Networking Democracy

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Interesting discussion of our Networking Democracy project by David Wilcox of the great Designing for Civil Society blog. He also contrasts what we are doing with a Tom Steinberg message on Democracies Online that I have been meaning to blog. Steinberg suggests it is a waste of time trying to influence actual government behaviour. Whether this is because of civil service decrepitude and chronic arse-covering, ministerial heeby-jeebies, cabinet procrastination, big organisation pass-the-parcelism or what, he does not quite say. I know what he means. That's why what we are doing is independent of the government and a big hat-tip to Michael Wills for giving this the official go-ahead in his Ministerial capacity and "letting go". Who knows what will happen with the Summit and how it connects to input from the internet? Wills has let us get on with our own discussion and what I want to come out of it is a document that will be at the very least a marker for the future. At some point - by which I mean 2020 at the latest - there will be a set of relationships between the internet and democratic decision taking. I'm sure one of the rules that will emerge will be the Wilcox rule that "You need to be very clear about what you are trying to do, with whom".

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): While suffering from a bad cold I got a very interesting long email from David Marquand who started with our Networking Democracy initiative, and said

I like the idea in principle, but the tone of the comments both on the OurKingdom piece and on your Guardian piece is so deeply depressing that I have to say I doubt if anything of great (or even any) value will come out of the exercise. The trouble with internet communication is that people blast off the first thing that comes into their head, without thinking through a coherent argument. There is a discipline in writing for print publication which the internet loses; and the gains in spontaneity and freshness (which are real) are outweighed by the loss in responsibility and accountability. The more I see of it the more I feel that internet communication is rather like a conversation in an overcrowded pub, where everyone is shouting so loudly that they can’t hear anyone else, much less think about what other people (or for that matter they themselves) are saying.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have written a piece for Comment is Free on our Networking Democracy debate and have been dumped upon in the usual way by most of the commentators, though not all. I've tried to give the discussion a bit of context and also quoted the Michael Wills ippr speech. As you can see, I am trying (over-valiantly?) to separate the idea of a summit on a 'British statement of values' from the question we are trying to assess, how can the internet be used to deepen democracy?

OurKingdom is hosting what we believe to be a unique online deliberation on how the potential of the internet can be integrated into a national political process. It is about this question: can participation on the web reinforce representative democracy? The initial phase took place among a group of experts who were asked to set out the problems and summarise what is already known - please look at it here. The first section of it has an email exchange between Anthony Barnett of OurKingdom and Michael Wills, the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice - who bravely agreed to an independent debate. Their exchange sets out what we are doing.