 I'll hold you to that later on. That's some point in the summer. Okay, probably just a bit of background first. I've been researching in the field of loosely what you might call the democracy for about ten years. Mainly looking at things like political participation, election campaigning, parties, and more laterally what I'm going to talk about here is political representatives, MPs and parliaments online. Most of that has been in the UK, partly because that's where I get my funding from and say they'd like you to focus on that. But we've also done comparative work across Europe and some of what I'm going to talk about today is a UK-Australia comparative project that we did. I'm hoping that some of the issues that press will talk about have resonances here and raise more general questions, especially about the nature of democracy and the net, et cetera. So, as I say, let's just go to the first one. The background to this research was originally we had a sort of two-and-a-half-year project between about 2003 and 2006 looking at parliaments and assemblies and political representatives in both the UK and Australia. We focused on Westminster and also on the federal parliament in Canberra and the relatively newly created Scottish Parliament Welsh Assembly and then also two states in Australia, Victoria and Queensland. What we were looking at, I suppose, was broadly three or four things. We were looking at how far new technologies were really facilitating changes in the role of MPs and their relationship both with their electorates and the voters, their political parties, because both countries have a strong tradition of party discipline. And their role as legislatures and policy makers and things like that. We were interested as well because there isn't much data, particularly in the UK and also in Australia, about public perceptions of all this and data from the voters' perspective and how they were using ICTs or might use ICTs to contact and monitor their representatives' behaviour. And then, bigger, broader questions, we wanted to just look comparatively what was going on. We saw factors that shape patterns of usage and behaviour online. And what, in some sense, is the big broad woolly question which I'll finish on, is what's happening to representative democracy? I'm not sure I know the answer to that, but maybe you've got some answers to that as well. The methods we used very quickly were a range of things. We've done around about 100 interviews now with MPs, parliamentary staff, you know, political representative staff. I'm just engaging in another round now between 2003 and 2008. We've also done surveys of MPs online presence so a bit of content feature analysis of their websites and more laterally, again, blogs and social network sites. And again, we've done that on... We did that in 2003, we repeated it in 2005 and I'm updating it again now. I have to say that looking at political representatives' websites sends you completely insane after a while. Originally, there was three of us doing this and I'm updating it by myself and it's like going through about 500, 600 sites. My brain gets a bit fuzzy after a while looking at these things. From the public perspective, we also used standard pretty public opinion survey data in 2005 and 2006, so we did a couple of surveys and we did some focus groups as well. I'll go through the sort of background. Let's go on and just... What I'm trying to do here is summarise five years' work into three PowerPoint slides, which is good practice but hard work for an academic room. We like to talk for hours and hours. But I'll try and just make some basic points here. We've gone with the expectation that there might actually be more interesting things going on in Australia than there was in the UK. The reason we expected that was because the literature said that's what was happening and we also thought that the geography of Australia might make a difference. You've got MPs out there with constituencies which span thousands of miles with hardly any population. We thought there might be some drivers there for them to use the technology innovatively. In fact, what we found was there wasn't a huge amount of differences between what you might call individual representatives in either of the countries and indeed there was probably less innovation in Australia than there was in the UK. I'll say more about why that might be the case later on. There's some pretty standard patterns though and I'll just highlight some of these. First of all, the growth of what you might call personalised online presence. In other words, their own websites, their own blogs, these sorts of things was relatively slow. They first started around the mid-1990s and yet even now, 2008, you've got around about a quarter, maybe even a third of MPs in Westminster Parliament don't really have an online presence. There's some characteristics to those MPs as well. They tend to be older. They tend to have been in Parliament quite a long time. They tend to have constituencies which are not electorally competitive. In other words, they're not under a lot of threat. So the incentives for them to set up on online presence is perhaps less. Same message again largely in Australia as well, I think, to a certain extent. What are they actually doing on the whole? What's your standard MP do well? If you look, I bet this is probably the same in most countries, but pretty much it's that cyber-brochian model still. That's sort of built for the broadcast era. If you looked at the site and I've looked at hundreds and thousands of them, they look pretty much the same. What have they got? They've got a page with their bio on it which tells you all the dull facts about they joined the party when they were three years old. They've done all these positions, et cetera, et cetera, and they've lived in the constituency for years and they support the local authority standard stuff. Then they have all their press releases, why anyone would want to read their press releases is another matter, but all their press releases go on there, and then they have their contact details. The basic message they seem to be trying to push across is, look, this is me, I'm a very busy person, and I'm busy representing you. There you go. So that's pretty much a standard pattern for the bulk of these sort of things. The other thing we started to pick up on was what I called on the third bullet point there, the growth of template politics as well, which sort of underpins the cyber brochure message as well. This goes to the relationship between political representatives and their parties. What parties are doing, partly to counter, if you like, the individualisation of it, is to provide them with standardised information and standardised messages and content. If I can just click on that link, I'll just show you what I mean, if this works. This is a templated site of my... Well, she's not my local MP, because I actually live in Salford, but it's by the university's base. Around about a third of the governing Labour Party MPs have a site which is more or less exactly the same as this. So in all the words, it has pretty much the standard thing, it has this little map and it has, you know, a pattern about it has all these things down the side, and all they do is put a bit of personalised information in. So they can personalise it to a certain extent, but largely once you've looked at one, you've looked at 100 of them. They're pretty much the same. If you go to the Labour Party's site, there will be similar sorts of branding there, but these are mainly used for local parties and MPs. Yeah, you can do that, even most people wouldn't, but you could do that if you wanted to. So what you've got is these templated sites. And the same thing to a lesser degree in Australia as well, we came across, you know, so what you've got is standard, they look professional. Let's face it, most people are not going to look at 600 sites. Are they going to look at maybe one if they look at any at all? So they're not going to see them all. So they look sort of professional, but it's a good means of the party, but it's a long degree of control over the content. Okay, so that's the less interesting message. What you've also got, though, is the growth of a small group of representatives who you might call, this is a cliché term, sorry, the Web 2.0 politician. And it's not only about their use of technology, it's also about their attitude to their role as well. So they tend to use the technology, they tend to use blogs, and they tend to use those sort of tools and the interactive communication tool, but they also think slightly differently about their roles and MP as well. And so some of them, when we did the interviews, talked interestingly about no longer seeing themselves as this sort of hierarchical figure where people came to for advice and help, but being part of a hub or part of a network where they didn't necessarily know all the answers, but they could maybe help direct people to other people who would, and that they were part of this sort of networked idea. So I'd say it's around about probably about 5% in both... No, probably 5% in the UK, maybe less in Australia of politicians who are using the technology in slightly creative ways. I'm wondering whether, for time purposes, I'd quite like to show a web camera. I know I showed it to a few people yesterday. I'd quite like to show a clip of that, but maybe I'll leave that to the end. Do you want to see it now? OK. Maybe a disappointment to you, I don't know. Let me just explain what's going on here. David Cameron is the relatively new and young leader of the Conservative Party, the main opposition party in the UK. Nobody knew much about David or Dave as he started calling himself, which is sort of interesting. In 2006, he produced this, autumn 2006, he produced this web camera site which hit the news and it hit mainstream media and he got a lot of coverage for it. It's a mixture of a blog and a video diary and a question and answer and all sorts of other things. One of the interesting first things you'll see about this is it's not branded in Conservative Party colours. That's the first thing. It's not blue. It's this sort of pinky mould you call it, more mauve colour, I don't know, anyway. There is Conservatives there, but you have to try sort of quite hard to see that. It's very much a personalised thing as well, which is sort of unusual in the context. It's about promoting and marketing him as a politician and not necessarily the party, which is also interesting in a UK context because we don't tend to have that very much. Let me see if I can find the very... This is the very first one. I don't know what the sound will be like on this or anything, but if you get an idea... ..just to say two words about this before it starts. This is the introduction to webcam. It's his first one. Now, it is either completely spontaneous or it's a complete mastery of marketing, and I'll let you decide which one. That's not the one, is it? Sorry, it's gone into the wrong one. Can I get down to this one? This always happens with technology. You'll never have any clips. Yeah, that's the wrong video when I played it differently, but we can't seem to get... When I did that, I played this one. Yeah, here we go. About what the Conservatives are doing, what we believe in, what you want to do, what you want to do in a minute. Can we just do this in a minute? Um, where was I? Right, we want to communicate directly. We want to tell you what the Conservatives are doing, and we want to give you behind-the-scenes access so you can actually see what policies we're developing, the things that we're doing, and have that direct link. Because I'm really keen that we can communicate with people properly. So this is webcam. This is the web camera. Sorry, this is the opening piece. Today I'm going to be talking about clean politics and telling you about the announcement of many lasers today. We're going to have some great interviews on this service, on the cane, coming exclusively to you on our website, and lots of behind-the-scenes footage of the conference. But today, we've still got a couple of days to go before the conference. Doing a lot of work on speeches and policies in preparation. I should say that nobody knew very much about camera, at least amongst the general public. The only thing they'll like you to know is that you went to Eaton, which is our top public school, and that he has this reputation of being incredibly, incredibly posh. And so this whole exercise here looks very much like, you know, the kids interrupt him. You can see the baby in the background. He's doing the washing up. It's like, I don't have a butler. I haven't got servants, and I'm really a modern guy. So, although it's different, it's also a mastery of sort of, I think, you know, modern political marketing. But it's just nice. Web camera has also been copied around Europe as well. So there's various web cameras cropping up. The other thing I think that it's worth saying is that one of the things that policy students increasingly are doing is basically monitoring their post bags. Not just the email they get in, but also the regular mail, and putting everything into databases and sorting and monitoring. And all this is about targeting and marketing and building up some sort of relationship with their electorate. Now, if they're getting thousands and thousands of communications a week, but increasingly what they're looking at is, like I say, harvesting that information and then setting up a channel of online communication, usually via email, with those people and with their constituents, so that they know that when someone writes to them on, let's say, fisheries policy, they know that that person will be interested if they've got something to say about fish, and they can do this in a sort of targeted way. And that's really what they're interested in. They're more interested in the technology as that sort of marketing and targeting exercise, especially for incumbent sitting MPs. Okay, what underlies this? This is not scientific, right? We did these interviews, we did, you know, probably about 70 or 80 interviews with political representatives. And I tried to pick out the standard sort of responses that you'd get in terms of what ICTs could do for them and what ICTs we're doing for democracy. Now, it's fair to say that most politicians don't have a thought, if you ask them, the first one we ask them about, you know, what do you think the internet's doing in terms of democracy? What's it doing in terms of your role? They sort of sat there and looked rather puzzled, because a lot of them don't use it, first of all, and the ones that do haven't really thought about why they're using it. But you could see sort of five sort of classic responses, and this is in no way scientific, though. There's administrative modernisers, and I put some quotes underneath just to illustrate the sort of things that I'm meaning here. They tended to talk about the technology in terms of efficiency gains, not in terms of democracy. It's about, you know, can I do things more quickly? Can I do more work? How do the tools help me, you know, get through the day? So there's a quote underneath there. Well, we could modernise Parliament, we could do more, and if we had screens in the chamber, we could actually get on with some work instead of just sitting there. We get text messages in the chamber, but we're not supposed to, but the speaker's not stopped it. That's how antiquated we are. So it's partly about this modernisation agenda. I said, we're interested in branding themselves and they're interested in votes. You've got the innovators, which I've already mentioned, which talk heavily about dialogue and interaction and also networking, and they tend to be the bloggers in particular. The skeptics are the ones who tend to think that technology is just making their life hell. It's exacerbating their problems, it's exacerbating their workload. So the quote under there, we asked someone about why they didn't have a web presence, essentially, and they started to go into a rant about blogs and they said, well, blogs, interactive democracy, we just haven't got the time. MPs have bursts of enthusiasm and then reality bites and it gathers dust. A couple of weeks of enthusiasm and then nothing. There has to be a hard evaluation of the benefits and my suspicion is the returns are marginal, returns are minimal. In fact, it's probably more trouble than it's worth. And there's a real core of underlying skepticism when you interview representatives about technology. And then the last one that I liked, are the fatalists. There's a lot of fatalists hanging around out there, mainly government-backed bench MPs who know their careers are going nowhere and are disillusioned with life in total. This first quote underneath there came when the tape went off, so it was the end of the interview and he just sat glumly through the interview and he said, well, we're fucked, basically. He said, parties are finished. She said, look around this place, we're sitting in this. He said, no one cares about this place. He said, we're finished. Everything's done for. Which was nice. I wish he'd done it on tape, but anyway, there we go. And then the second quote is from someone in the Scottish Parliament. I have a feeling was, he's a fairly senior figure. I forget exactly which. And he just said, let's face it, there's always going to be the lumpum proletaria. He was a left-wing MP, by the way, who think that we're all eating and drinking at the public's expense and we're only in it for ourselves. And then he said, but hey, that's democracy. And he said technology ain't going to do anything to change that. So you've got those sort of responses. In comparative terms, I suppose this is the sort of academic coming out of me here, so sorry about this, but actually one of the things that was shaping and driving and also using hurdles to the way that politicians and parlants were using it. And I tried to break these up into three things. There's the systemic level and I think I picked out two things that were important in the context of this project. The participatory and electoral context. One of the drivers for using technology in the UK or for at least getting people interested in it was the fact that electoral turnout dropped dramatically in 2001. Only 59% of the electorate turned out of the general election in 2001 and that rose only a very small amount in 2005, that's 62, 63%. And particularly amongst younger voters. And there was an air of crisis. And so politicians and think tanks and journalists all jumped on the idea that somehow technology might provide a magic bullet. It doesn't, but that was a driving force. Now in the Australian context, that's sort of masked. The problems are there, but they got compulsory voting. So you don't see that catalyst dramatic effect in terms of dropping turnout. And I think that's quite important in the understanding of these sort of things. Federalism I think would be quite important in the Australian context. You'd got competition between the states. The two states that we looked at, Queensland and Victoria, Queensland had built quite a big reputation on its e-government, e-democracy initiatives. Victoria followed suit, but wanted to be better. And there's a competitive environment going on there. The second level, institutional, organisational level, I think in order to understand politicians' use of technology and also plans, you need to know a lot about the culture and the norms of those institutions and not necessarily about the technology itself. I've listed a few things there. One thing I'd say that underlies maybe politicians' scepticism here is that every day life is politicians. And maybe it's going to take a whole generational change to shift this, but as politicians, they're not desk bound. So a lot of them don't sit with a computer very much apart from maybe on a train if they're going somewhere and have a laptop. They spend their time going to meetings. The way they've been brought up, even before being an MP, is to go to party meetings, is to knock on doors, is to do the public face-to-face stuff, kissing babies, all that sort of stuff. That's what they value. Face-to-face is the ultimate. Technology, they're not really that interested and they don't use it that much. The staff are the ones that use it for them. And so the everyday culture is not built around technology. It's not built around anything. I have to think about that because I'm always fiddling about the laptop or a computer. They're not. They don't do much of that. I'll just say one little anecdote, and this is coming out in Australia. There's no Australians here, aren't there? Well, apologies if I attempt a very bad Australian accent, but I did this interview and it was in Queensland, I think, and the politician said to me, we're talking about technology, and he said, ah, jeez, mate. He said, technology. He said, no, he said, I like to see the whites of their eyes. I want to debate with people. I don't want to look through a screen or touch a keyboard. I have to say that in Australia it does fulfil certain of the cliches. There's a macho element to it. I really want to debate, but I want to debate physically with someone, not through a computer. I'm not going to go into all of these because we haven't got time, but in the UK, one of the things that distinguished it from Australia was the external scrutiny. The federal level in Australia, I have to say, there wasn't much going on, and they weren't under much pressure to do much. In the UK, you've got My Society, which is an interesting organisation. I think some people at John Palfrey are not here. We'll know Tom Steinberg of My Society quite well. Lots of initiatives from them. We can look at those after I've finished talking, if you want to look at some of those, to pressurise MPs to do things online, but also to scrutinise what MPs are doing. And the Hansard Society also giving assistance to MPs if they wanted to blog, if they wanted to do things. So there was assistance there if they wanted it, but there was also scrutiny and pressure to do it, which didn't exist to the same level, certainly not at the federal level. And then at the individual level, what's important to MPs? Constituency environment. If they were in a marginal constituency, with high levels of internet access, you can be sure they would make use of the tools. If they weren't, if they were in a safe constituency where their majority is quite large, and maybe they didn't have a large amount of students or constituents who are often a driver for using the technology, they wouldn't make much use of it. What that does is underpins a sort of digital divide in terms of representation. I'm not going to say too much more about those. Let's just get on to the last couple of slides. So what's the public's response about this? Let's say we did survey and we did also focus group work in the UK and Australia. Just to give the basics, contacting and visiting MPs' websites and blogs on the last slide is pretty low. I think the figures for the UK was something like about 3% of the public had ever visited an MP site. I think 5% had been to the parliament's main site. In Australia, it's significantly bigger. Maybe that's to do with geography, I'm not quite sure. Something like three times as big as the UK. But it is growing. And it's growing amongst young people, because of education and using schools, prompting them to go. They wouldn't go off their own back, but they have to go through school. So there's some of that. What was interesting in the focus groups was though that the expectations and interest in online communication appeared quite high. So they expected politicians to be doing quite a lot. And they expected that politicians should have websites and should be doing and should be interacting and should be accessible. But it was a mainly sort of consumeristic approach. They weren't necessarily interested in visiting it, particularly if they had a problem they might do it, if they wanted something they might do it. The other thing to say about it was that online communication they thought was very useful and the internet was very useful and it was going to be useful to democracy. But not for them, it was always for other people. So particularly they also, if you have the focus groups there, I was going to be useful for young people. But then the young people also said, well it's not going to be useful for those people who are interested, those middle-aged, sad political anoracs who want to look at it like me basically. So it was always useful, but useful for other people never directly themselves. The people who use it the most, and this will become as no surprise I'm sure to you, are of course the ones who contact their MPs online, the ones who read the sites, the ones who engage politically online were the ones who are politically interested already, the ones who are politically engaged already. They need to be maybe 30s to mid 40s. They need to be middle-class professionals. They're the online engaged. That sounds like again that I'm describing myself. It's sort of male middle-class professional in his 30s to early 40s. The danger that MPs felt about this was that you're simply exacerbating again the participation gaps. Unless you use the technology creatively, you're simply going to amplify the voices of those who are already prominent within the system. The last point I'd say is that the parliamentary and technological environment matters. For instance, in Australia, there's real problems with broadband in very rural areas. Now, it's quite clear that once you switch over to broadband, people do a lot more things online. They go to a lot more places. They use it for longer, not surprising there. And that matters. Let me do my very last danger of talking too long. What does all this mean? I'm still trying to puzzle after quite a long time about what all this adds up to, what's there. I think what we're entering really and what we have entered is perhaps an era of difficult democracy. I think life's getting tougher for politicians and you might say good. That's a good thing. Let's make it really tough for them. But I do have some sympathies for them. They work harder than the past. Well, certainly in the UK, they work harder than they've done in the past. They do more. They spend more time answering constituents' letters. They spend more time in the constituency. They do all sorts of things. And yet the more they do, the more we hate them, broadly speaking. What is the technology? What is that fitting in with all this? Well, out of the interviews and out of other things, I think there was a number of pressures that were emerging there that MPs talked about and felt they were under. I think it's disaggregation and acceleration that it was hard to package issues anymore. The issues were appearing all over the place. Politicians weren't quite sure where they were coming from anymore. How could they fit things together? How could they build broad policy packages? The speed of everything was quite bewildering for some of them. They used to have... The old certainties are breaking down. What can they grip onto? I've already mentioned amplification. The noise levels, just in general, email is added to that. So they're hit all over the place with this stuff. But their fear was that it was amplifying people that are already pretty advantaged. They were the ones who were making use of the technology. Unless you did something about this, you were simply going to get then the third bullet increasing fragmentation of representation. You can see that because if you're in a relatively deprived constituency, that internet access is difficult, your MP also won't be doing much with the technology. You're increasingly becoming even more of a disadvantage than the constituency next door where there's high levels of connectivity, that maybe you've got a university in there as well. People are using the technology that can access services more easily. And then also what politicians were worried about was unrealistic expectations. And this comes through in the focus groups that might say that the expectation levels are enormous and then the levels of disappointment are also enormous as well. And that there is a feeling that maybe the technology might add to that. The potential remains, I think, there, just because I don't want to finish too depressingly. So I've got to say that the potential does remain there. And Stephen Coleman has talked quite a lot from former colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute about conversational democracy. And there is some potential, I think, there to make a more continuous representation that it's not just about election periods where politicians talk to the electorate. She's one of the common complaints. That you can now have a dialogue over a longer period of time. You can have a conversation, potentially that policy makers can make themselves more informed and more aware. But equally, the public can be more informed and more aware of possibly what are the restraints and restrictions on politicians as well. The potential is there to do that. But, as I say, the hurdles are pretty huge in terms of doing that. But as I say, I'm still puzzling in part about what it all means. And I think it's a good place to stop. Thank you. Here in the United States, some politicians have been doing elaborate things on the internet for years, including use of databases for targeting. But here, I think the big driver is not constituent service with fundraising. How does the need for fundraising in the country you study compared to the massive amounts of money that politicians try to raise here? Yeah, that's a good point. I say the UK is a little halfway house, but it's not through these politician sites because they're not allowed to raise money through, especially if there's parliamentary expenses going into their sites. So they're not allowed to do online fundraising through that. So it's the parties, generally, that do that. And the UK does tend to follow, increasingly at a lower level, trying to follow that American model of trying to raise money as being one of the central aims of using, especially in election periods. But through these sorts of sites, they're not really allowed to do that. Other countries, Australia, again, there's the continental Europe, for instance, where there's state funding for parties. You don't see this at all. Funding's not at mind, not necessarily much of an issue. So you can see the way that, for instance, that's a good example of the way that political rules and systemic rules have an influence on what they do online. But the UK parties now will be looking very closely at what McCain, Obama and Clinton are doing in terms of that, because that's where they get their lessons from. So the UK is always seen as a sort of now follower to the US. One thing at the Internet and Democracy project that we've been thinking about, or at least I have lately, is essentially the methodology of understanding the internet's effect on democracy. As a researcher in the UK, what quantitative or otherwise methodologies have you seen that are useful besides the anecdotal? I suppose the first thing I should say is that we try and just use a range. Is it triangulation? Sorry. In terms of quantity, I'm not a quantity person. The people I work with, Rachel Gibson and Binal, is only the quantity people on the team. So we've used the standard quantity methodologies, the survey stuff. And there isn't, certainly in Europe, there's not a lot of quantity data on internet. And it's a real frustration. There's not much from, again, the user perspective is the wrong way to look at it. There's not much there. So we've used the standard tools. The other thing we started to get to on the Australian side is also to looking at network analysis and I'm no expert on that, but also to use hyperlink calling and those sort of things. New means of mining data. We've gone for, I guess, fairly standard methods, but we've tried to go for a range, neither quantitative nor quantitative, but a lot. What we'd really like to do, but you can never get the... In the UK it's horrendous trying to get data out of the parties or the MPs and stuff. What we'd really like to do is look at the data and the traffic on the sites and things like that, but they won't give it to us. There's no way they'll give it to us. I'm really jealous of countries like the Netherlands, that parties give them all sorts of things. Fantastic. I just love that, but UK parties won't give you anything at all. But I just think a range of methodologies is possibly the key, but I think we do need good quality, quantitative stuff is lacking in Europe. Yeah, you are next. So I wanted to thank you for this research in particular because at least here a lot of what we look at tends to be from the citizen and the voter perspective and so to actually look at what are the politicians' attitudes towards the technology that's important because it's a two-way street. What strikes me about what you've described here is that the politicians, as you would expect, look at the technology in the same way that a company would look at the technology, which is what companies would call customer relationship management. I've seen governments here call it citizen relationship management, which sounds kind of ominous. I think one of the things about it is the idea that you... I think it's reinforced by the way you're describing the kinds of technology they're creating is that it's about creating a relationship between the politicians and the individual, which is kind of... at least in the States and I know that the parties work differently in the UK, especially... you know, it's just... power here tends to be more built through associations and not by individual citizens' participation so the more that they're emphasizing individual citizens' relationships before you're creating a party electorate into these kind of atomized individuals which is probably not how the electorate sees itself either. And so to some extent I'm wondering if the interesting thing that's going to be happening is going to be more how are the politicians going to take on groups that is here in the States that got moved on and these kind of large natural groups and I don't know if there's quite as much on the local level but how are they relating to these kinds of groups of people on the web and the internet rather than individual citizens? I think you're... I'm not sure I've got a good answer for that. I think you're entirely right that a lot of the way they look at it is on that individualized, atomized relationship. I'm not sure... When we did the focus groups and we didn't do enough on good angles, I was surprised how much also the citizens tended to mirror that as well and talked in very individualistic, very... What shall we say? It was an information... If they wanted it, then it was individualized information seeking that was the driver. They didn't tend to talk in... When we did the survey work also on other projects one of the things we found is that people were less interested in the networking, the participatory angle, the meeting of the people. What they were interested in was getting hold of information themselves not with the real driver. So in some ways you could say that the question was not that far apart. It appeared from the voters. What I think in terms of responding to groups I don't think we've got anything really like move on to the same... I wonder if the politicians have incentive to keep you into business. I mean I'm thinking about it. It's the most basic governance issues. It's much more powerful for me to get all my neighbors together and say we, 10 of us, 20 of us want this thing fixed and I just sent in a message. And a site like this doesn't... Even if you've got 20 of your friends to all do it at the same time you don't get any sense that you're all doing it together. I think party bosses, for instance, party leadership like that sort of individualized relations, you can see that. You can see that in terms of particularly the Labour Party under Tony Blair would have been a classic example of this. The appeal was always not to activists and to local parties. The appeal would be to individual supporters and members. That's where they aimed at because in a way that's a way of ameliorating the power of local activists and groups and the collective power of that. So that was always the aim. And you can see that reflected also in some of the initiatives that the Labour government has taken. For instance, online petitioning. I hate the other side. Sorry, Tom Steinberg. I really don't like that online petition site. The number 10 one. What it encourages is the idea of a direct relationship between you as an individual citizen. Okay, you can network with other citizens and you get this petition. And somehow the Prime Minister or Government department Parliament doesn't appear in the picture. That's partly their own fault because they're slower responding and they're not thinking about online petitioning. But this sort of petition's model again seems to be built very much around that sort of individualised sort of model and consumerist model as well. And I think there's competing things going on. That's why I said that the real innovative MPs and they're a handful, they also talk about it. They don't just talk about the technology. They talk about their role as a sort of network. I think that's sort of interesting. So they're much more on the Stephen Coleman conversational democracy networking dialogue model. The bulk of it though seems to be this sort of consumeristic individualist model. That's the one that seems to be winning if anything. I don't remember who's any. You seem to have somewhat of an angle of sex and orientation in terms of your research. Do you believe that the English speaking world is at the forefront of using these technologies? I hear these dim rumblings that the new parliaments like Estonia and the Bass Parliament in Spain are the ones that really, you know, they're not bound by all their traditions. They think creatively about those issues. That's exactly right. It is an Anglo-Saxon-focused project partly because it's funding that. No, you're right. New parliaments and Estonia has been one of the ones, but you can see it in a UK conference because Scotland, in this project, it's written in when the parliaments was mentioned of technology and what technology can do. Underlying that was the attitude of the Scots as well is that we're not going to be Westminster. So we're not going to be Westminster and we're not going to be like the Westminster model and we can use technology to build a new politics. And I think that's entirely right. I think more interesting things could well be happening what they are happening in New York homes because they're not high bound by this culture and this tradition. Westminster is terrible. Which might give you an insight into Westminster. I did an interview with one MP and I was asking about why Westminster was so painfully slow to get anything done apart from the fact that there's about 36 committees that feel anything to do with this. He said, look, what you've got to understand about this place is that some people think that the abolition of top hacks was a radical step forward. So that explains the pace of change in this place. But you're right. Where you've got new parliaments and they're not high bound by these traditions and they can create it and they can create, you know, a technology sort of built in rather than grafted on, it's much easier. The Australian one was quite interesting though because the federal parliament in Canberra is a relatively new parliament building, the 88, something like that. So it was built sort of for the computer era, sort of, just about. But the problem there was that there was no drive to modernise parliament because they felt the building was already new and they'd already, you know, it was sort of modern anyway. Whereas in Westminster, at least there was a modernisation drive which was promising them to think about technology. So there's a sort of half-way house. But the trustee question is right, I think. New parliaments, it's sort of easier for them to do it because they can build it into the fabric rather than graft it on. If I could just ask one other question, think of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hansard Society as sort of major players. But I also get the sense that there's more of a tight-knit culture among people that study e-democracy in Britain and in the United States. It's a very small world. There's some of the organisations I've mentioned here. We're talking about a handful of individuals. So Tom Steinberg's name keeps cropping that all of my society initiatives, it's a relatively small group of people. It's the same in the academic world as well. I meet the same people over and over again. It is a small world. You can see that play down. They're all gathered around London as well. What do you make of the 10 Downing Street Twitter feed? I haven't looked at that closely. I know that Twitter first has only just emerged last year when the deputy leadership of the Labour Party campaign started using it. I'm not quite sure what to make of that yet. I think it's probably just the... At this stage it's probably just a knee-jerk. Here's the technology, let's try. Because that's often how they start. It's just something new, let's jump on this. I don't know. To me it's not very surprising that there wasn't a big political fight for the blogs because there was no intent to have political change. It's just about increasing the efficiency of existing systems and increasing the electability of the people that are writing these blogs. It's not really a dialogue. It's about people being able to present their message, maybe get some advice and consent from various activists, but why would it change anything? That would be surprising, based on this design. Except if you look in the literature. A lot of the distance between the literature and then I said this yesterday, the distance between the literature and then what's going on is enormous. Can you get all this hype about what it can do and people talking in very high level terms about democracy? I suppose to be fair actually, for instance in the UK I said after the 2001 election when turnout dropped, it was a panic basically. And people were latching on to anything there. So people did have quite, initially have quite high expectations of what technology might do, but you're right when it gets into the real world of what people are interested in. They're interested in much lower levels of aspirations, what they can do for them. Can they get some votes out of this? Is the ways of making life easier on a daily basis? All those sort of things. But it's the disjuncture, which is one of the reasons why we sat out to do some of this research, is that there's simply no empirical evidence there. There was a lot of speculation and there's a lot of high level theorising, but not much empirical evidence. There's still pretty patchy in terms of what we've got. So would you say that this means, you're not saying that the internet has limited potential, which is why you're saying that blogging, politician blogging has limited effect, or how broadly would you apply your results? Sorry, sir. Obviously it seems like the results of political blogging are pretty negative from the perspective of improving, based on your research. Nothing much really changed. Does this make you pessimistic about other kinds of technology, like the Downing Street Twitter feed or something, or you think it's just this particular... Probably it's politics that's got a change and not the technology. Intelligence can make a little bit of difference around the edges, but I said at the end there that we're entering an era, and I don't think politicians really tonight have got a grasp. They've got to relearn how they represent people. They've got to relearn how to govern or govern us. And at the moment, I don't think they know what they're doing. They're struggling and searching around the... The old certainties have gone from them, but they can't latch on to anything new. So the technologies can be a useful tool, but most of them don't really have a strategy for using them anyway. Will they make a difference in that high-level aspirational terms? No, because that would be unrealistic. I think they can contribute at a local level, for instance, and I showed people yesterday there was a guy called Tom Watson, one of the first bloggers. He didn't start it with high-level aspirations of creating a new form of democracy, but he says it's made a change to him in the way that he relates and also the feedback that he gets. So I think it's about maybe scaling down some of the expectations and then putting together all these little changes and seeing what happens, and also the indirect effects. The political world is very slow to change. If you look around, things are changing pretty massively and amazingly in some aspects. Eventually, the political sphere will have to at least play catch-up. There are lots of questions, and I have no idea now who is first and who falls inside. I'm going to jump in. I'll do the jump in. Go ahead. I just wanted to try taking the focus off the politicians, because they're not going to change and don't have much incentive to change. Can we force them to be more open, more transparent, so that citizens have better access to the information to create the MySocieties and the blog posts for them that allow the public to focus around? Yes, and that's already happening to a certain degree. I think MySocieties stuff has opened up certain things. Shall I just tell you a little downside to the MySociety type approach that you may or may not be aware of? MySocieties, through analysing the way that MPs vote and what they speak on in Parliament, and they've got all this data about how often MPs speak in Parliament and what they do and how they respond to constituents, they created, I think, league tables. Who were the best responders who weren't? All this sort of thing. It's quite funny to see MPs being hoisted by their own tar, because they like to enforce league tables on every other sector of the community. The downside to that was people started to notice that MPs were interjecting in debates with no apparent purpose, just getting up, making a little comment and sitting down. And so there's some sort of anecdotal evidence, well not anecdotal evidence, because some MPs have admitted it, that all they're doing is something to raise the profile up the tables. So you've got to be slightly careful there. But yes, I have some sympathy with MPs there as well. I do think that they make life tough for themselves, but also they've got a tough job. But yes, they're not going to do it of their own free will, necessarily. So you are very careful on not providing a specific criticism of very similar five or six hundred percent of MPs. If you are elected as an MP tomorrow in a non disputed district, what would your website look like? It would probably look like this, if I'm honest now. Because again, it goes back to incentives, doesn't it? What is your incentive to do? If your majority in the UK, for instance, is 10, 15, 20,000, and you're probably going to be elected for the next 20 or 30 years, what's your incentive to actually do an enormous amount? Okay, you can be conscientious and do things, but at the end of the day, you're going to probably prioritise still the things that you think make a difference. Now, the reason why perhaps they don't spend as much time as we might think they should on websites is that they still believe, for instance, that local newspaper coverage is far more important than having a glossy or interactive or nice website. So they'll spend their time, and this is probably what I'd do to begin with, is to spend your time getting press coverage and name recognition in the local press. Because first of all, your basic problem is that 65% of your electorate won't even know who you are. They don't know your name. So constantly for the next four years, what you've got to try and do is try and just raise your name profile and just make sure that you mobilise the people necessary to keep you being elected. So if I was being cynical, that would be what I'd do. If, on the other hand, I wanted to do something more interesting with my website then, I think I'd start thinking about the dialogue model and the interest. Whether it be blogging, I don't know. The social networking thing that the representatives have just jumped onto in the UK and Australia is sort of interesting. There's a few interesting things going on there. But it's too early to say how that's going to play out. There was an example in here that I could have shown. There's a guy called Steve Webb, appropriately named, who has been probably at the forefront of some innovative technologies. And he now has, he's on both MySpace and Facebook, and he has something like 2,300 friends, which for an MP is quite a lot. They're pretty friendless people aren't they? But he has a distinct strategy. One of the things that he's said, the reason why he's using this technology is his constituency has, I think, quite a large proportion of students. Now students, of course, tend to disappear off to other constituents. They're probably still entitled to vote in his constituency, but a lot of them don't. That's the problem. One way of keeping in touch with him, he's decided, is through Facebook. And he has now quite a large number. He claims to have over 1,000 of his own constituents, which is quite a lot, you know? But only as he got this network, he's also, he claims, consulting them online about issues and getting feedback. And he thinks that he's hitting now, especially with this younger student group, he's hitting people that wouldn't normally communicate with them, which I think is sort of interesting. But of course he's underlined it. He's driven for electoral purposes. He needs to communicate. He's not always, he's actually built his majority, so that's one of the things he's been doing, he's built part through this sort of contact model. So there's two elements to that. One is a crude electoral one, but also he does have, I think, I think he has a genuine interest in also building those sort of networks. And I think that's interesting, and it's going to be interesting to see how that, it's relatively early to see how that works. So that's something I probably want to look at as well. Hello. How are you? I'm very well. Good to see you. That's a surprise. You've looked at several countries, and would you say that of two functions, one has clearly dominated, but the question is why. One function transparency, which is what sort of the academic approach to the internet and those sort of components of the internet as a democratic tool, but the other is publicity, and particularly one-way publicity. One explanation is that obviously those who are in charge don't want to change. But is there more to it than that that's led to the publicity becoming the primary function of the internet? Maybe it goes back to this idea about the culture of politicians, and I said about it, maybe it requires a generational shift. Most politicians aren't like the world over, but the average age of a politician both in the UK and Australia is somewhere in the early 50s. What you might call here digital immigrants, if that is some of them that can use the technology at all. I think we're not going to see that sort of, what I'm saying is they still then relate to that broadcast model, that sort of publicity, the top town, the press, the way you do business is this, and it's a sort of hierarchical model. That's what they've grown up with, that's what they used to. You can see a slight shift amongst the more recently elected younger ones. The people who've used the technology before they came to Parliament, they've used it in a work context. They have a slightly different outlook on it, but it's going to be what? Maybe another 20 years before we see people who've grown up from birth with the technology who perhaps think about it in different ways. I know you've got projects here on digital natives, and I'm just struck by the, I mean, for instance, my students, the way that they use the technology compared to me, it's just so different, and I'm sure I don't understand a lot of the things that they really do as much as I might try, and I think that mindset is going to require generation. Don't you think they might adopt the institutional approach? One of the things I didn't mention here, but in the context of it is, it depends on what one Australian described to me as the churn factor. So what he said was, if you just get at each election relatively small numbers of new MPs coming in, they'll be institutionalised into practice, and that's what tends to happen. If you get a huge turnover, like we did in 97, and I think in the Australian context the last election might have made a difference as well, if you get a big turnover then you tend to get shifts in attitudes. So 97 was important in the UK because you got a whole new generation of MPs who were younger. They came to parliament with expectations about the technology. First of all they came expecting that they'd get a laptop and that they'd be able to do things and when they got there there wasn't even a plug on the wall. So they had to do something about that. So there was a generational search. It sort of depends, they can get institutionalised fairly quickly and that's the complaint of some of them, but I think if you get those churns, as it were, you can then get a job forward and a difference in approach. But the norms, cultures and rules are pretty heavy in a place like Westminster they do become like residents of the old-fashioned mental institutions which are relevant. They are ingrained with the culture and the audience is getting smaller and smaller and longer I speak the more people drift away. Are we done? I guess we'll wrap it into offline conversation. So you tell us where you're going. Thank you very much.