Political transparency and web 2.0

Over the past few years there have been a number of initiatives on institutional transparency – FOI legislation, expenses reporting – that together with greater administrative decentralisation have helped increase accountability in the political system.

Having said this, sleaze is making a comeback which means that we need to up our game once more to continue to enforce honesty in our political system. And with the arrival of web 2.0 we are better equipped than ever to do so.

This week I have come across a fantastic initiative from Sunlight Labs, an American organisation for the advancement of institutional transparency. It’s called LittleSis, an online application that combines facebook-like functionality with Wikipedia-like user editing.

Using LittleSis, any user can edit information in the site and profile those in power. The site focuses on 3 main factors about an individual:  Relationships (which includes Business/Government positions, other memberships, education and donation/grant recipients), Interlocks (people in common organisations), Giving (who they’ve donated to, as well as other individuals that have given to the same recipients) and the basic personal information.

The intiative has a number of challenges ahead of itself obviously, principally anyone could spread a false rumour about a public figure or organisation, but certainly it has a lot of potential to bring public accountablity to the forefront of British politics once and for all.

Web 2.0 has given us greater interaction between our politicians and the people, now applications like LittleSis could provide for a second key requirement for regenerating political life, transparency and accountability.

Hat-tip: Wikinomics

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New gateway to Labour blogging launched

It was no secret that Derek Draper was launching a new site aimed at strengthening Labour’s online army in the war of the blogs. A meeting was organised a few weeks ago by Draper for a bunch of Labour people to hear what Blue State Digital, the online strategy firm behind Obama’s online campaign, had to say about a new Labour online offensive to challenge the current Tory hegemony over the UK political blogosphere.

In principle Draper’s idea is a good one just not too original. As I have blogged before (here), the issue is that the Labour blogosphere already has too many ‘gateways’ and what it really needs is to provide one that really stands out, a Labour ‘ConservativeHome’. We have got Bloggers4Labour, LabourHome and now LabourList, all of them aiming to be a home for the netroots (and this is only after a similar site, Labour Outlook, was closed down). What this achieves it that none of them are ever going to get on their own the levels of traffic that Tim Montgomerie’s site has. If Draper wants to really create a genuine Labour netroot hub he should be talking to these other sites and propose a merger which can create a truly independent gateway. At the time of my previous post on this issue Bloggers4Labour was up for a chat on this, so there could be room for at least a discussion on this.

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Back in time with…

Brilliant idea from the developers at Google. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the company they have decided to let us take an unusual trip back in time. You remember how the internet was in January 2001? No Youtube, Facebook, September 11th, David Cameron, this blog… It is quite shocking how much the internet has changed in just ten years. Have some fun with it yourself here. Enjoy!

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Total Politics blogging guide out (for free)

If anyone is interested in reading about the state of the British blogosphere without spending any money or getting the guide for free at any of the parties’ conferences, just click here to get a pdf copy of the guide for free. Enjoy!

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Stay at home Saturday reading

Brilliant post by Charlie Beckett in defense of ‘amateur’ creativity in the face of professional journalists’ patronising attitude to the blogosphere. Essential reading.

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Friday round-up

Well the weekend is upon us. Today it’s been an extremely unproductive day. I have watched most of the Olympics Inauguration Ceremony (really really impressive), failed to finish off the methodology section of my dissertation and not much inspiration for blogging today either. But just a quick post with a couple of interesting things I found around on the internet just as an excuse to wish you all a happy weekend.

First of all this report in TechPresident on McCain’s ‘The one’ attack ad on Obama. According to a group of progressive evangelicals that has endorsed Obama for president the ad (that at first sight seems pretty ineffectual) is full of coded language for evangelicals that portrays Obama as the anti-christ. Strange to say the least, but on a second viewing you can see slight hints I guess (not a religious man myself so can’t really tell if it’s emotionally compelling). The video is below for you to judge.

And the second interesting piece of infomation is this online version of the book ‘Rebooting America’. A compilation of short essays on the potential a relationship between web 2.0 and government could have for transparency, efficiency, etc… I just got a copy of the book delivered to me by Amazon and hopefully I’ll get to read it soon and definitely will put  the review out here when I’m finished with it.

Nothing else, happy weekend! and I leave you with ‘The one’…

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The government and web 2.0

I just found out through Dizzy that No. 10 plans to launch a TV channel. It certainly does no harm if it helps to provide greater transparency, although I presume it won’t be too much fun to watch either. But the ‘funny’ thing Dizzy has found out is that their announcement wasn’t followed by taking precautions from the inevitable online prank. And a prank is exactly what happened, have a look at this…

This isn’t the first cock-up by the government’s web 2.0 operation. As Guido has embarrasingly noted in his blog, the widely publicised Ask the PM a question YouTube campaign never actually happened. Both of these msitakes are avoidable and embarrasingly amateurish. Which is shocking seeing how the open source government work under Tom Watson is looking great and the UK is becoming a much talked about world vanguardist in the open government field.

UPDATE: LabourMatters tells me that the PM did actually answer the question, it simply was delayed for 10 days. My mistake there.

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Labour and web 2.0- a new home for the netroots

I have blogged before (here and here) about the need for Labour to promote its web 2.0 operation more agressively. Although the UK is still well behind the US in terms of online campaigning, eventually political internet mobilisation will become crucial here as well.

Yesterday I came across Labour Outlook, a nice looking site that aims at becoming a meeting point for Labour activists across the net. With this new addition the Labour netroots have currently three different online hubs to participate in partisan discussions, these are Bloggers4Labour, LabourHome and Labour Outlook. Now here goes a proposal for Labour netroots to think about, how would everyone feel if at least LabourHome and Labour Outlook were to merge into one single site? I know, we all are left wing activists, and as such we like pluralism of views. But the reality is that the netroots would be better off having one single meeting point from where to coordiante netroot mobilisation, etc. If one of the two sites was to expand to include a news feeder (Labour Outlook’s newslink is really good for that), a comment section for netroots’ input, as well as a column section (both LabourHome and Outlook’s are pretty good at it) for interaction between party officials and the netroots, we could find ourselves with a superior new online home than ConservativeHome is for the Tories.

My intention isn’t to reduce the range of voices out there, but rather to provide all of us in the blogosphere with a point of reference to coordinate action more effectively. So there goes my thoughts on improving Labour’s netroots operation.

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Campus Party kicks off in Spain

The world’s annual biggest LAN party, Campus Party, is kicking off in Valencia tomorrow. This 12th edition is the biggest yet with more than 8,000 participants.

The Campus Party was created by networked groups of computer science sudents across Spain. You can read the history of the gathering here. A great deal of people that attend are teenagers dying to blow their heads off playing computer games and exchanging movies, music and other stuff (yes, porn is part of that ‘other stuff’). But the real hidden gem is the gathering of the most gifted computer geeks in the country that work together in thousands of open source projects from Linux to Emule.

The Campus Party has become so massive that it has expanded to include gatherings also in Brazil and Colombia. And is always good to see the number of sponsors growing, especially the inclusion of the Spanish Ministry of Industry.

You can follow the Party’s official blog here (I think only in Spanish thoug).

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Prescott on Brown

John Prescott has written a post for LabourHome today declaring his support for Gordon Brown to stay on as leader.

Two important points to be made about this:

1) As the blogosphere’s influence in the UK political world grows exponentially, it’s essential for Labour to catch up with the Tories more developed web 2.0 operation. LabourHome has changed owners and aims at becoming the progressives grassroots’ meeting point in the blogosphere, similar to what ConservativeHome is for right wingers. Having more high profile contributors, like the former Deputy PM, will help towards achieving that status. Moreover, it will be a good way for party leaders to check the grassroots mood on plenty of issues and viceversa, for grassroots to transmit their ideas up the hierarchy to party bosses.

2) A second point to be made, is that I completely agree with Prescott (my actual argument here). Frankly, his post isn’t too illuminating. It simply serves its purpose of transmitting his support for Brown for everyone to see. But he’s right, Labour can’t change leaders again without calling a snap election which they will most certainly lose. So let’s rally behind Brown, at once and not half-heartedly, and more importantly let’s get a MESSAGE to transmit to the electorate (I will elaborate on this point soon by the way).

Ok dokey, enough for now, back to my dissertation…

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