Tom Steinberg aksked me to crosspost his response to AIR-L. -- Matthias ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tom Steinberg <dowire@tomsteinberg.co.uk> Date: Nov 21, 2006 7:36 PM Subject: Re: [Consult] ePetitions at No Ten, Bundestag, and elsewhere To: consult@groups.dowire.org Hello Matthias, Thanks for moving this debate to this list. Unfortunately nobody seems to be around to approve my membership request to AIR-L so that I can put mySociety's side of this: clearly the inability to debate issues online in the way we want is today's hot topic! I suppose my overall reaction to reading the thread is that such a bright group of people seem to have missed something our ordinary users have understood in droves: the site is a beta and if you want features added you have to ask for them. I'm afraid that complaining about them on a list we don't even know about doesn't actually count as constructive. Our other more common garden users have realised they need to actually send us their feedback, and we've made a slew of changes in response: http://www.mysociety.org/2006/11/17/this-is-what-beta-means-the-first-48-hou... Now onto the issue itself - the lack of forums. Our design philosophy as an organisation has always been clear: pick a simple task that benefits the public and solve it as well as you possibly can before launching. Then as soon as it is out in the wild, respond to your users demands as fast as you can (within the constraints of your resources). In our case this meant building a massively load-capable petition signing system that had transparency engineered in from the start, and then changing it really fast in response to user requests. For everyone on this and the AIR-L list who would like to see forums, I have just one question: * Do you consider it possible to design deliberative discussion system on a site as sensitive as No10 which will generate debate sufficiently mature as to merit the sizeable public spending on moderation that would be required? If so, how? Personally, I'm sceptical that the No10 site can ever host good discussions, and running HearFromYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com I think mySociety can claim to have some experience in this field. But I'm just one citizen, and if you are British it is your democractic system too: if you want forums you should ask for them and express your support for whatever hiring of civil servants or building of technology would be required. Lastly, please note that for those of you who think I'm ignoring the fact that there ARE discussion forums on other petition sites, please just absorb the following scale difference: * Total petitions submitted on and offline to Scottish Parliament in first 7 years : 964 * Total petitions submitted online to No10 site in first 6 days: 925 I look forward to your feedback on this issue very much. best, Tom Steinberg Director, mySociety.org Member profile for Tom Steinberg: http://groups.dowire.org/main/contacts/tomsteinberg ----------------------------------------- Group home for Online Consultations, Dialogues, and E-Participation: http://groups.dowire.org/main/groups/consult Replies go to members of Online Consultations, Dialogues, and E-Participation with all posts on this topic here: http://groups.dowire.org/topic/143437 For digest version or to leave Online Consultations, Dialogues, and E-Participation, email consult@groups.dowire.org with "digest on" or "unsubscribe" in the *subject*. Online Consultations, Dialogues, and E-Participation is hosted by Democracies Online - http://dowire.org.