Centre for Digital Citizenship

The CdC has launched a new prototype tool called PolicyCommons — http://policycommons.leeds.ac.uk/.

There is a need to help users make sense of the range of publicly-expressed opinions about government policies. We are developing PolicyCommons to address this need.

PolicyCommons will generate visual summaries of public statements about policies being proposed by governments. In particular, the tool will display arguments for and against policy-proposals as browsable debate maps.

Users will be able to browse these debate maps and follow links from the visual summaries of the arguments back to the original policy documents.

Ultimately, the aim of PolicyCommons is to support greater participation in the democratic process, as well as to improve the openness and accountability of the democratic process.

PolicyCommons is being developed as a tool in the EU-funded IMPACT project, where the University of Leeds, represented by the CdC, is a work-package leader.

The IMPACT project is researching and developing a set of tools for facilitating online, public deliberation of policies.  These tools include:

• a tool for reconstructing arguments from sources distributed on the Internet
• a tool for modelling the legal effects of policies
• a tool for soliciting public opinion about policies
• a tool for visualising and tracking the arguments for and against policies (PolicyCommons)

PolicyCommons is based on the open source Cohere project being developed by the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. The PolicyCommons application itself is a “fork” of the Cohere code and is available on the Github code repository — https://github.com/cdc-leeds/PolicyCommons.

Over the next months of the project, we will extend the basic functionality of the Cohere platform to create the PolicyCommons tool that meets the particular requirements of the IMPACT project.

So…watch this space!

The CdC was represented at the Third International Conference on eParticipation (ePart2011) held in Delft, the Netherlands.

Neil Benn and Ann Macintosh presented their paper entitled “Argument Visualization for eParticipation: Towards a Research Agenda and Prototype Tool”. The paper describes CdC’s ongoing research on the EU-funded IMPACT project.

Click here to download the paper from the conference proceedings website.

Click here to view the presentation on Slideshare.

A recent report of the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press found that 8% of American adults who use the internet are Twitter users. This is the first survey reading from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that exclusively examines Twitter users, asking the straightforward question: “Do you use Twitter?”

8% of the American online population is still not as many people as participate in democratic life everyday, but the most interesting finding is that twitter is particularly popular with young adults, minorities, and those who live in cities (raising questions about the relationship between the digital divide and social divides).

Most interesting, ‘observations related to users’ personal or professional lives are the most popular types of updates, while location-based tweets and links to videos are the least commonly mentioned’. This is a striking finding different from another study which identified that over 85% of post come from media sources, simply re-twitted by users (See Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon work below).

Report main findings

On the digital divide:

• African-Americans and Latinos – Minority internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users.
• Urbanites – Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers.

On types of posting:

• 72% of Twitter users say that they post updates related to their personal life, activities or interests.
• 62% of those we queried said they post updates related to their work life, activities or interests.
• 55% of these Twitter users share links to news stories. One in ten (12%) do this at least once a day.
• 54% of these Twitter users say they post humorous or philosophical observations about life in general
• 53% of these Twitter users use Twitter to retweet material posted by others

Links:

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Twitter-Update-2010/Findings/Overview.aspx

http://snacda.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/what-is-twitter-a-social-network-or-a-news-media/

The Centre for Digital Citizenship, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

At their best, democracies should be noisy, reverberating with pluralistic voices, competing explanations, diverse values, ever-broader sources of information and illumination, all competing to fill the public sphere with their calls to attention and urgent demands to make a difference.

But more than just noise. To be truly effective, democracy requires structure, so that speaking can lead to hearing; so that articulations of unexpected and unwanted views are not drowned out by the blindingly obvious; so that the nuance of qualification is not crushed by the blunt force of dogma; so that the voices of the marginalised, neglected and unconfident are allowed room to emerge and impress; so that the ratio between volume and meaning can favour the latter. In short, democracies should be noisy, but not cacophonous. Out of the incessant buzz of storytelling and debate, discernible outcomes must transpire.

Contemporary democracies are too often characterised by the frustrating vacuity of the angry headline, the over-dramatised incident, the denunciating mob and a prevailing mood of cynical resignation. From the US healthcare reform debate to the public furore surrounding EU deficit controls, the prospect of effective civic reflection has all too frequently been abandoned in favour of a carnival of unrestrained uproar or virulence. All of this has had troubling consequences for the practice of citizenship. Firstly, when politics is made to seem either fraudulent or futile, the most likely public response is to disengage. Secondly, even when citizens do feel motivated to engage with public affairs, there is a growing gap between the long-term character of socio-political problems and the short-term pressures that tend to dominate the political agenda. This leads too often to a public discourse framed by the pragmatic priorities of immediacy, with both politicians and journalists strategising in ways that ignore underlying problems and durable consequences. Thirdly, as the media have come to be characterised by intensified competition for public attention, their messages have tended to become increasingly consumed by sensationalism (in the case of mainstream, offline journalism) and extremism (in the case of online blogging and debate). None of this looks good for the prospects of a democratic public sphere, within which citizens ought to be free to engage in an informed, balanced, meaningful and consequential consideration of important public issues.

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This week I’ve been at a very good conference on ‘Deliberative and Participatory Democracy in the UK and Ireland’ organized by the PSA’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group.

My paper focused on e-participation policy and the design and evaluation of local e-participation projects. I contrasted two general approaches. The first is technical, based on finding out ‘what works’ and identifying the ‘right tools for the job’. The objective here is to determine what software ‘tools’ or ‘solutions’ prove most effective by testing and objectively evaluating them within short-term pilot projects. This approach assumes there is only a small group involved in designing, developing, and evaluating projects and that these actors share a definite idea of what project objectives should be and what success looks like. The second approach, typical in more innovative e-participation projects at local level, involves the participation of various stakeholders in design and is necessarily more communicative and relational. Here the goals being pursued within projects are more contested, dynamic, and open to negotiation among stakeholders. Projects are not limited to the technical question (‘what’s the right tool for the job?’), but also involve the practical question (‘what should be done?’). Indeed, in this view, reasonable agreement on project objectives and a shared commitment to them among different relevant stakeholders is an important part of what counts as success.