How epetitions work (from government site)

There are a few provisos: the petition has to be approved (by the relevant department) and the petition can’t relate to appointments - presumably to avoid things like the ‘sack Gordon Brown’ petition which gained lots of names during the last governments attempts at digital democracy. There are also a few rules about joke petitions, and the slightly catch all “the issue is not the responsibility of the government”.

As someone who does a lot of online campaigning, and has an interest in hacking together ideas for running online petitions, this is potentially really exciting.

But, there are a couple of issues:

1. It’s a closed system. This is a massive issue. Charities and other organisations rely on online activism to recruit new members to their lists and encourage them to take a more active role in their campaigns (and yes, to fundraise from – but fundraising is activism too – see how the Obama campaign publicised it’s large number of donations as committed support).

   Take for instance a hypothetical example: a small campaigning organisation launches a campaign for the UK government to do something about a UK company supporting a dictator. The petition captures the public imagination, hundreds of thousands of people sign the petition. It has it’s day in parliament, but then the campaign moves out of the public eye. The small campaigning organisation can’t contact the petition signers to ask for help in moving the campaign forward.

   One of the big criticisms of online campaigning is that it’s low value ‘clicktavism‘, but if you have no way of capturing the details of the people who sign your petition, how can you get in touch with them and encourage them to be more involved, have tea with their MP and do some high-effort campaigning? Online petitions are often seen as the first step in engaging people with issues, and getting them more interested in politics.

   This leads me to think that a lot of campaigning organisations will ignore the system, and instead it will be used by the likes of the Sun to run campaigns like ‘Lets have the Red Arrows at the Olympics’.

   Worse still, it seems that newspapers like the Daily Mail are intent on using the petition system to launch campaigns like bringing back the death penalty. Given the current structure of the e-petition system it actually favours tabloid campaigns, since they have high circulations and don’t have to think about engaging in long term campaign work.

2. It doesn’t tackle the big issue of how MPs respond to online campaigning. There is a massive variance in how MPs respond to being lobbied online. Some ignore email completely, others respond just to individual emails, and a few more respond to identical emails in the same way they would to letters. Recently a number of MPs have been very vocal in their opposition to online email petitions.

   Personally I believe that as our elected representatives, MPs have a duty to respond to their constituents, but at the same time appreciate that trawling through a lot of emails that are all the same might tax the resources of the average constituency office, and cause the kind of annoyance that can alienate MPs from otherwise worthy campaigns.

A proper online petition system would enable campaigners to do the things they need to do to work effectively, and at the same time give the politicians reasonable ways to gauge opinion and thus hopefully respond.

So how could it be done better?

• Involve civil society: Involving the people who write the software that campaigning organisations use would be a good start. The e-petition system was written by a civil servant department bizarrely named ‘Skunkworks’ for £82,000.
• Build out the e-petition system as an API - an ‘API’ allows other pieces of software to access a system – twitter uses this very effectively to allow all the tools like tweedeck and hootsuite to send tweets. Organisations could feature the petitions on their websites and recruit activists to their own email and supporter databases at the same time.
• Create a set of guidelines / protocols for lobbying MPs, ministers and departments and for people wanting to lobby them:

  It could be as simple as specifying something in the subject line of an email e.g. PETITION_mycampaigntitle for identical emails, and
  PERSONALQUERY_mycampaigntitle for individually-written emails. Or perhaps sending an MP a daily / weekly email informing them the number of constituents who have signed a particular petition, and inviting them to respond  (essentially taking over the task of managing the petition).

  This is a two way process: for it to work politicians would have to agree to respond if the ‘rules of engagement’ are met, and online campaigners would need to respect the rules.

• Give campaign targets a platform to reply on – if it would encourage reluctant MPs to engage with online campaigning it would be worth offering the opportunity to put their views across.

In today’s modern world we carry out more and more of our daily activities online, banking, paying bills, buying insurance, shopping etc. It seems that providing the option to engage properly with politicians on the web is long overdue.

Thoughts? disagree with me completely? leave comments below!

*I’ve been fairly liberal in my definition of an infographic. Generally a picture that depicts some sort of data.

1. XKCD online communities map

This infographic compares the relative sizes of all the various social media sites, based on their user size and influence. By using a geographic context “Sea of Opinions” “Gulf of China” and “Plains of awkwardly public family interactions” the author is able to convey opinion alongside facts. By comparing things like spoken language, email and SMS it also gives a very effective idea of the bigness of social media.
Also goes to show that an effective infographic can be a simple line drawing.

XKCD online communities map

XKCD also did a radiation chart where you can compare the dose of radiation you get from standing next Fukushima nuclear plant to having a chest X-ray.

2. The History of Digg (and others)

There are lots and lots of vertical skyscraper infographics – they tend to tell a story in the style of a timeline which you scroll through vertically, which makes sense as most web users have the ability to scroll up and down rather than side to side. They usually contain a narrative story illustrated with various facts and figures.

This one from online schools charts the history of the online news site Digg.

History of Digg

See also the history of Rick Rolling which includes the factoid that Pete Waterman only earned $15 in royalties from 150 million views of “Never gonna give you up”.

3. Left versus right wing

This is a big and hugely complicated graphic which manages to convey a lot of information without looking overly messy. By tradition most internet users tend to skim read rather than digest every bit of information you give them, so this design combines headline facts with symmetry to provide an easy way to compare and contrast the ideological differences between left and right.

Information is beautiful - Left / Right wing graphic

Lots more infographics available at Information is Beautiful or buy the book.

4. Greenpeace EfficienCity

An animated infographic from Greenpeace, which allows you to explore a perfect energy efficient town. Also check out their Rainbow Warrior website which features 3d graphics that wouldn’t look out of place on the bridge of the starship enterprise.

Efficient city, efficiency, EfficienCity

5. #UKsnow

#UKsnow was a clever twitter / google maps mashup which generated an interactive map using location-tagged tweets about snow and it’s intensity. Suffered from accuracy issues and in some way more interesting about where twitter users are clustered who find snow a novelty.

It doesn't snow in May

Also check our Ushahidi for SMS based crowdmaps about more serious issues.

6. How big are things?

An oldie but a goldie. How Big Are things is the original site that allows you to compare the size of a 747 to a blue whale, or a neutron star to central Manhattan. Has spawned many copies that use the same idea.

Compare a blue whale to a 747

8. 87billion.com

Visualising very large numbers often poses a challenge. 87 billion dollars is such a vast number that it’s difficult to comprehend.

About the size of a house

Honourable mention: any site that compares something to the size of Wales / Belgium.

9. Wordle

Used a lot by (lazy) bloggers analysing speeches, this infographic site generates graphics that size words by frequency given a piece of text.

Wordle of this blog post

View more or make your own at www.wordle.net

10. The Babel Fish

Proves you exist so therefore you don't.

Infographics aren’t anything new, they’ve been around since Da Vinci started doodling illustrative ideas for aeroplanes in his notebooks. In 1977 The Babel Fish (and other) graphics from the Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy predicted a futuristic computerised device which contained almost every bit of information you could possibly imagine wanting to know.

The original hand drawn faux computer graphics were created by Rod Lord.

11. How Banks Cause Hunger

Food speculation gone crazy from the World Development Movement

Can bankers get any worse?

Update(s):

• Here’s an infographic on saving energy in Datacenters (via stumbleupon)
• Social media infographic
• Infographic on how banks cause hunger from the World Development Movement

We all take for granted the vaccines we had when we were little (I actually managed to embarrass my GP father by making a bit of a fuss, but in my defence I was only 3 and needles sugarlumps were scary). Yet around the world millions of children miss out on simple, cheap vaccines that would prevent horrible illnesses and death.

Vaccines are regarded as a very cost effective way of controlling childhood diseases – prevention being much cheaper than cure. Now, for the very first time, there are two new vaccines that will help stop pneumonia and diarrhoea – 2 of the biggest killers of children under 5 around the world.

However, it’s one thing having these vaccines available; it’s another getting them safely to the places where they are needed. In a few weeks world leaders are meeting to decide how much they will pledge to support the roll out of these vaccines in developing countries. The money required is equal to a tiny percentage of global budgets, yet during a global recession aid budgets are often easy targets for cuts.

Please sign the petition today it takes about 10 seconds, and no it won’t hurt one little bit.

I’ve called this version Webtivist Basic (because I lost count of what version number this would be).

The script is very basic (hence the name) but allows you to setup simple email actions to a suitable target from any site, and to store your activists details in a database. This can be exported as a .csv file which can be dropped into any supporter database / email newsletter program.

It checks for common swear words (in case your activists get over enthusiastic!) HTML and script language I’ve noticed that form bots use, so you probably won’t need a captcha.

Visit my Webtivist page for instructions and the link to download from sourceforge.

This was originally written as a project at the World Development Movement since as a smaller organisation they couldn’t afford the more expensive online action systems on offer. It’s free and released under the Non-Profit Open Software License 3.0 (Non-Profit OSL 3.0).

I’m hoping to include a bit more functionality in the next release, to include things like pre-filled in form values from personalised emails, email to MP using a postcode lookup, tweet actions (all things various versions of the script has done in the past). I’ve also had a few ideas about integrating SMS as well.

Eventually I’d like to build a super-dooper version that has a nice administrator back-end, so that setting up online actions to elected representatives and capturing the data will be as easy as setting up a blog.

Comments / ideas / criticism welcome. If you want to help me work on the database of MPs emails & contact details please get in touch (am working my way very slowly from A..).

#1 Crowdsourcing

The idea of outsourcing work to the internet is hardly new – Amazon has effectively crowdsourced all of it’s product reviews for years, but there are a few interesting projects that have popped up recently.

Hunch is a project by on of the people who developed flickr and is effectively a technology demonstrator – it’s a social network with questionnaires which learns from the answers given by the community and & builds up idea of who you are and then helps you identify what things you would be interested in. Although the commercial potential is obvious, this approach could work for matching campaigners (or donors) with charities they’re likely to be interested in. SocialActions.com

During the expenses scandal the Guardian newspaper uploaded nearly 500,000 documents and crowdsourced the analysis of them on their MP expenses website.

Crowd sourcing translation for emergency info was used in Haiti by Ushahidi although it posed problems with matching the expectations of users on the ground with what was practically possible by the aid agencies.

Taking the concept even further The extraordinaries is a mobile phone app which describes itself as micro-volunteering – and which seeks to answer the question “I have 20 minutes right now what can I do?” by matchmaking suitable volunteers with tasks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWCvB7_hl6s

Last year a campaigner based in Bangladesh contacted me on facebook in regard to a proposed open cast mine in Phulbari, Bangladesh. A UK based company GCM were attempting to get permission to build a mine that would displace 30,000 people and destroy the water supply of a further million.

I was able to very rapidly put together a video, based on footage of GCM’s offices, stock footage of an open cast coal mine and a video that had been made by the campaigners in Bangladesh. The original Bangladesh video titled ‘the blood soaked banner of Phulbari’ and was too long for the standard youtube format of less than 10 minutes, so by re-cutting highlights from this film with WDM’s material made the video more suitable for our audience.

We ran a series of online actions using the video and were successful in getting Barclays Bank to sell their shares in the project, and Gareth Thomas (minister at BERR and DFID) withdraw UK government support for the project. This was the most popular online action WDM has ever carried out.

I think the video would have been improved with footage of the campaigner doing a piece to camera – by experimenting with different video formats I’ve found that an appeal made directly to the viewer makes for the most effective response rate to an appeal or campaign ask.

2) Question to Gordon Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXl_ydgTKrc

This is a very simple video shot on a tiny video camera with a question to Gordon Brown asking what he was doing to fight poverty at an upcoming G20 conference. At the time Downing Street were using YouTube for people to submit questions, with a vote to decide on the videos for Gordon Brown to answer. By emailing our supporters the voting link for our video we were able to ‘game’ the vote in our favour, and you can see in the responses to this video a direct video message from Gordon Brown.

Emailing our supporters with an alternate action to the normal petitions or email actions helped improve the response rate, and being able to reply to our supporters with a direct response from the Prime Minister proved a popular way of promoting WDM as an organisation having an impact on politics in the UK.

If I was to do something like this again I think the video would have sounded better comming from a supporter or local WDM group member as opposed to staff, I think also the sound would have been greatly impoved with a better camera / microphone setup.