On Thursday there’s an event on at the US Embassy where a panel will present their thoughts on the influence of the web on the US election and, laterally, what it all might mean for the UK.

This will be the first of a flurry of online campaigning analysis as minds begin to focus on a general election at some point in the next two years.

Online campaigning is interesting for lots of different reasons: for academics it means data, the media see a rich source of scoops, and the parties see massive PR potential, if not a direct route to voters. No prizes for guessing what new media consultants see. For the electorate, online campaigning should mean having access to a sufficient amount of information on which to base informed decisions.

While all are agreed on the desirability of electioneering online, there is no agreement on what is feasible and what is worth doing. Online campaigning is still a ‘grey area’, which makes it a nightmare for the regulators - and probably the electorate - but while everything is up for grabs it also means that online campaigning is a rich source of innovation in a otherwise pretty mundane area of politics.

The event is invitation only but the FT is streaming it and has asked for questions to pose to the panelists. I’ve got a few:

• What proportion of election resources will the winning party put into its campaign?
• Can the parties genuinely strike a balance between presentation and functionality online - that is, can the parties truly offer something of value to the voter or is it all about appearances?
• In the age of the permanent campaign and the social web, does online campaigning have to stop when the polls close?
• The last time the Electoral Commission looked at regulation of campaigning online was 2003, and it concluded that there was nothing to be specifically concerned about online. Is this still the case?

I’ve formed views on these questions from research and discussions with ’stakeholders’ of online campaigning. But what are yours?

Have been thinking about analogies ahead of a presentation I’m to give on eDemocracy in the UK. And with our domestic football season coming to an end, I’ve been thinking along footballing lines and playing about with this angle…

If we think of the web or politics as having football-like leagues, then taking an interest in eDemocracy is remarkably like following a lower-league team.

Our grounds are basic and scrape by on low attendances. There’s very little in the way of pace, skill and glamor in the games. Times are often tough: sometimes there’ll be wonder goals or occasional shots at the big-time if we make cup competitions, but these occasions are few and far between. Players come and go, the team goes up and down in the league but on the whole very little changes.

Nevertheless, fans of these teams pride themselves on their tireless devotion, their commitment and their ability to recall every single minute detail about the team’s history and current performance. Other fans and outside observers respect us and feel sorry for us in equal measure. It makes us happy to be a fan of our team, but the reality is that its existence is only of passing interest and importance.

The rock we cling to is the feint prospect of promotion.

In the case of eDemocracy, promotion means joining mainstream politics, consistently attracting big-name players, bagging a lot of spectacular and well-worked goals and, crucially, attracting hundreds of thousands of new fans, so that when you are at a game and you turn around the terraces don’t feel so lonely anymore.

But how to get that promotion?

Do we need a lucky spell (like the Downing Street petitions), an industrious team (like MySociety), a star player (like Gordon Brown), a cult manager (like Professor Stephen Coleman) or an injection of cash (like WebCameron)?

And another important question is if promotion was won tomorrow would our sites, our communities, our processes all be ready for it? Remember the football teams who have found themselves in the premier leagues only to plunge back down under the demands of playing in the top flight.

Been taking a keener-than-usual interest in Canadian politics online; I’ve written an article for a Canadian journal discussing different national experiences of eDemocracy.

I didn’t write about this specific site, but I found CitizenVoices interesting. Ostensibly it’s a platform for Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, to bring young citizens together for dialogue with politicians.

Four elements caught my attention:

1. The dashboard model - I tested this approach with the Office of the Children’s Commissioner as part of the Digital Dialogues project last year. It was developed in partnership with Vohm, and brought profiles, forums, blogs, polls and an ‘Ask & Answer’ module all underpinned by Drupal. The idea is to give participants control over what functionality they use, in the interest of seeing whether their participation frequency rises or falls in comparison with sites where the functionality is pre-determined by its managers.
2. The design - thought and effort have been put into the design of CitizenVoices (produced by Plank)… that’s good. It’s also rare; very few consultation sites pay the necessary attention to layout and look and feel, which I believe has an impact on registration rates and participation frequencies. As with the Children’s Commissioner site, the core users are young people so it’s especially important to get the image right.
3. The lack of orientation - I came straight to CitizenVoices through a search and couldn’t find out the who, when or why of this site in sufficient time. This lack of transparency and instruction is a problem; easily dealt with but an unfortunate oversight.
4. The persistence of old media thinking - the site incorporates blogging but the entries come as large set-piece articles, lacking the character and brevity required by blogs. Although there’s still a place for the ’set-piece’ in politics, it doesn’t square up with the stated aim of this site, which is to appeal to younger web users. This may get sorted as the Governor General becomes more familiar with the medium, but there might not be an audience if the process takes too long.

An evaluation of the Children Commissioner’s site will be out in summer ‘08 (though you’ll need to ask the Hansard Society for a definite date). It would be cool to get one for the CitizenVoices site too.

Quite a neat article on ‘Open Innovation’ in the Summer 2008 edition of the Design Council magazine. The author, Jeff Weedman of Procter and Gamble, takes a canter through what open innovation has done for businesses.

He cites Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School who says there is a spectrum of innovation, with open innovation at one end and closed innovation at the other. Every business, says Birkinshaw, must place itself somewhere on that spectrum but not, he warns, at either extreme.

This raises the important question: many businesses and, indeed, organisations and institutions aren’t on that ‘innovation spectrum’, so how do they take that step?

The quote also serves to underline an important point about practising innovation. The point is that a business, once on the spectrum, will then need to find a locus at which it is most effective. This position will have to change over time, and businesses must regard regular reviews of their innovation strategies as essential This is not a light undertaking and businesses will naturally deal with this requirement with varying degrees of success.

I regularly talk to my clients (in public, private and civic sectors) about their approach to using digital media to facilitate, source and communicate innovation. The pictures on individual and collective levels are revealing and I’m hoping to persuade some of them to let me produce case studies I can talk about here.

Thoughts on how to do so, or about open innovation generally, would be much appreciated.

I’ve had an opportunity to - properly - go through the World e-Parliament Report, produced by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.

As I knew it would be, it is an excellent piece of work. I think that the particular value lies in the fact that it looks at a range of possible applications of ICT and covers as many Parliaments as possible.

For me, the recommendations were also an important inclusion. Everyone knows the state of play and where the problems lie, but very few know how to make decisive steps toward addressing these challenges. The Report’s recommendations are clear and achievable and it will be interesting to watch Parliaments try to enact them.

And this tracking, I think, is crucial. Which Parliaments take up the challenge? Which make the best efforts with the limited resources at their disposal? Which are innovative? Which are conservative and static? Which are lazy and isolationist? I think it would be worth taking this tracking on another level and actually setting up some awards to be given out at the Centre’s annual Conference.

I would also like to suggest:

1. A partnership or mentoring scheme whereby a high-achieving parliament is paired with a low-achieving parliament. The relationship would be mutually beneficial, with the low-achiever getting advice and being able to do some leapfrogging, and the high-achiever having the opportunity to stand back, look at itself and have a better idea of where it should go from that point onward.

2. From here - working toward the next report - I would like to see a specific set of recommendations on using ICT to facilitate citizen and stakeholder engagement. Engagement is absolutely crucial - as the Report acknowledges - and is all the more desirable and feasible in our current low-efficacy and high-technology climates. But the Report does not provide specific recommendations on improving engagement, and I feel this lets Parliaments and politicians off too lightly.

3. Lastly, another set of recommendations and level of support that I think are lacking are those on technical specifics. The Report deals with technology broadly, which is understandable because you could fill out another report of the same length with stuff on XML standards, secure data storage and basic ICT provision for committees. But based on my experience of working the Global Centre’s stakeholders, it is this sort of specific direction that many of them would thank the Centre for providing.

What do you think?

How can you keep track of what is going on in the Lords? You can read Hansard, you can watch BBC Parliament, there might be the odd article in the papers.

The Lords has been quite a closed shop, more by accident than design. Yet it is busy, bustling, important and relevant. The challenge is how to get the public to tap into that potential.The answer may be found online through blogging. This is the hypothesis of the ‘Lords of the Blog’ pilot launched by the House of Lords and the Hansard Society at www.lordsoftheblog.net.

At the end of 2007, I made some predictions about political uses of the web over the next 12 months. One was that the House of Lords would turn to blogging to encourage public awareness and participation. Of course, I was dealing on some insider info. Fundraising for ‘Lords of the Blog’ was one of my last duties at the Hansard Society. But finding the funds was no guarantee that the blog would see the light of day. The kudos for that lies with Barry Griffiths, the project coordinator, and Liz Hallam-Smith, the Lords Librarian for having the foresight to see the value in such an experiment.

I spoke to Barry on Tuesday a day after the public launch to find out the latest. He has sober ambitions for this first foray into the blogosphere by the second chamber, but was affording himself the chance to bask in a successful launch and a flurry of media and public interest. I asked him just to take a step back and explain what the goals of the exercise were:

‘The pilot currently benefits from having nine Peers who each bring their own area of expertise to the blog. Since January 2008, during the testing phase for the blog, it has been great to see the peers involved become more comfortable using the blog.

The Peers have come together from across the House to make short regular entries providing an insight into the business of the House of Lords and to talk about their own activities in and around the Chamber. Members will write and upload material and moderate user comments themselves’.

So on the paper this is an exercise 1) to inform the public, 2) to encourage the ‘right of reply’ but 3) to build up skills and capacity within the Lords. But I wanted to know how Barry sees things panning out in reality:

‘The blog will run for an initial 6 month period with the possibility of extending this deadline if there is sufficient interest from the contributing Peers and blog audience.

The contributing members have been posting content on the development site since January 2008 to get them up to speed on the nuances of blogging. The immediate goals for the project are using it as both an education and communication tool to increase public engagement with the work of the Upper House and its Members.

The group of contributing Peers will be added to once the blog goes live. Some of the original nine Peers may well stop blogging but we hope to continue to introduce new Peers to blogging in order to keep the interest of visitors to the blog’.

I think this is the right approach - iterative steps and flexibility will be key to the pilot’s success. And what of success? What will a successful ‘Lords of the Blog’ look like? Exact performance indicators are less clear but suffice to say an evaluation report will be carried out and published so that we can all learn from the exercise:

‘For the next six months the Hansard Society will evaluate the pilot, capturing data about the audience of the blog in order to assess its reach and value. This evaluation will take the form of pre- and post-engagement surveys completed by blog visitors, plus interviews with contributing members and the Lords authorities’.

I look forward to the report over time, but at the moment I’m just enjoying reading the entries and the insights they share. So good luck to all involved. So far so good!

Thinking forward, I can see three challenges facing the Hansard Society and the contributing Peers:

1. How can the blog be kept in the public eye after the initial ‘welcome’ goes cold (less than a month away, probably)?
2. How can the Peers interest be maintained to ensure regularly and engaging contributions?
3. Can the Peers be encouraged to incorporate other media to prevent the blog becoming too text heavy?

These are challenges that every new public-facing blog faces in its first months of live. But when the blog in question belongs to an institution struggling to communicate its very important role to the public at large, the stakes are all the higher and all the more worth the trouble.

They say:

“The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Inter-Parliamentary Union launched today the World e-Parliament Report 2008. The Report was prepared as part of the work of the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.

The  World e-Parliament Report 2008 represents the first effort to establish a baseline of how parliaments are using, or planning to use ICT to help them carry out their representative, lawmaking and oversight responsibilities and to connect to their constituencies. It is also intended to advance a shared knowledge base among the parliaments of the world and to promote international debate on these matters.

The Report is based on the responses and comments provided by 105 assemblies from around the world to a survey on the use of ICT in parliament conducted between July and November 2007. It also draws on experiences exchanged during the World e-Parliament Conference 2007 and relevant publicly available information”.

I say:

“An excellent and very important piece of research. Significant, because it covers all conceivable applications of ICT by parliaments across the world. Well done to Gherardo, Jeffrey and Jane for putting it together”.

The Report is available at www.ictparliament.org.

A friend of mine sent me an article by Stephen F. King in eGov Monitor. It’s a balanced, insightful review of FixMyStreet, a website produced by data-fiddlers, MySociety.

Funny coincidence, because I’d been getting increasingly pissed off by fly-tipping on my street and the failure of the local council to clear it (despite the fact that street cleaning staff pass it daily). Glasgow City Council’s own online reporting service is so very flat, form-based and practically impossible to find that my mind turned to alternatives.

FixMyStreet is one such ‘community problem reporter’ service. And I heard about another called Community Fix, offered up by Dial Media Group.

The big difference between them is in the looks department - Community Fix has a far better user interface and uses Google Maps which helps, whereas FixMyStreet is simple and functional but very brown and seems to be using quite outdated maps.

The big similarity between them is that neither service can guarantee that the problem will get fixed.

I think this is the fundamental flaw in both. Both sites have good technology going on, but they haven’t thought through the process as well as they could.

The tactic seems to be to shame council into doing something. I was on the selection panel that looked at the [successful] FixMyStreet funding application to the Ministry of Justice ‘innovations fund’, and I made the point then that a far more sustainable approach would be to make the funding dependent on MySociety partnering up with a sample of councils to test and develop not only the technology but also the service. A different point of view won out and, well, that’s where King’s article comes in.

Inspired by the article I’m running my own experiment. I’ve reported the same problem via both third-party sites and the Council’s own, and I will do my best to track the service and, crucially, if anything gets done.

Already in the time it’s taken me to type this up, I can confirm that I have received receipt emails from only two… no prizes, yes, FixMyStreet and Community Fix. Community Fix came in first, and strangely says that the Council is not only aware of the problem but is dealing with it - this is despite the fact that I’d not yet confirm the report via their link, and there was a disclaimer on the email saying that they couldn’t guarantee anything.

That reminds me - I’ve got an bunch of tyres and washing machines I need to offload.

Been thinking about if I were to design the ideal football website, how would I go about it?

What about you? What conventions would you keep? Where would you make a change?

Another shout from this blog to the Economist, this time for its special edition on technology and government.

On the whole a well-written feature which takes in a range of international case studies; the real value of which is to be found in its brevity amidst otherwise verbose analysis.

One aspect I liked was this idea of ‘government in competition’ or, more accurately, government lacking competition that would make it strive for better effectiveness and efficiencies. In the nearby blogosphere, Simon Dickson also raises this facet of the feature and goes along with its conclusions.

I also appreciated this ‘government in competition’ thesis, but was surprised that the author of the feature (or the usually very savvy editors) didn’t take it in a different direction.

These days governments face greater competition that ever - indirectly, yes, but also, importantly, in the direct sense. State governments have to compete with supranational as well as regional (or national) institutions. These regional governments within a state - like here in the UK - have to compete with one another (for example, not only to get access to the budgets but to justify them too).

If we believe the Economist - amongst others - governments have to compete with one another for citizens in this age of uber-globalisation. They also need to compete for investment from fickle businesses. Governments need to compete within themselves. When there is only so much resource to go around and the best staff have to be retained and kept engaged, it’s team vs team, division vs division and department vs department.

In this genuinely competitive climate, using the web (and other forms of ICT) to do better governance and democracy is a must for any government looking to find and maintain a competitive edge. My argument is that the lack of e-government progress in a particular country isn’t because a governments doesn’t feel the competition, it’s because they don’t know how to take it on. It’s the give-in and hide indoors approach, which we all know isn’t healthy.

You could contend that no one is likely to move their family or business to another country just on the qualification of that country’s standing in some e-government chart. Perhaps - it wouldn’t be the sole reason but read the rest of the special edition and you’ll find that its an important factor.

After all, we don’t use Amazon solely because we can buy books from it.

Oh… and congrats to Jeremy who got a name-check in the feature. See, it has all been worthwhile; where to now?