 Mae'r ystyried rhoi'r Gymru o'r Minnesotr, ac yn parhwyr i'r cyfnoddau o'r cyfnoddau. Fy oedd yr Amhericaid yn gymryd yn gwybod o'r cyfnoddau. Mae'r Ucaid yn ystod i'r cyfnoddau a'r cyfnoddau a'r cyfnoddau. Mae'r cyfnoddau a'r cyfnoddau o'r cyfnoddau o'r cyfnoddau i gyd yn cyfnoddau. Fa yma, i dd料 o ymwneud gynhyrchu, dlu'r panlwydwyr. I gyrffreiddol gan cymryd, a phryddu allan o'r pethau i ddweud yr hwn yn hyn o gael'r cwmifarau fitrath i ddweud, ac mae'r cwmifarwyr goingfysg fel Nielson o'r 12-pointu barod yn gweld i'r unig i ni'n ymddangos i ddonewch ien nhw'n bryddiad ar hoffodol a phryddu,' a byddai'n gwneud ymdweud. maen nhw'n... Benchur rwyf wedi cael ei wneud o'i gweinwch ar ac yn ymwneud. Hefyd wedi cael ei wneud y profesi a llwyddyn nhw'n harfodol yno. Mae'n angen yma. A rydych yn cymryddiacker o'r pryd. Felly byddwch erbyn cael i fod yn cael'i amgaeon ac yn ymwneud yn cael wirgofyn cymaint. Felly yma'r ffordd. Felly byddwch yw'n gweithio... maen nhw yma? Rockabodd. Felly efallai piolaid. Rwy'n gweithio yma, If not, I've got a room full of people I'm sure who can run for a couple of minutes, so hopefully we'll get a little bit of it. This is Nicholas Sarkozy. What you could do, you could stick him on the dance floor, put different tracks on, changes moves, and France became completely obsessed with this. Disco Sarkozy. It's well worth checking out properly, because the actual moves are really funny. How do I get my slides back up on here? Oh, it has come. It has come. Hopefully that was worth seeing. My main point about that, there have been lots of funny things like that in campaigns, and people have made these days apps and online films. The thing that I found most interesting about that one, apart from the dance moves, is the Sarkozy campaign, it's quite satirical because he was going after the youth vote, and he got a lot of flack for not doing it properly and being kind of all youth and not getting it quite right like politicians tend to do. That was something really satirising that, but it was made by his own campaign group, so it became hugely popular, and at the end of it they got the mainly young audience to sign up to an email list and were getting messages from his own campaign. In the UK every election that comes round is always the media looks at the use of the internet and says this time it's going to be the internet election or whatever, but I'm sure this audience will have noticed that senior politicians in the UK aren't actually very good at using it, and it tends to, the reporting after it always says it hasn't really gone off properly and people haven't used it again, it's been a damp squib. So I've lost my notes again on here. Just bear with me one second. But in fact what it tends to show in the UK is that the use is more people looking at official sites, people getting information. About 25% of people at the last general election looked at an official party source of election information and nearly half looked at a non-official. Is that a damp squib? Kind of, but it also means that gradually half of us are looking online for election stuff, and this is one of the kind of Disco-Sarco type stuff that's happened in the UK. Crouching Tony, Hidden Hague, this is the kind of stuff that people tend to remember rather than the candidate information. There's a serious point about the funny stuff actually, which is that you have to do what becomes viral and what works. E transparency, the accountability piece, the internet is fantastic at that kind of thing because you can crowdsource information and get different people looking at what's happening, putting it online and accessing it from anywhere. One of the good UK examples, my society, which many of you will have heard of has done a lot of work in this area. One of the best sites in terms of information about democracy is they work for you where you can access information about your elected representatives, sign up and it will then just use your postcode, you don't need to know in advance who they even are, and then it will push you information by email whenever they stand up in Parliament or do anything and it will send you what they said. It's quite interesting because you might think you know what the main interests of your MP are, but you'll find you don't necessarily know until you get their speeches popping into your inbox. In countries where democracy is less established or even non-democracies, stuff like this can be even more powerful. There's a site that started in India, ipaidabribe.com, which uses the power of the internet in a really powerful way, where anyone, and a safe way I guess as well, because anyone who has paid a bribe or something they shouldn't have paid a bribe for can record it and say when and where they had to do it and how much they had to pay, but they don't have to say exactly who the official was or who they are so there's no payback. It's a great website. I don't know if you can see it properly up there. Bribe asked for vehicle registration, bribe for police verification, asking bribe for attestation, paid bribe to an officer at village office, and all the little details come up, and then there's bribe analytics data and a running total of the amount of bribes. 225.96 cr, which is crore, which is an Asian numbering system, it means 10 million, so that's 2 billion rupees so far, bribes recorded. Evoting is a bit of an issue on its own, which tends to really polarise people. One of the reasons people get interested can the internet or digital technologies be used for that part of the democratic system actually voting itself. Would that maybe increase turnout? Would it make it easier for people who are going to do it anyway, that kind of thing. It has its fans and there's a lot of technology being developed, but then it has a lot of people also extremely worried about could this actually be a less secure way, a less private way, and a lot of the early studies so far show that it doesn't actually seem to increase turnout that much. Disengagement is called apathy, but it's more disengagement, it's not so much that people can't be bothered to vote because there aren't convenient ways to do it, it's because they don't want to vote. Having said all that, it's not a topic that's going away and there's the Speaker of the House of Commons at the moment has set up something called the Commission on Digital Democracy, which has considered a lot of these issues and is going to look at e-voting in the autumn, so if this is an area you're interested in, you should take a look at their website and get involved in that discussion. It's going to be an influential policy paper. Local e-government is the piece where once people are elected and they do stuff, are they using technology properly to serve the citizen, to which the answer has generally been no in the last decade or so. It's getting a little bit better. In central government they've brought together a lot of the diverse online services now under one team, under one model, Gov UK. Have we heard of that website? It's much more usable than the old online stuff, more user-centred, but the problem now really, I guess, with the back-end stuff, is all of government doing the technology properly in their own bit and feeding it in properly to the front-end bit. Again, the answer is probably no at the moment. There's also tensions, government's a huge, expensive thing and some departments in particular, the ones that are really huge and handle huge amounts of money, the financial departments, the benefits, tend to really resist feeding into the Gov UK kind of concept of nice, easy front-ends, so there's kind of battles being fought there. With local councils, again, huge area, one thing that I found out about recently that I thought was really interesting and kind of captured something interesting about the potential technology here to be used in a good way, something that the West Yorkshire Fire Service is doing in Sheffield with a group of universities. What they're doing is they're using masses of sources of data, I guess most of it open data, to predict where fires are going to happen and model responses, so they're using large-scale simulation, they're using geographical data, demographic data, behavioural data, times of year, times of day, millions of different sources, so obviously they've done stuff like this before, in planning any public service you'd be thinking about peak times or whatever. I thought this was an interesting point, though, about the new potential given more and more sources of data and more and more complex technologies. Potentially services will be really quite tech-driven, in a sense, and again, are they setting up for it properly? Are they doing it properly? I guess you could think that was quite a minority report as well, that sort of predicting when things are going to happen. But it's all about motivation and accountability. If it's done by a bunch of people spending public money to serve the public, then it's going to be worth doing in that way. I might skip through a few of these, because I'm running out of time. I think I might mention the Movimenti sinque stelle, or however you say, the five-star movement in English. Do we have anyone from Italy in here? Maybe you can say a bit about it when we go to question. Is this something that you're interested in, the five-star movement? Yes. A lot of their policy-making and decision-making is crowd-sourced online, I guess we'd call it. It's a response partly to the particular Italian situation of politics being perceived as and perhaps being extremely corrupt. People reckon that brains are thinking, how can we actually make a system where decisions are made without corporate influence? The answer is, we don't let any politicians make any decision. So they create these online platforms. This is the guy who is in charge of it, Bepe Grillo. He's a comedian. But obviously not just a comedian. He's in quite strong control, so although it's quite decentralised, there is often tensions about, can you run something completely decentralised, or do you have to have that kind of central control? But this isn't a small thing. This isn't a wacky thing. In the recent European Parliament elections, they won 21% of the vote. They won 26% of the vote that allows Italian general election. I mean, they're huge basically. They're a real political force in Italy. They're not the first part. They're not actually government, national government, but they have huge representation at every level. They have mayors, they have regional councils, and they make their policy completely online. Yeah, we're through to this bit. A couple of the problems. What are the problems with all this kind of stuff? Direct democracy is not without its problems. It's a lot of the online models or digital models, more direct participation, because that's in a sense what the internet is good at doing. There can be problems with that. One is representation issue. Are the group of people that will come online and participate, representative of a whole nation, are you guys a cross-section of UK society to make decisions? It's not just you guys these days that are online, obviously. But these are serious, probably the biggest problem, I guess in some ways, with direct democracy. You want democracies for everyone, including the vulnerable, the voiceless, the people that don't or can't participate in anything. So an election is about the best way to sort of, it's not all the time, but to feed that mechanism into democracy. Direct democracy circumvents that all the time. The tumbleweed tantrums and trolls is just about the problems with online debate. Those are just three of many potential issues that you come up with if you try and do something serious and meaningful online and debate issues. What the internet tends to be is a catalyst. You need to get momentum. You need to have something that works in the first place. You need to capture an issue that people are interested in the first place. So with the five-star movement, people are fed up with corruption. With anything that really takes off, even think about this ice bucket challenge, which is going on at the moment, which is possibly one of the most successful online campaigns. How come? How has that happened that almost everyone's heard of it? Loads of people have done it. Everyone's been trying to spark viral campaigns. What it's done is it's captured a perfect grouping of things. It's done something funny. It's done something where people involve their friends and social networks. And it's tapped into people's existing desire to give a little bit of money to a good cause kind of thing. So that's the clever bit. It's not the internet. I don't think it's not a country in itself. It won't come in and revolutionise and make society good. But if you guys can think about how it can make things better and angle your work a little bit in that direction, and get involved in democracy, then that's the way to think about it. I did have more ideas. I mentioned the meet-up as well. If you're interested in talking more and finding out more, come at half past eight to the workshop area. And we'll have a further chat. But has anyone had any immediate questions or comments or stuff I haven't raised that you were hoping that I would talk about? Thank you. So if we are left with Sarko Disco as a future of voting and whatever, the democracy is going to end pretty soon. I mean, if you're not viral, you're not getting elected, it's kind of, we're losing the point. Is there any hope? That's a profound question. It's to do with what people want and find fun, isn't it? The Sarko Disco is not the whole of French democracy or the whole campaign. This was a successful use of digital tools for that piece of the democratic process, which is a necessary piece. You need to campaign. You need to, these days, I guess, capture an audience and then tell it, hopefully, your policy message. That got people onto the email list. The young people became Sarko Noughts, I think they were called. And then the campaign sent them some messages, which hopefully were a bit more serious than that. Is there any hope? Not sure. Any other? Yeah. Can you, sorry, can you wait for the mic? Or do they need to? Or shall I just repeat what he says? Hello. Oh, God, that's loud. So digital democracy gets thrown around as a term quite a lot. But obviously as we move into a more and more digital world, one of the things that keeps getting mentioned at the Digital Democracy Commission that you mentioned is that actually what they're talking about is not digital democracy, it's just democracy in the world that we're moving into. So is it necessarily a thing, or is it just a reinvention of the evolution of the whole system? That's a complaint. No, no, not a complaint. I quite like them just to talk about democracy in some ways, because I think the bigger problem for me is engaging with democracy, understanding of democracy. There isn't really such a thing separately to me as digital democracy. There's democracy, there's now the digital world. There's good and bad ways then, or different people can use. And so I'm interested in that area, but no, only if it can improve democracy, but ultimately, it's important to focus on what is our democracy, how can it work better? Something like the Scottish independence vote, that's a nice democratic question. Hi. Do you think elections and political parties are something that need to exist in digital democracy? Do you think we could have purely crowd-controlled voting on issues? I mean, are parties something that might disappear in the future? Could we simply have people putting forward votes and ideas and formulating via transparency voting on the government themselves? I think, I doubt somehow for a whole nation. I think there are spaces within a democracy for perhaps larger and larger areas of decision to work like that. Gradually, as people develop the tools to do it well so that minorities' views aren't overlooked. But all the time, I think there will probably have to be an underlying accountability of the bigger area in a sense. I mean, budget is another issue. There are quite interesting exercise in participatory budgeting, which basically means that an authority gives a chunk of money and then gives a mechanism for people themselves to decide how that's spent. So essentially that's what government is really deciding how to spend money. And sometimes quite interesting things happen and things happen differently to when a government of any kind, even if it's elected, would decide how to spend that money. But I do think democracy is necessary for, I suppose, freedom. If you have any bunch of people, EMS is quite an interesting experiment in organising staff collaboratively. But you do need, I think you always need a system which knows what's going on and a way of volunteering and discussing and an election seems to me the best way to work out who ultimately is in control. Because any other way that I've heard about is not better. I don't know if that answers any of your questions. I think probably partly is what I'm saying. Yeah. Following up on that one, because it originally sounded idyllic to me, but when I thought more about that, you're going to have a lot of people who will just vote like David Beckham votes or whatever. You won't necessarily... You can't change people, unfortunately. Exactly. You won't necessarily have better thinking or engagement even if you made the voting compulsory. Depending on what I mean by better. They're just going to follow public figures who will effectively become politicians. What's right for a nation isn't necessarily what one personally thinks is right. I guess there is such a thing as right and wrong and it goes to really profound questions like that. I think it just comes to me, comes down to a practical level, which is I think you've got to have a system of government and a form of democracy is the best system compared to all the other ones. Church is old. There are problems, many problems with democracy and that's one of them is what you've just described. Not everyone has a deep understanding of issues and makes wise choices and all the rest of it. But, unfortunately, that's life. We were focusing mostly on elections here but do you have any good examples of people actually using internet and whatever to show people you elected me. That's what I've done for you. That's my accountability because everyone wants to get there but once they get there being accountable that's a whole different story. Well accountability is one thing. Politicians telling you what they've done. A politician will always tell you what they've done is good and what they said they do and that kind of stuff and that's natural. You can say that's terrible. We would all do that in a sense about talking about our own. The way the internet is good for accountability is much more though other people finding stuff out. A group of people look comparing manifesto promises with what has happened, that kind of stuff. The internet is great for that kind of stuff. That's where the accountability comes from bottom up. All the top needs to do is let that happen. Make sure freedom of speech, the basic freedoms which we do have basically compared to most other countries. Just curious about what you thought about the interaction with media in this because obviously a lot of people are educated by the media. So the media was knobbled by corporations and the media can influence what the voters would do. Do you think there's a greater chance of lobbyists and media being under corrupt and subvert the democratic system? Well speaking as a journalist I mean whenever I hear the media the media includes everything from the sun to corporate-owned outlets to newspapers and outlets that are more serious to BBC which is funded to be neutral and small at these days. It's a very diverse thing. There is lots of good stuff and lots of good journalism and there is an element of corporate influence. One of the points I'd always made there is that these are important issues to think about but these are issues that exist in every nation and they are worse in non-democratic nations. Corporate influence in somewhere like Russia there's no separation between the companies and the people around the country in countries like that because there's no kind of people mechanism. In this country in democracies corporate influence is something we need to be careful about watch out for definitely. We have more of the tools to do it and we need to do it. The answer isn't to attack democracy in my view. Just to pick up a few things that were mentioned and I'll be very brief. You made this comment we won't have better thinking and that's something worth thinking about the statement. To me it's not that clear and what you said earlier the internet-connected crowd is very good at information gathering I think we will be better at collecting information and then making that available to people who want to inform themselves and that is something where we can already see differences to previous decades. Was that a question? 30 talk again now. Then we applaud. Let's carry on talking. There's an interest if you've got things that you wanted to raise or if you want to come talk. There's James here running for parliament on policies that will be partly selected online. There's other people at EMF who are some really leading people in this field and we're going to try and get them together at 8.30 in the workshop space. Come and carry on. I think you can bring a beer as well. We're not going to stop you. See you later.