Image by Melvinheng on Flickr, shared via a creative commons license.

This is not a post about the things that are wrong with our world. This is a post about how we make them right. Of course it is not exhaustive, and by no means is it intended to be a detailed and flawless solution, in fact it openly admits that fact, because that (you will see) it is the point.

This post is in reaction to many things, but particularly in reaction to the recent #3strikes debate, the actions of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and a recently circulated confirmed rumour that suggests the same minister may have his sights set on the leadership of the Labour party. This is not a party political post, and I do not intend to argue why one man’s leadership would be bad for Labour, instead I intend to suggest that what this man represents is an outdated vision of politics, a vision that is bad for our country, and bad for our democracy.

Our society (and although I will talk more generally, ‘our’ here refers to UK society) is governed. We have democratically elected governments who, on the whole, make decisions and enforce laws with the intention of bettering society. I do not believe that anyone gets involved in politics for any other reason but improving the society they live in. This is the desire of the BNP, just as much as it is the desire of mainstream parties, their vision of a ‘better’ society might be opposed to the majority, but that is why they are not in power. Largely speaking, the party in power is supposed to represent the majority vision of what a better society is, and then strive towards it.

I do not believe that is currently so. Leaving aside first past the post reform and candidate selection, we wholly and entirely do not currently live in a democracy. The power is very much not ‘with the people’.

The Story

When Labour came into power in 1997, it was to the tune of a wholly broken opposition. 18 years of Conservative government had systematically deconstructed all that was of society and replaced it with the ethics of individualism. This was very good for a few, and catastrophic for a many. The many had finally realised. Labour won with more than just promises to renew, however, they won with what was for the first time, politics as marketing. It wasn’t just slogans, it was shiny adverts, they weren’t just promoting the values of the party, they were selling the story of New Labour.

Something else very important happened in 1997. The death of Diana. Others have pointed out before me how this marked an important turning point, not in politics, but in the media. This was the media as story, news not as reporting events, but as representing emotions. The papers spoke as though they spoke for us as they ordered the Queen from Balmoral.

Labour was in power without a credible opposition, and suddenly the press felt powerful. They could move the Queen to action. And someone needed opposing. If it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’, The Sun could also oppose it.

Story is a very hard thing to fight. It is much older than democracy, much older than society.

That was the beginning of the era of Spin. Labour had ridden into power on a narrative, and the mainstream media had assumed the role of opposition using the same. One proposed a story of a better society, the other claimed to represent the stories (wishes) of the people who lived in it.

You notice how neither of these groups are made up of ‘us’?

This is the politics that politicians such as Peter Mandelson, David Cameron and (yes, even) Boris Johnson represent. (Can you think of a better story than the bumbling fool made good?)

An Information Economy.

Spin is all about distribution. Spin is about controlling the narrative of politics; it is about packaging and marketing your version of events. Spin requires complete control of information.

Spin is not working. Our society has grown out of it. Our country has been made undemocratic because of it. Our politicians do not fear the people, they fear the press. The people do not trust their politicians because the press exposes the antiquated attitudes and secrecy within their ranks. However the Press only constructs an oppositional story, it does not deconstruct it. The press is also not run for anything but the benefit of sales. No matter how well standing the broadsheet, how ubiquitous the tabloid. The mainstream media choose their story, and then they spin their readers and politicians into it.

The internet opposes and undermines that.

We live in an information age. For better or worse that is something that must be accepted. There is a rival economy, and it consists of information, it is a world (democratically, one might say) built of a thousand individual narratives. No one claims to speak for others, if someone is championed, it is because one person had the words that echo with others’. In this context the politics of Peter Mandelson et al will not work. He is a clever man, and I hope clever enough to see that one voice, big business, Spin, the politics of ‘push’, are gone. This is the century of pull, this is the century that politics has to become mutual.

Wikipolitics.

Well, everything needs a title doesn’t it? (/a hashtag).

I have blogged before about how I don’t believe in apathy, but I do believe in disengagement. I believe that British politics is due a reformation. I believe that we can demand that. Are you bored of the tone of the Labour government? Do you really believe that a Tory one will be different? Are you looking for a protest vote? A voice? You will not currently find it at the ballots.

What is Wikipolitics?

It is a starting point. It takes the open-source ethic and applies it to government. I don’t propose that we edit policy documents. I do believe that parliament should be opened up, demystified, and the power taken back. How do we do this? We’ve already started, look at projects such as Louder, 38 degrees, look at the Trafigura backlash, the Iran election, the G20 protests.

We now live in a world where we construct our own media consumption, where we pull together, build our own stories. Politics and the mainstream media are clinging on to old methods of distribution and delivery.

Whilst still acknowledging that at least 2/3 of the world does not have access to the internet (the UK figure is something like 30%, with a further 7-8% only having narrowband access – source) and those who do are likely to be from more affluent, developed backgrounds, we also need to be aware that instant publishing and access to our own media channels is incredibly empowering.

We also need to pull ourselves out of the luxury of political disempowerment. It is our responsibility to be involved in politics. If it is not one with which we wish to be involved, then we need to change it.

Reformation, Reclamation.

We need to tell our parties: “Arm your backbenchers with Flips, with Audioboo, with simple wordpress websites. Open up. Work in real-time. And don’t be afraid. We know you are, we know you are worried that you will be criticised, pulled apart, but please remember that although it has not been so before, that is what we mean by democracy. That is the open-source ethic. Let us participate”.

This worked for Obama, he brought the US the highest election turnout in a century. But then he stopped. And that where it’s gone wrong. That’s when Murdoch took back over.

The mainstream media has characterised us as a pack of baying wolves. The politicians have been characterised as lying snakes and fat cats. 2/3 people believe they cannot affect decision making. Trafigura, Jan Moir, proves we can. How about we take that to the rest of politics? How about we build our own wiki-guide to how we want to be engaged with, how we want to ask questions of the policy makers, of the parties? How about we offer a route that bypasses the mainstream media – taking honest debate and mobile video on the campaign trail, introducing them to the modern realities outside the political bubble, having a conversation, rather than being delivered a speech. You may argue that there’s no point in participating in a broken system, but how else are people to know how to fix it?

Because this is important. As it currently stands it would take as many years to get women equal representation, as it would a snail to crawl the length of the Great Wall of China. As it currently stands we are bickering and buying our way to climate disaster. As it currently stands we live lifestyles of excess and complete unsustainability. And for all our excess, are we happy? Or are we to some degree living the lives and values that are sold to us – other peoples’ stories?

We are facing a hyper-connected, global village era, politics cannot continue to be its own island.

This is not a manifesto, it is a call to arms. And this is where I stop, because this is a story, too. It’s a story about us, but it’s still my version. We need to write an ending together. How can we open up the political process? What do we want to know? Do we think there should be more experts involved in policy making? Do we want to see cabinet meetings taking questions from Twitter? What tools can we offer? Comment. Engage. This is up to all of us. What can we build? (We have the technology). Go.

– Hannah Nicklin is a brightly coloured and basically nocturnal playwright, blogger, academic and geek. She normally lives over at hannahnicklin.com, and is @hannahnicklin on Twitter.

For charities and campaigners, the opportunities afforded by ‘the social web’ are so massively game-changing that it’s hard to even consider the possibilities without throwing all the cards up in the air and starting again.

Previously, campaign information was distributed via either broadcast OR conversation – conversations were constrained by location, and broadcast brings with it the same problems it does anywhere else – it’s

• expensive
• wasteful
• impossible to track
• difficult to nuance
• time-limited
• platform specific

and all in all a MASSIVE gamble.

But now we have an entire way of thinking about the internet that’s built around ‘shared sociability’ – this ‘Web 2.0’ thing everyone’s been banging on about for the last few years.

So campaigners and charity organisers have the chance to

• re-engage those amazing minds they were previously shouting at via a newletter
• let the subject of the campaign speak for itself via video, photos and audio
• update interested parties hourly rather than monthly or quarterly
• let your supporters BE the campaign rather than just fund it
• track ACTUAL engagement statistics, and follow the progress of any element of the campaign.
• share information, strategy, materials and supporters amongst a network of connected campaigns.

How does that sound? Awesome, that’s how it sounds.

The cost of paper mail-outs is astronomical, adverts in magazines and on TV are an horrific waste of charity money in an age when there are alternatives, and being able to document every face-to-face event you hold and share it FOR FREE with those outside the charity increases the impact of those events by a factor of 10.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is just how huge a shift this is for most organisations – if your entire infrastructure and methodology is about justifying then implementing a marketing strategy that will hopefully fund whatever your campaign is, inform people and motivate them, but which is very expensive and has no guarantees, then suddenly discovering that there’s a world of interested, connected, motivated and resourced people out there happy to talk about what you do and share your information freely with their friends, as well as DO the stuff of the campaign requires a pretty cataclysmic volte face.

Which is where Louder.org.uk comes in.

The social web is such a massive area now, that coming to it late can seem hugely daunting. So the NCVO have put together a site that’s designed to make co-ordinating the web-side of a campaign easier.

It will:

• help aggregate all the content
• keep supporters and activists up to date
• pull other people’s campaign ideas and content into one central place,
• and – crucially – provide instruction, tips, help and support in how all this works, both from the NCVO themselves and fellow travelers on the journey to a better world.

The site is currently in Beta testing stage – it’s launched this Friday, but will still be developing for a long time yet – but it’s there, it’s growing, and it’s available to you to use and play with from Friday.

Possibly the single biggest global impact of the social web is what it’s done to charitable and political engagement. We can stay informed, we can be heard, we can be a part of something bigger. Because, as the site strap-line says, ‘Together We’re Louder.’

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What’s my involvement, you ask? I was invited to the pre-launch event some months ago, at which the idea was put out there for the site. I asked a lot of questions, made a lot of comments and was then hired for a few days to help plan the site and define the range of tools. If 50% of what we’re hoping for ends up being possible, it’s going to be a truly awesome resource.