Crossover’s creative lab process will explore the use of interactive and participatory media to engage audiences with contemporary science. Participants will have a unique opportunity to experiment with new applications of digital media and to develop formats combining elements drawn from documentary, drama and games; they will ask how to harness the power of social networks to devise formats rich in user contributions, what opportunities do mobile or location based platforms offer, how can games and participatory media by used to attract new audiences?

Hey, at least it suggests you’re not the only one thinking along these lines…

Anyway, it’s a great post and alludes to something I’ve been thinking about for some time, though am struggling to lay down cohesively, that it’s no use talking about the democratisation of media if the existing power structures remain in their current form. By this, I mean that this democratisation needs to extend from the sphere of new media to other aspects of our lives, communities, relationships etc. It’s no use being able to mobilise people online to speak out and campaign against Mandelson’s Three Strikes, for example, if we have no real way to hold him to account and overturn/affect the policy, or issue or whatever is the gripe.

I’m also skeptical to the extent that it’s a case of disenfranchisement. It’s only something I’ve been thinking of lately and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I feel that when something really upsets people, they will enfranchise themselves in some way or form; they will find their own voice and take their own action etc (though I think this is perhaps blurred by my own beliefs and drive that maybe don’t ring true with many other people). That’s not to say disenfranchisment isn’t a problem, it is, but I think apathy is also involved, even if it is just a different set of held values as you said on your blog not long ago.

I kid you not.

Thinking about the information-flow idea. Politicans, the good ones, if they engage usefully with a question rather than firing off meaningless soundbites, are often moderate. The more information you have about an issue, the harder it is to be partisan. When I’ve chatted to politicians about issues I care passionately about they’ve always politely represented the other point of view to me and I’ve found myself sympathetic towards the need for balance. To be true representatives they have to realistically and diplomatically balance all sides; and they often have info of which I was unaware.

I’m aware that what seems to me like a well-researched, principled points of view might sound like lefty frothing to a moderate who had to balance the realities of a complex political situation. Of course I think my views are more justified and coherent than the BNP, but to people in the middle, we can come across as similar. If we want to live in a democracy we have to accept that progressive, radical geeks are not the majority, and find a way of including, representing and balancing other points of view.

What I’m thinking is that the sort of wiki or wave politics you’re talking about would be a good opportunity to open up that sort of conversation. I have had food for thought, and sometimes found my views challenged as being overly-simplistic, every time I have spoken in person to a politician about an issue I care about. Rather than only being able to find out the politics going on behind a decision I disagree with if I turn up and badger a politician in person, I want that politician to have a mandate to explain their process publically, online, where it can be read and queried and challenged if we find it inadequate. We may not like the answer but if we can see their reasoning we may become more aware of the complexity of the issue. Or we may continue to disagree, having found the counter-arguments lacking. Either way, more information and transparency can only be good.

This sort of system would work best if it was completely universal: if you could access it anywhere, in any language, if kids were taught to log on at primary school and there was a kids section on the wiki where they could have their say and ask questions.

I don’t know how to get from here to there. I don’t know how useful such a system would be with the self-selecting group of hyper-geeks we’d end up with. One way might be to set it up with a “starter” group of volunteers taken from all sections of society, and a starter group of politicians. Is this the sort of project we could get funding for? Like a “democratic think tank” – an experiment to see what the results were? Honestly, I don’t know how we’d get started. I worry about the demographic exclusivity of starting a project like this among geeks who all mostly agree, which wouldn’t reflect any of the realities of how it would be used more generally. As you say, we need to be wary of creating a new intelligentsia, but at the same time online ethics, the open source movement, the decentralised nature of the online information economy have exciting implications for modern democracy.

Still thinking: thanks for the food for thought.

There’s a connection in my mind between the idea of Wikipolitics, the Open Source movement, the social consultancy method of groups like Tuttle… The common threads are decentralisation and collaboration, and I think that MySociety-inspired consultation might be the seed that could take root in our present system. Tuttle is more a coalition of experts which filters down to a relevant group: the Wikipolitics idea is more hierarchical, if we’re talking about improving dialogue and information exchange between the people and their representatives.

The open source movement’s hierarchy is informal, based on expertise and experience. Getting our elected representatives to listen to those with expertise and experience of specialist issues would be a good start.

Chicken-and-egg question: how to you get people to accept/vote through those reforms before they’ve been educated enough to understand why they’re necessary? And even though I am absolutely right with you, I’m aware that the people starting Hitler Youth probably thought they were doing the right thing too… there always needs to be provision and tolerance in society for a multitude of ideas for it to be healthy. We don’t actually want to turn everyone into little tolerant lefty clones, even if we wouldn’t mind if everyone spontaneously realised we were right.

Like you, I believe the intolerance we’re discussing is a narrative rather than a reality, and I think it’s possible to massively reduce it by improving society. But that’s going to be a slow process – the older people get the harder their minds are to change, and in some ways cultural reform is about waiting for intolerant, inflexible members of previous generations to die. Until then, they will resist change, and lots of people find it convenient to agree with them. How do we get to where we want to be? what are the building blocks? What is the first step? And how can we trust the residents of this broken society to trust us to change it?

The biggest potential drawback to proportional representation is that it might remove one of the most popular elements of British democracy: the local MP who hears the concerns of their constituents, represents them to Parliament and faces losing their seat if they fail to do so. This is where the Lords come in. I propose an upper house composed of constituency politicians directly elected by the alternative vote system to sit alongside a lower house that proportionately represents the wider passions of the people.

This is an exciting train of thought.

My experience of London Assembly Members is that the good ones are very influenced by what their constituents tell them. Denny, who runs Police State UK with me, has told me about his old Labour MP in Milton Keynes, Brian White. Apparently he spent some time every week going door-to-door round his constituency, asking people if there was anything they wanted to talk to him about, anything bothering them, anything they wanted him to do something about. We both hate Nu-Labour but we agreed that sort of active engagement might well be enough to get us to vote for someone regardless of party affiliation.

But this sort of engagement is rare. And with the current distance between MPs and their constituents – the vast numbers of people in each constituency, the political disenfranchisement many of them feel, the only way to get in touch being emails, faxes and letters which will get a form reply if anything – makes it easy for them to get away with staying disengaged.

Denny said once that he’d considered running as an independent candidate and pledging, if he won, to run online mini-referendums on every issue he had to vote on in Parliament, and to vote in a way that genuinely represent his constituents, regardless of whether they agreed with his personal ethics. We debated it back and forth. It’s a flawed but compelling idea.

First we need to fix the problems with candidate selection (what do you think of the ideas put forward in Open Up, such as open primaries?), then we need to facilitate direct public engagement between representatives and their constituents – a wiki format would be ideal. Representatives who didn’t engage would face consequences – if they persisted in refusing it might have to lose them the seat. The wiki format would facilitate fact-checking, research, comparing differing reports and bringing in the opinion of experts. It would be chaotic, possibly a much bigger and messier project than Wikipedia, but I think wikipedia is a testament to what the public can achieve. Sort of like a counterpoint to the comments on Have Your Say.

You’d need language support, of course. Accessibility is an issue, but there could be free-to-use terminals in all public libraries, schools, universities, public centres – perhaps they would only connect to this system, to prevent people hogging the terminal to use Facebook.

MySociety have already pioneered online tech to facilitate engagement … I think something like this is the next step. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that you want something like Google Wave, with built-in live language support, live chat and playback features, rather than a traditional wiki. Wave’s still in beta (although if you don’t have an invite and want one, we have some spares), takes a lot of memory and a fast connection, and still has lots of bugs. But I think it has a lot of potential in this context.

I actually think online communication demonstrates the opposite attributes! Modern politics is full of live interviews, question times, panels, press conferences, all filmed and recorded live and broadcast live over TV and radio. This has the advantage of immediacy that traditional print media lack. But online communication has the advantages of both. It’s immediate and live – but slower than in-person chat. You can take the time to think and compose a reply.

This not only makes it less easy to excuse politicians who say stupid shit, it makes the conversation more accessible. I’ve been to a few City Hall meetings and it always strikes me, every time, the extent to which politics is dominated by confident, charismatic, good looking, intense, charming people, who are well-spoken and warm and can convince you of anything. The rest of us, without those skills of persuasion and charm and diplomacy, can often feel we don’t stand a chance – even if we can get a word in edgeways, we don’t have the same stature, somehow – or we aren’t as well-spoken, or just don’t have the experience of speaking eloquently in public. But more subtly, I have noticed how many of those in power project a personal authority which is difficult to challenge face to face, however much you may disagree with them at a distance.

Online communication opens this up. You don’t have to be good looking or charming to speak powerfully online. It not only makes it easier for more people to engage on a more level playing field, in text, but it also would reduce the amount of verbal faff that goes on so much in BBC politics. All the “And I’m going to tell you why that is, that’s because …” methods of answering questions, all the automatic verbal filler that gives the speaker more thinking time. You wouldn’t have people shouting over each other, you wouldn’t have the ruder person on the panel drowning the others out, you wouldn’t have posh accents talking over regional ones and men talking over women and everything else you hear all the time on radio and TV. I’m not saying online conversations are perfect, but they have advantages which I think could be useful right now.

Also, think about the potential of online conversation. Previously, this sort of live conversation has been between a small handful of people, with a passive audience. Interaction takes place in the form of solicited questions from the audience, or phonecalls – that’s not a real exchange of ideas.

Compare this with the comment threads on the big political blogs, where a single conversation can include 800 or more people. When have that many people ever, in the history of the human race, been able to simultaneously and actively engage in the same conversation? It even beats the Athenian ecclesia, where people had to take it in turns to speak while everyone else listened, and speakers had to be approved in advance.

Democracy worked in Athens because it was small. Representative democracy hasn’t worked: we need a new methodology. The Internet offers unique opportunities for including the vast numbers of people who need to participate for it to work these days.

Like you Hannah, I only have vague ideas. But I’m definitely on board and fascinated to see where this conversation leads.

Openess, I believe should go both ways, and is not opposed to the building of a new set of ideals – mutual accountability, and two-way communication are the result of the former, and the progenitor of the latter, both it would give us an opportunity to reform our society as you (and I) suggest.