Jon Bright (London, OK): Tech guru Bill Thompson speculates today on the BBC website about how the internet may change the nature of politics.
What could the internet do for democracy?
A lot, in theory. Thompson muses on the possibilities of direct democracy - people getting more control over the policy making process, for example, by allowing large petitions to form the basis of 'people's bills'. Social networking sites like Facebook are providing simple ways of bringing together large groups of people with shared concerns. And, paradoxically, this truly global network could make a truly local politics again possible, providing influential forums for local issues as well as ways to engage your MP.
Thompson notes that George Osborne was onto open source politics for the Tories before Gordon Brown called for a new dialogue and he notes that OurKingdom is (thanks, Bill) helping to make the web part of the debate over the promised new settlement. David Wilcox also takes up the argument over at Designing for Civil Society. Bill recognises that the internet is not (yet) universally available and no 'IT solution' is infallible. But his call is for the internet to be recognised as part of the landscape politics operates in, to "make it a core part of the political process just as the telephone and television are". It's not long, in my opinion, before it becomes even more fundamental than that.
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Bill Thompson's article on the BBC also mentions the work of mysociety, who are a very 'good', progressive group of people working to make the web more useful for e-democratic ideas and methods. Well worth checking out their website. They are responsible for the e-petitions site on the government website as well, which was so successful at capturing the road-pricing debacle (although there are plenty less Daily Mail friendly petitions that have taken place their too...)
F
There's also http://www.our-say.org/ which has some interesting ideas...
The number of 'grass roots' local community blogs and forums have increased rapidly in the last year. Two blogs in my area (Camberwell) receive significant amounts of traffic and instigate real action at a local level - especially support for local businesses
http://camberwellonline.co.uk/blog/
http://www.se5forum.org/
If an MP could engage with their community at this level, then I would definitely be interested
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