I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.

As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic debates, there is no shortage of name-calling and point-scoring. But if you ask the readers to look at things from a strategic point of view, you may find out something that you didn’t know in the first place.

Mick is no mean political analyst himself, and nor are his regular contributors. But by inviting commenters to look at thing objectively – to spell out what they see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that the DUP face, commenters from all sides of the spectrum could at least agree on where the DUP stand on the political chessboard.

It provides a useful tool in any materialist analysis of ‘what will happen next’ because, for all that some politics is, as Harold Wilson put it, “a crusade or it is nothing”, the last few weeks in Northern Ireland have shown that political parties rarely do anything unless it allows them to make the best of whatever strategic hole they are in.

So, having attracted lots of comments over the course of one day, deleted the ones that sought to introduce pointless whataboutery and pointscoring, Mick was left with a couple of dozen nuggets of information.

Next step? Let’s visualise them – put them in a fun-to-fiddle-with application like Prezi: (be patient – it takes a while to load…..)

This is the second in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. Last week I made the case for using existing content – blog posts; Wikis, like Debatepedia; and visual debate-mapping tools, like Debategraph – as a knowledge base to drive new policy exercises, and introduced you to my new project, Poblish, which demonstrates this.

This time, I’m going to cover how existing content – the blogosphere, in particular – is currently used, and just how bad the situation is.

Blogging and personality

Individualistic political blogging dominates the collaborative alternatives because of its quantity rather than its quality, and because of personality rather than because of the arguments made. ‘Reputation’ within the blogging world is too often self-fulfilling, and technological limitations – combined with the laziness of politicians and the media – have created an oligarchy of ‘go to’ bloggers.

While the minds of journalists are not entirely closed to newcomers, it’s undeniable that the opinions of a couple of dozen ‘power bloggers’ carry more weight than all others put together. Where the strong preferences of a small minority dominate the weak preferences of the majority, democracy suffers.

Not only does this conceal the richness and diversity of the blogosphere in favour of accepted wisdom and conventional categories (‘Labour bloggers say…’), it corrupts both readers and writers. The priority of these bloggers gradually turns towards reportage – being ‘newsworthy’, breaking stories, filtering gossip, tracking trends, and developing their own ‘brand’ and influence. As their fame spreads, they draw traffic away from less well-connected blogs, encouraging readers to leave comments among a sea of others, rather than take the time to develop their thoughts more fully elsewhere.

While aggregators held out the possibility of providing readers with a single window onto a wide range of blogging opinion, the result has generally been to tie bloggers to their own political party.

Lack of interactivity

The level of interactivity on blogs has barely advanced during the past five years. Although all blogging platforms now offer a commenting facility, and some allow comments to be nested below others, comments continue to sit apart from the original article. They cannot refer to particular sections in the original, even though useful contributions are far more likely to relate to specific sections of the original rather than the generality. (Services like this do exist, but they are very far from mainstream blog tools.)

By being outside the context of the original, the mental pressure – to understand the original, and to constructively contribute – is taken off the contributor, but shifted onto the original blogger, who must attempt to understand and ‘re-contextualise’ the commenter’s addition before he can move his own argument on. What should be an interactive process becomes a sequential one, and all the slower and more time-consuming as a result.

Finally, the noise-to-signal ratio of comments can become enormous as a blog increases in popularity, unless strict controls or voluntary ‘codes of conduct’ are in place.

Lack of collaboration

Collaborative alternatives potentially provide more valuable content than blogs: more focus; less duplication; less pressure to be ‘journalistic’; a fairer balance between contributors; as well as a less ‘noisy’ experience. However, the very fact that they ask more of contributors makes them more expensive to create, and therefore thinner on the ground. This, in turn, can make collaborative editing seem a lonely experience. This situation will likely continue until there are efforts to break down barriers between the two types of content. Aggregators are of little help here, as they perpetuate the idea of a single time line of unrelated articles, in stark contrast to the ‘world wide web’.

Isolation and insulation

New blogs begin life in complete isolation and need to build connections with others if they are to keep their enthusiasm going. They need blogging friends, and they need encouragement. However, until a true blogging political hub appears, new bloggers often find themselves locked into political party silos, isolating themselves from the much wider external audience. A parallel incentive is for people to insulate themselves in order to avert the discomfort they feel when confronted with deeply contrary opinions and threats to their world-view. More often than not, it us unregulated comment-boxes that fuel this, rather than the behaviour of other bloggers.

Conclusion

When reputation becomes detached from quality; when friendship, like-mindedness, and convention determine the success of a blog and the popularity of its content; and when atomisation rather than interaction is the norm, the result must be a homogenisation of ideas, and a greater chance that rare but brilliant insights will be missed. This is the opposite of what we’re looking for.

In the next post I’ll be explaining how Poblish tries to address each of these problems, and how policy-making can be made more informed, more efficient, more constructive, and also more satisfying.

Just a quick signpost to this post on the ReadWriteWeb blog about. I think that this observation has implications for the nature of representation – and even for leadership.

“Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a permanent public record of what you do or say?” Hsieh argues that Twitter adds a public broadcast element that reminds him to be more positive, thankful and empathetic. He writes that those same values trickle down to the corporate culture of Zappos.”

And political representatives really do need a bit of that positivity at the moment. It does beg the question: Does the use of these interactive tools – always staying in the peripheral vision of friends, journalists, colleagues, rivals, constituents and peers – make us more empathetic or attractive? And if so, is it possible that these tools could be the saviour – rather than the undertaker – of representative democracy?

One of the advances that the long tail of the blogosphere has brought us is that some social work gets reported properly. Not the way that newspapers often report them, in their need for sensationalism. And, of course, they do it all for nothing.

One of the bloggers that does more to educate people about the realities of public service needs a new MacBook. Surely there's a grant somewhere?

Take Random Acts of Reality, for instance. The latest post is worth a look, but look around the site if you can? Some of them are quite literally eye-watering.

Try this post from a while ago for size. Brings a lump to the throat doesn’t it?

Now, it seems, Tom’s blogging has been curtailed because his laptop has packed in. I don’t know if any of this blog’s readers have access to charitable funds that are designed to promote better policymaking and democratic understanding through use of teh Internetz, but if you do, you could to worse than direct a few hundred quid towards Tom to pay for that MacBook that he’s coveting in his most recent post?

If you are an elected representative of any kind, you really must book mark this site or stick it into your RSS reader.

Here’s an interview with the blog’s author, Tom Reynolds.

Oh, and a declaration of my interest here: I’ve never met Tom, or spoken to him. I’ve just read his blog and if I had a grand to spare, I’d think of chipping into his laptop fund. But I don’t at the moment….

A good blog doesn't have to put up with too much 'graffiti' (click for pic credit)

Sandwell Councillor, Bob Piper, has a good post here about his recent trip to Bruges, raising questions about graffiti. It seems there may be a case for a high level of short-term investment to make the problem go away?

“One aspect of the City that distinguished it from so many places I have visited in the last few years, in this country and abroad, was the total absence of graffiti. Apparently the City Council has a policy that they remove graffiti free of charge, usually within one hour of it being reported. A few years ago they used to charge private dwellings and people thought, what the heck, pay to get it removed now, and tomorrow it could be back. Since it became a charge-free service, and instantly removed, the spray painters got fed up first and decided they were wasting their time and effort on their ‘art’ which would never be seen. Hence Bruges is free of the scruffy mess which blitzes so many cities. I think I’ll suggest Sandwell gives it a try. Does anyone know if this instant removal service has been tried anywhere here, and to what effect?”

I’m currently working on a project (all will be revealed soon – I promise) that will help people be able to adopt a similar approach to their comments boxes. Anyone who has written for a high-volume blog (and the Telegraph or Guardian blogs are a great case-in-point) will be familiar with the way that trolls lurk in the comment threads waiting to make their same repetitive ad hominem spEak You’re bRanes points. People with something worth saying often avoid the blogosphere because of this – quite rationally in my view.

My view on dealing with trolls is similar to the City of Bruges view on dealing with graffiti. Delete early and often – a bit of up-front investment makes life easier in the long run. The counterargument that this is ‘censorship’ is nonsense. Blogs have trackbacks. If you want to spEak You’re bRaines you can do so on your own site in minutes using Blogger or WordPress.com among many others.

In the context of this, I think that Kerry McCarthy MP has made the first step along a road that I think that a lot of MPs should follow. There is a fairly nasty shrill faction of bloggers who seek to harass her personally online – constantly demanding apologies and feigning outrage.

“Anyway, Iain Dale got upset, as he often does, and bandied around words like ‘petty’ and ‘pathetic’, at which point I blocked him. For non-Twitter people that means he can’t see my tweets and can’t send tweets to me. In other words, in the words of his idol, Cliff Richard, “we don’t talk anymore”. (And no, that’s not a feeble attempt to smear; he loves Cliff, which is his prerogative, if a little weird.)

Some might think this rather an overreaction. Cue all the usual stuff about ‘MPs are supposed to be thick-skinned’ and ‘you’re obviously not willing to engage’ or ‘you only want to talk to people who agree with you’, which is patent nonsense, if you look at the number of people I do follow on Twitter and the amount of to-ing and fro-ing I do in conversation with them.

So why did I block him? Partly it’s just because he caught me at the wrong time. But also because it seems clear to me that the Tory strategy on Twitter is to try to provoke me into spats, so that I end up spending all night arguing with them rather than engaging with ‘real’ people. This has the dual purpose of drawing attention to themselves (and most of them are rampant self-publicists), and of making me look like I’m someone who spends all her spare time in undignified online squabbling. It looks especially bad if people come to the argument late, and wonder what on earth is going on.

I therefore have two choices – try to ignore them, which means they’re still there as an irritant, or block them so that I can use Twitter for enjoyment and engagement, which is how it should be used. In the case of Iain Dale (and Shane Greer and Tory Bear before him) I’ve decided to block because, frankly, I’m fed up with them. That’s allowed, isn’t it?”

Anyway, this project that I’m not ready to tell you about yet: It will help MPs who previously didn’t want to blog to do so without having to constantly run this trollish gauntlet. Details to follow!

Tim McGarry at the Slugger Awards

Tonight in Belfast, we’re running the second in what I hope will become the annual ‘Slugger Awards‘.

These awards – previewed here on the Amnesty blog – are something of a departure for political weblogs. It would be fair to say that politicians are – for the most part – less than thrilled by the way that blogs have transformed politics.

The Slugger Awards are something of an attempt to redress the balance. Slugger is unusually visible in Northern Ireland’s politics. It has over 34,000 unique visitors per month and Stratagem/ComRes polling shows that 96% of NI Assembly Members read it.

It is widely recognised as watering hole for Northern Ireland’s political class. It has a terrific convening power the even we organisers underestimated. Having shifted over 300 tickets in a couple of days, it rapidly became clear that we would have filled a venue twice the size.

The awards will provide bloggers, their readers and commenters to say what kind of politics and politicians they want to see more of. It is a pro-politics event in a young-ish democracy – a place where the development of a good politics is crucial.

Awards will highlight the need for good local representation and a political culture. It includes prizes for the best Councillor, the best local authority, journalist and local paper as well as awards for the promotion of participation and involvement in policymaking.

They will be presented by the actor and comedian Tim McGarry. This is particularly fitting as he plays a fictional Sinn Féin councillor in the popular BBC Northern Ireland comedy Give My Head Peace. The full results, along with a few surprises – will be visible on the Slugger O’Toole website later today (or perhaps tomorrow morning – once the hangovers have worn off).

Niall Connolly appears to regard himself as an expert on democracy.

Wonder if he’ll stand for election?

Charlie Beckett has yet another good post up – this time, over at OpenDemocracy.

The point of Networked Journalism is that the citizen as an individual and as part of these organisations is now part of the production of news communications.  The relationships offered by networked journalism offer the potential for increasing trust in that news communications. By extension it could go some way to restore greater faith in political communications, too, and thus even in politics itself.

If people can participate in something at all parts of the process, then they are more likely to take a responsible and considered stake. If networked communications can offer greater openness, transparency, relevance and control for the citizen then they will be more likely to engage with the substance of the content. They will also be more prepared to support and even invest in that process.

It reminds me of that Norwegian construct on e-democracy that I saw last year (the link has moved so this one will have to do: Public sector information provided by ordinary citizens and the original document is linked to here).

Certainly, the idea of breaking the monopoly that bureaucracies have over the provision of public sector information. The reason that the Slugger O’Toole website is so interesting is that it fosters a mostly well-mannered and constructive conversation about public life in Nothern Ireland. Generally, if you need to elicit any facts about Northern Ireland, you can ask for them in a comments-thread and get them more quickly than any FoI request.

A step in the right direction by local government information providers.

The idea of spinning that off into a wiki called ‘About Northern Ireland’s government’ is an interesting one – I suspect that it would be a better use of public money than actually building the websites themselves and paying civil servants to generate the content. Moving from where we are now to a situation where that could happen is, however, no small feat – but I think that the way that the Birmingham News Room is encouraging and resourcing citizen journalists to write about local issues is a major leap in the right direction.

The Slugger Awards in 2008 marked a change-up for a political weblog.

I started my blog, Slugger O’Toole in early June 2002 purely as a research tool for a paper I was planning to write on the future of Unionism in Northern Ireland. At the time, I was still trying to assemble the writing team and hadn’t even approached a funding body.

Of course I didn’t need funding to start writing the blog. At the time the standard Blogger software package didn’t come with a commenting facility; and I didn’t even put titles on my post for the first month or so. They tended to be short narrative summaries of the day’s news in Northern Ireland.

But by the following February, we had the funding and were in a position to roll out interviews with some pretty senior people in Northern Irish politics. We shifted platforms to Moveable Type, primarily to give Slugger the commenting stability it lacked in Blogger.

Almost immediately the comment traffic took off.

At first it had the civility of the small village. By that stage we were on something just short of 1,000 visits a day. But as the site grew in reputation and the audience grew larger it became obvious that running a blog with pluralist values and sustaining a decent level of engaged discussion would require some conscious management.

And for me the pluralism of the blog was crucial. Not simply because of the forty year long rupture in Northern Ireland’s civil society, but because as James Surowieki notes in his Wisdom Of Crowds, a diverse crowd is a smart crowd. Homogenity leads to group think and general stupidity:

“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement or compromise. An intelligent group does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision that everyone can be happy with”.

But the problem was primarily a political one. How do you develop and then enforce a set of rules that allows you to keep the inclusive character of the site and develop a civil discourse in a political space that’s known for the ferocity of its politics? In other words how do you keep the space broad enough and engaging enough to fit the totality of the political spectrum?

In a funny sort of way the ‘rules’ emerged slowly out of the conversations o the site. One commenter, ‘Howard’, suggested that as far as possible we should outlaw ‘ad hominem’ remarks on the site; on the basis that such arguments are not arguments at all, but logical fallacies which only ever drag a civil conversation to its doom.

Considering that a huge proportion of political argument habitually resiles to personal attacks, that implied we’d be asking for something from our commenters that our politicians and journalists could not keep to.  It was further codified when another commenter, IJP, suggested we adopt the old Soccer slogan, “play the ball and not the man“; our 2005 entry on which still comes to the top of a Google search for that term. See also the variants: Whataboutery; and Don’t listen to him…

Taking the soccer analogy on, we then introduced a red and yellow card system, with yellow intended as a warning to persistent offenders and red a last resort, an expulsion from the site for two weeks. Once we’d moved on to Expression Engine we could reinforce that by setting up a redirect to the BBC Children’s Tellytubbies site, where miscreants are greeted with an ‘Uh oh’, from one of the furry little creatures. The intention: to communicate the ban was serious, but it was neither personal nor done out of malice.

My pre-occupation at this time was to drive the aspirational quality bar as high as people could make it, whilst keeping the entry bar as low as possible. To that extent, I would look for useful ways to engage directly with contributors over the reasons why this piece or that piece had been cut.

Often by excising the abuse and leaving the political substance of the material it’s message would be hugely strengthened confronting the reader with power of argument (invariably engaging) rather the strength of feeling (unerringly similar and, mostly, dull) towards political opponents. Former offenders would often go on to provide some of our best commenter material.

So to conclude, on Slugger we have managed to keep conversations relatively civil (we do have some serious lapses from time to time) by developing and laying our a clear set of guidelines. We try to actively enforce those rules, but not remotely from behind curtains like some hidden Wizard of Oz creature.

If someone complains about an action we do our best explain, front of house so to speak, what the breach was and why it was taken.  Engagement is the key. Many bloggers who have high volumes of comment traffics see it as an add on that helps keep traffic cycling their stats upwards.

For me, has been about engaging with an intelligent commons. We’ve had some pretty big stories break from the comments zone. One that comes to mind arose in the comments on the Tuesday. Picked up by a local on the Wednesday, made the region television news by Thursday, and the front page of the Guardian on Saturday morning.

It has been a hugely rewarding aspect of my blogging; and at Slugger we are looking to develop technological ways of helping to enhance the quality levels of debate. But it is something but it has to be worked at over and over.

This article has been cross posted at the Matt Wardman Wire.

Niccolò Machiavelli - a bit sceptical about all of this 'candour' business

Shorter version: If you’re a politician, it may be a good idea to get into blogging. But do it under a pen-name! It’s safer that way, and it will make you better at your job.

This is an old-ish question nowadays. And as the big question around social media at the moment is ‘should everyone Twitter‘, I think it may be a good time to revisit the question of blogging – now that the one-note evangelism for the medium has died down.

I’m not convinced that most politicians should set up an official blog of their own, or formally blog in their own name. Annoyingly, this is not a common view. Daniel Hannan, a UK Conservative Party MEP says it’s a good idea.

The inestimable Shane McCracken of Gallomanor also thinks they should – indeed, he goes further and asks if leaders should blog (three different times – here, here and here).

Though my own conclusions are slightly different, I’ve been helping a few councillors to have a crack at it recently, and I suspect that a few of them will emerge from it very well.

Former Lewisham Councillor, Andrew Brown picked up (a while ago now) on a Centre for Policy Studies paper on how the internet is changing politics, and how it skews some biases that may already be there in terms of activism and influence.

For some time now, the corporate world has been warning it’s clientbase that this is an activity that is here to stay – with guides from IBM and The Economist Intellegence Unit. Particularly pertinent is the advice offered by BT, suggesting that a lack of experience in Web 2.0 presents business with potential drawbacks, and the implication is that an experience with social media is valuable asset for any business.

Deloitte go even further in their advice: “Change your world or the world will change you.”

Canadian blogger Jim Elve has an interesting view on this in what is, admittedly, quite an old post:

“My own advice to politicians thinking about using a blog has been consistent. Get an official blogger. If the official blogger writes something as outlandish as this, the candidate or incumbent can fire the fool and distance himself from the article.”

Were Machiavelli alive today, I suspect he’d be sniffing around jobs as an online communications consultant. He’d probably find plenty of work without ever building up much of a profile for himself. Offering sound – but unfashionable – advice is like that. Machiavelli would have been particularly worried about exposing one’s thinking to public scrutiny when you are in a position of power.

In Machiavelli’s view, inconsistency was something of a virtue, and he wouldn’t have liked his clients to close off avenues by pre-applying ethical or systematic boundaries to their thinking.

Perhaps it is the case that one can never think the unthinkable in one’s own name? And do we want a cadre of politicians whose primary aim is to think aloud – but only to say things that external pressure groups will not object to? Isn’t this why the Chatham House Rule is so valuable to policymakers? Interestingly, Machiavelli didn’t publish his work during his lifetime (he dedicated it privately) – not because he didn’t want the message to be read, but because he didn’t want challenging ideas associated with himself.

I think that his advice would be similar to Jim’s. And, for different reasons, I’d concur with both of them.

Firstly, I think that there’s a bit of ‘teh interwebs is coming – look busy!’ about all of this. There is a proposition that “if you’re not doing what the bright young things are doing, you’re being left behind.” And I suspect that ‘blogging’ is often a substitute for ‘engaging with social media.’

As such, one has to admit that there is no better way of stepping into the world of social media than getting a blog set up, understanding how a creative use of widgets can make the management of a blog less time-consuming, and how activism on various other fronts can drive traffic to your site.

There is also the argument that it will be difficult to compete in any battle of ideas in future unless you understand the dynamics of social media and how it will change things – this is the gist of Podnosh’s argument here. The author Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Just writing a blog is a good way of forcing yourself to think – and to do it in a way that ensures your output is coherent (your comments thread will ensure that this is all well incentivised).

But this raises another question: Should politicians blog in their own name? I’d argue that the reason for using interactive media is so that you can eavesdrop upon high-quality conversations – ones that have been subject to a collaborative filtering. Ones that have had a reputation management job done on them. Anyone can do this – but as Anthony points out, sometimes – the moment that you declare your politician-ness – the conversation turns into a spitting match.

There are, of course, politicians who are just made for the world of blogging. We all know people who have the kind of personal manner that works very well when it’s transferred to the blogosphere, and some politicians are like that. But I’ve met quite a few very good politicians in my time that really don’t fit into that camp at all.

If we fall into the trap of equating a willingness to blog with a capacity to represent people effectively, we may eventually damage politics in a way that we never intended.

This is the sort of thing that may come up at Barcamp – stay tuned!