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?
Online at OK: Democratic Audit's full report, The BNP: the Roots of their Success
Britain is good at dealing with diversity - Kanishk Tharoor
The BBC was right on BNP - it is our political class who have been complacent - Jacob Ignatius
Get over it, better to flush out the whole affair - David Elstein
Richard Wilson (not verified) said:
Thu, 2008-03-27 15:01Hi Anthony,
just read your really good Guardian piece.
As you may know we have a TeleParticipation workstream (funded by JRCT and MoJ) where we're looking at how to engage millions of people meaningfully in critical policy issues. See Page 127 of:
http://83.223.102.125/involvenew/mt/archives/blog_37/Involve%20Participation%20Nation.pdf.
We're really struggling to find evidence of effective deliberation and opinion shifts happening online. Clearly online forums are incredible ways of reaching diverse groups, data aggregation, creation and co-production. But, and it seems to be a big but, the real benefits of deliberation i.e. getting diverse groups to engage respectively and for their opinion to change doesn't seem to happen online.
We at Involve are very much web zealots so I'd love you to prove me wrong.