[Air-l] Petition Tony Blair, online that is

[Louise Ferguson]

On 18/11/06, Stephen Coleman <S.Coleman at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> I don't share Wainer Lusoli's apparent delight at the arrival of the Ten
> Downing Street e-petitions tool. From a political perspective, one might ask
> why citizens are being urged to petition the Prime Minister, when the UK's
> system of government is not presidential, but parliamentary. More
> significantly, this technology has been built so that people are only
> allowed to sign petitions, but not discuss them. Unlike the Scottish
> Parliament's e-petitions, public deliberation is prohibited. This leads to a
> narrow notion of democracy without discussion in which petitions can claim
> neither representative nor deliberative legitimacy. >From the perspective of
> internet research, this is an interesting illustration of how political
> design can undermine technical potential.
>
> Contrast this with the great tradition of political petitioning that has
> existed in Britain since the late thirteenth century. The Chartists of the
> mid-nineteenth-century  did not make a political impact by collecting
> signatures, but by holding mass meetings to discuss the cause of their
> petition. Imagine iif the Chartists - or the disarmament movement of the
> 1960s - had been allowed only to plead with the Prime Minister rather than
> assemble, deliberate and develop their own convictions.
>
> Citizens sending petitions via this new e-tool should be encouraged to
> subvert its intended restrictive use by setting up an alternative web space
> in which propositions can be openly discussed and revised.



No discussion, but presumably this is down to Downing Street, not MySociety
(which has built many other systems that include a discussion element).

I'm inclined to see the e-petitions site as just that: it sits alongside the
traditional method of petitioning, performs the same function, and no more.
Just improved efficiency and less drama (no standing outside 10 Downing
Street to hand it over).

Discussions do take place, but elsewhere. How else do you explain the
thousands of signatures present within days and with little publicity, on
what is still a Beta site? Specialised forums and discussion lists are where
people interested in this and related issues 'congregate'. They don't tend
to hang out on the Downing Street website.

In the case of the 'right to private copy for personal use' petition (5th on
the list the last time I looked), discussion has taken place at public
events (e.g. a recent Conway Hall event), online through Open Rights Group
public discussion lists... The petition is merely one element in a much
wider discussion concerning intellectual property rights.

I feel fairly cynical about the effect of such petitions, but that's another
matter.


Louise Ferguson