Tom Steinberg, leader of the group of policy wonks and e-government/e-democracy hackers-for-good best known for their sterling work under the MySociety label has come together with a group of individuals from government, Cisco, Ofcom, Google and others (working in their personal capacities) to form a Power of Information Taskforce which has just released a draft of its Power of Information Taskforce Report. The remit of the taskforce is here, but briefly it is intended to help the government help the public using web 2.0 and better use of citizen- and state-generated information.

Consistent with the overall approach of the taskforce, the report will be available in a comment-able form for two weeks, after which it will be handed officially to the Cabinet Office.

From what I’ve seen from a brief view of the report it makes a useful contribution to encouraging the UK government to open up its data and practices to public deliberation and scrutiny. It does however appear to be missing a strategy to formally integrate participation in relevant social media sites as part of the normal activity of (selected) civil servants. On the one hand, many might see such outreach activity as an optional extra they can easily forego given their already busy workloads dealing with phone calls, emails and the post. On the other hand, it may be necessary to provide rules outlining how to judge how much engagement with social media is “sufficient” and which social media is strategic, since it would be possible for an enthusiastic civil servant to spend all of his or her time intervening in this way at the expense of other work.

I am a little surprised I haven’t seen more published by researchers re-analysing datasets about US Internet use provided by Pew. The reports issued by Pew are great but they don’t always include analyses that I would have made. Here are a few such observations about bloggers which I have made and which will (probably) be in my upcoming thesis:

• 46.4% of bloggers posted every few weeks or less often. 42.1% believed they blogged an hour (or less) a week. (late 2005 survey of bloggers)
• 59% of those who created (self-defined) political blogs in the US were college educated (N=16), no political bloggers had less than a high school education. 63% of blogs that got media attention were by the college educated (N=12), again none were by those with less than a high school education. (Late 2006 survey). Note that 27.7% of the US population had less than a high school education in the 2005 US census.

It’s great that Pew is one of the few organizations that makes its data available in this way, and if anyone else has done interesting re-analyses of Pew survey data please let me know.

Typical - you wait ages for good journal articles about political blogging in a UK context and eight come along at once! I still would like to see an article which measures and assesses the (lack of) connection between independent UK political blogs and the UK political scene and explains why the impact of UK political blogs appears to be much less than that of US political blogs…

Google has long insisted that it wasn’t interested in or involved with news gathering that involved human intervention - “we just serve stuff up using algorithms”, they say. (Of course the algorithms at Google News are continually tweaked to ensure that people using them get the kind of results that Google believes that they want, and the selection of news sources themselves is done by humans…) But I just noticed a new programme off in a corner of Google - Power Readers in Politics - essentially a group blog run by a small and Google-selected set of politicians and journalists, attached to Google Reader. Also see their Canadian version.

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

The charitable organization MySociety which builds civic websites in the UK has launched its first campaign - Free Our Bills. It’s a rather wonkish one but well worth supporting. Basically they are putting pressure on parliament to improve the way it publishes legislation online to make it easier for independent groups like them to parse the data and pull out key parts of the text (see their detailed description of the changes sought if you are interested).

I came across a great piece of research six years ago - interviews and focus groups in the UK with general public, ethnic minorities and people disadvantaged by disability or homelessness looking at their attitudes towards e-democracy proposals and what might encourage them to participate. It was commissioned by the Office of the e-Envoy and published online on edemocracy.gov.uk - a website to support consultation on edemocracy proposals. Alas, first that website and then the e-Envoy’s office were closed, and the archive of the e-Envoy’s site didn’t include this document anywhere. So in the interests of science (and with the permission of the report’s original authors, Creative Research) I have hosted the report myself. So if you’re interested in e-democracy, check out:
Creative Research (2002) “E-Democracy: Report of Research Findings” Office of the e-Envoy, London. http://davidbrake.org/ukedemocsresearch.pdf

It’s dismaying to me to see that even in a country with a healthy budget for and interest in egovernment, valuable information (paid for by the taxpayers!) can disappear from view after just six years…

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This video is very popular among technophiles, as its ranking on Technorati demonstrates. It suggests that thanks to Web 2.0 technologies (which it neatly explains) “we’ll have to rethink copyright, identity, ethics… ourselves”.

While I am by any measure a heavy user of Web 2.0 technologies, the sunny optimism of some social web enthusiasts this video and the absence of a wider social perspective on the phenomenon really irks me.

Update: Michael Wesch responded to this post (see comments below) and it appears I have misrepresented him - I should not have read sunny optimism into the video. After all in the time available it is asking a lot to both present the potentials of Web 2.0 as he has done impressively and to critique them. But to continue…

The fact remains that according to a recent survey only a little more than a quarter of US online users have ever tagged anything and only 7% of them do so daily. And who are the people who tag (and by extension use a variety of Web 2.0 services?). As Pew notes, “classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.” Eszter Hargittai’s earlier research bears out this relative lack of interest in Web 2.0 usage - even among American college students. Hell, this video itself, although it is the toast of the blogosphere at the moment, has been viewed less than 20,000 times. Doesn’t that say something about the limited scale of interest in Web 2.0?

So what? Well the creator of this video and other Web 2.0 enthusiasts believe that tagging is “easy” and “anyone can do it”. Tacitly then they also believe that the contents of user-content databases and the “folksonomies” that are created therein represent (if not now then soon) the preferences and interests of everyone - or at least everyone who matters - instead of the somewhat self-reinforcing interest clusters of a technologically savvy elite.

It concerns me that thanks to this presumption and thanks to the ease with which this data can be mined by journalists, marketers, politicians, PRs and other trend-spotters, the interests and preferences of this narrow group will tend to be over-stressed at the expense of those without the time and inclination to surf and tag.

Of course tagging is in its infancy and doubtless it will grow in popularity. But does this mean it will become mainstream? I have my doubts. And even if it does I suspect most content creation and tagging will continue to be done by a passionate (or geeky) few, like myself.

This, I suggest, is what we need to bear in mind before we “rethink governance” based on an enthusiasm for this new set of technologies.

David Brake

PS it is an ironic commentary on the “ease of use” of Web 2.0 technology that I had a great deal of difficulty embedding this video. Comments are now working so please feel free to add your own in the usual way (and comment on any past posts here if you had trouble doing so before!).

The excellent academic group weblog Crooked Timber has produced a kind of online seminar via their weblog about Yochai Benkler’s recent book The Wealth of Networks which has attracted much attention in the blogosphere and contends that the Internet has enabled a new model for producing public goods which is under threat from corporations and governments.

The seminar happened back in May ‘06 so you won’t be able to join the discussion there any more but the archives are still available and worth reading. And if you want to comment further Benkler’s book is - appropriately - online and in wiki form.

David Brake