themselves.

Two cheers for democracy?

(starts 0.38 secs in)

"We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she deserves only two"

E.M. Forster

This is a fantasic episode of The Moral Maze that asks "can you ever have too much democracy?" From the judges on Strictly Come Dancing to congestion charge campaigners in Manchester, there are those people who might say yes.

Have the expectations of the TV phone-in vote generation gone too far? Is representative democracy being undermined by continued government consultation exercises? Or do we need to vote on more contentious issues to encourage people to engage with the political process?

So, democracy - is it the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried from time to time, or does it substitute election by the incompetent many, for appointment by the corrupt few? What is clear is that democracy is not an unambiguous virtue.

The panel of Claire Fox, Clifford Longley, Michael Portillo, Kenan Malik and chaired by Michael Buerk cross examine Matthew Parris, Richard Wilson, Stephen Wilson and excellent Professor Steven Coleman.

Portillo, takes the line we'd expect from such an experienced politician. He's generally in favour of the current democratic model. He asserts his trust in the public concluding that in general elections, even those he's lost, they tend to get the answer right.

Portillo stands in contrast to both Parris and Longley who believe in government for the people and of the people but not necessarily always by the people. Parris sees the virtue of general elections in there providing a mechanism for removing leadership without the use of force and that on the whole the 'proletariat' will reach the correct conclusion. Governments disliked consistently and long enough by the majority of the people will fall. However, Parris feels strongly that individuals and the pubic shouldn't be entrusted with decision making on single issues like whether or not to join Europe or go to war. They're in the car but they can't drive it. A few years back he wrote an excellent feature for the Times on just this subject.

Richard Wilson, Director of Involve, takes a more moderate stance arguing that we need to tweak the processes and the tools to better engage and inform the voting public. Opinion poll politics is dangerous suggesting our leaders lack the confidence to lead.

The absolute highlight of the programme is Professor Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at Leeds University. His research backs up what any reasonable person intrinsically knows; people who vote in reality TV programmes are just as likely to vote in elections. The anxiety caused is more interesting than the activity itself.

Coleman chides Parris asserting that democracy is no frivolous debate. He builds on Wilson's argument questioning if there is scope, within this major transitional period of democracy, to rethink the way we do things. Are interactive technologies capable of being used to make democracy more meaningful to people bringing them closer into it rather more.

He goes on to question that if the media are cable of eroding social trust are they not equally capable of enhancing social trust? His arguments are compelling and reinforce my personal belief that that we should move away of the grand vision of democracy and look in more detail at it's component parts. How can technology help bring fairness, tolerance and having an equal share of voice are questions worth pursuing.

The more I dig around some of these 4ip themes the more I see people are seeing citizenship as something constrained and limited when compared to media and other areas of their lives. Hence my enthusiasm for what the Obama seems to be up to in the US. Just as TV and Radio became tools of democracy networked, participatory technologies provide us with a rare opportunity to engage the public in political opinions and political parties.

But democracy is precious and delicate. We need to think carefully and prepare thoroughly.

Software for a civic life

A conversation with Mike Mathieu of Frontseat.org and Joshua Michéle Ross of O'Reilly Media. Front Seat describe themselves as a civic software company and incubator. Like 4ip they're a form of social hedge fund looking to develop small, lightweight software that has the potential to have a disproportionate impact on peoples' lives.

With projects like Jane Jacob's inspired Walkscore and Obama CTO they're demonstrating how the use of public data and web services can be used to solve small but important problems.