SimonWaldman.net

At the time of typing, around 1.1m people have signed the petition on the number 10 site to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy. Now is this

a) A huge embarrassment for the government
or
b) A fantastic example of digital democracy in action?

Most media coverage so far is voting heavily for a) - or as the Indy says: ‘what began as a worthy exercise in openness has become something with the ability to cause embarrassment’.

Hardly a surprise. The whole structure of a petition system is going to result in ‘embarrassment’ - given that every petition is likely to be a protest about something the government has done or is about to do. Petitions saying: ‘we think everything you’re doing is top notch so just go right on ahead’ tend to be quite thin on the ground. Digitally or otherwise.

What this system does give, though - or at least appears to give - is give a pretty strong sense of the proportionality of issues; as you can see if you take the top five issues today and see the number of signatures (in brackets)

> Road tax (1.1m)
> Scrap inheritance tax (46,000)
> Repeal the hunting act (24,000)
> Scrap the introduction of ID cards (20,780)
> Reduce the classified period for census data to 70 years (19,000)

As you might imagine, it pretty quickly starts to fall away after that. By the time you’re down to the petition to : Instruct the Civil Aviation Authority to permit Single Pilot Public Transport Operation up to age 65 subject to a valid medical as lobbied for by no lesser authority than Rotorhub - the hub of the helicopter industry. there are only 80 names.

But here’s some questions and observations..

* Now that the road tax issue has made it to 1.1m does it mean that nothing with less than, say 750K is really going to register as a major issue. In fact on a broader note - does this all just boil political debate down to numbers…perhaps with weighting depending on the amount of the country that is affected and the previous history of co-ordinated lobbying on a subject.

* Any major public revolt against ID cards seems pretty unlikely. If this audience can’t get excited about it…then who will?

* Ditto hunters - come on chaps..you’ve been completely outflanked - not only by the urban drivers, by the anti-inheritance gang.

* Given the furore up and down the country about hospital closures, it’s remarkable/regrettable that there has been no co-ordinated campaign, similar to the roads one. The most prominent is about the closure of the Royal Surrey Hospital (a complete outrage, by the way - latest signatory: S. Waldman).

The BBC asks today, ‘Will e-petitions change anything?’. The honest answer is we just can’t tell yet (fine, but that doesn’t fill 800 words). I hope that an academic somewhere is going to track all of these petitions over a period of 12 - 18 months and then assess the impact they have. Both in terms of affecting media coverage (the roads story lead the Today programme today) and ultimately in terms of policy.

In the meantime, I think this is working out quite nicely. As experiments in digital democracy go (and I’m still not quite sure what that means - but it’s all moved on from MPs having websites) it’s pretty remarkable. It also allows for a much more open flow of criticism on the government’s own site, than, say, many media owners allow about themselves on their own sites.

I think the next step is for them to have an online template for ‘a national debate’, so the next time some waffling commentator or politician says ‘we need to have a national debate’ about this…someone can just press a button, and off we go.

Anyway, (thank God) it’s not all entirely serious. My favourite one is to replace the national anthem with Gold by Spandau Ballet. Vote now, people. If we all pull together, it could be in place by the 2012 Olympics.