[Air-l] Fwd: [Consult] ePetitions at No Ten, Bundestag, and elsewhere

[Matthias Trenel]

Tom Steinberg aksked me to crosspost his response to AIR-L. -- Matthias

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Steinberg <dowire at tomsteinberg.co.uk>
Date: Nov 21, 2006 7:36 PM
Subject: Re: [Consult] ePetitions at No Ten, Bundestag, and elsewhere
To: consult at groups.dowire.org


Hello Matthias,

Thanks for moving this debate to this list. Unfortunately nobody seems
to be around to approve my membership request to AIR-L so that I can
put mySociety's side of this: clearly the inability to debate issues
online in the way we want is today's hot topic!

I suppose my overall reaction to reading the thread is that such a
bright group of people seem to have missed something our ordinary
users have understood in droves: the site is a beta and if you want
features added you have to ask for them. I'm afraid that complaining
about them on a list we don't even know about doesn't actually count
as constructive. Our other more common garden users have realised they
need to actually send us their feedback, and we've made a slew of
changes in response:

http://www.mysociety.org/2006/11/17/this-is-what-beta-means-the-first-48-hours-of-petitions/

Now onto the issue itself - the lack of forums. Our design philosophy
as an organisation has always been clear: pick a simple task that
benefits the public and solve it as well as you possibly can before
launching. Then as soon as it is out in the wild, respond to your
users demands as fast as you can (within the constraints of your
resources). In our case this meant building a massively load-capable
petition signing system that had transparency engineered in from the
start, and then changing it really fast in response to user requests.

For everyone on this and the AIR-L list who would like to see forums,
I have just one question:

* Do you consider it possible to design deliberative discussion system
on a site as sensitive as No10 which will generate debate sufficiently
mature as to merit the sizeable public spending on moderation that
would be required? If so, how?

Personally, I'm sceptical that the No10 site can ever host good
discussions, and running HearFromYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com I
think mySociety can claim to have some experience in this field. But
I'm just one citizen, and if you are British it is your democractic
system too: if you want forums you should ask for them and express
your support for whatever hiring of civil servants or building of
technology would be required.

Lastly, please note that for those of you who think I'm ignoring the
fact that there ARE discussion forums on other petition sites, please
just absorb the following scale difference:

* Total petitions submitted on and offline to Scottish Parliament in
first 7 years : 964

* Total petitions submitted online to No10 site in first 6 days: 925

I look forward to your feedback on this issue very much.

best,

Tom Steinberg

Director, mySociety.org


Member profile for Tom Steinberg:
http://groups.dowire.org/main/contacts/tomsteinberg


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