Examination of witnesses (Questions 220
- 239)
TUESDAY 11 JANUARY 2000
DR STEPHEN
COLEMAN and DR
PETER BRATT
220. The very simple reason was lack of time.
I was never able to do it because every time I wanted to do it
I did not have the password with me or I simply had other priorities.
Is that not one of the problems with the online discussion that
the timing of such an event is critical to the validity of the
results?
(Dr Coleman) Yes. Undoubtedly so. There is a problem
that if we are going to link these to parliamentary business there
are not unreasonable expectations but fairly high expectations
on the part of people taking part that there will be some real
communication taking place. One of the things we plotted when
we coded the responses was that earlier messages spoke much more
directly to the Public Administration Committee. A number of the
earlier people writing in said "We think you should do this",
even in terms of syntax, they were clearly speaking to you. By
the end they were speaking to each other. It is quite reasonable
that they were speaking to each other. That will change when and
if there is a greater opportunity for representatives to take
part in this. It is very understandable that there will be constraints
to stopping you from taking part.
(Dr Bratt) Could I just say that I expect you are
a fairly atypical user with the demands on your time. The typical
pattern for discussion groups is they are slow to set off at the
beginning and you have Stephen and people like Stephen as moderator
but if and when they do take off the problem is stopping people
contributing, not getting them to contribute. The typical pattern
is a massive over contribution once it takes off.
221. One of the things I am interested in is
the difference between open discussions and closed discussions.
My local paper Milton Keynes Citizen runs a forum and the
leader of the council and I regularly read and respond on a number
of occasions to the different themes that run through. It keeps
me on my toes. Just recently they had a case where the web master
was deleting a whole section because of libel issues. Have you
considered that in terms of relationships and how people with
a particular point of view, trying to get a point across, run
into other aspects of the law?
(Dr Bratt) The whole legal question surrounding things
like libel in these discussion groups is a very, very hot topic
at the moment. It would seem that if I am the web master I am
responsible for trying to make sure that does not happen. Yes,
there would be a need to monitor open discussion groups regularly.
222. Should web masters be regulated?
(Dr Coleman) Yes.
(Dr Bratt) Yes, I would have thought so although you
are asking me, I have not thought about that in great detail.
There is a great responsibility and a great power there so clearly
attention needs to be given to that.
(Dr Coleman) In the United States they are now beginning
to produce training for people who are moderating public discussions
and there are training courses for them. It is very important
that this should happen.
223. Take TV coverage for politics, there has
to be a balance, there does not necessarily have to be in the
newspapers.
(Dr Bratt) Yes.
224. The internet should probably be like the
television media rather than the newspaper?
(Dr Coleman) No, to follow the phone ins, on the phone
ins, there does not have to be a balance, there has to be a reflection.
There tends to be a reflection of the state of views which exist
actually. In an online discussion, what one would want to avoid
is a discussion being hijacked by a group setting out to hijack
it. Online discussions should reflect the real politics in which
there are majorities and minorities. There are views that can
be stated more eloquently and views that are manifestly unwise
and there are also views and attitudes that are illegal and all
of that has to be embraced by the online discussion as offline.
There should be a degree of balance in the sense that one wants
every discussion to be as representative as possible. One also
has to recognise that even representative discussions are by their
nature, if they are democratic, not going to be finely balanced.
225. One of the things that interested me, why
did you concentrate on the internet as the way forward? You mentioned
digital TV but third generation mobile phones are going to transform
the way people access. You only have to look at what is happening
in Finland at the moment where the majority of people actually
use mobile phones rather than land phones and in place of televisions
in some cases.
(Dr Bratt) Absolutely. We use the technology that
is currently available because we had to do this at a certain
time in conjunction with your work but it is very much our policy
that we will continue to develop as the technology develops. Just
to give you some idea of what that means, I run an independent
multi-media production company as well, one quarter of my time
is taken up, not in production, not in meeting clients but keeping
up with the new technology and how we are going to use it. The
technology changes all the time and it is my job in relation to
the Hansard Society to say how it is changing and how it can be
used. It does not matter what the technology is, it is how it
makes a difference to whatever communication process we are involved
in.
226. As politicians we just catch up with the
internet and you are way ahead of us again.
(Dr Bratt) I afraid it is moving forward hugely. I
cannot kid you any other way, I would not want to. While this
protocol is about to happen and all of the other things are about
to happen it is moving forward hugely. Yesterday's announcement
of the AOL and Time Warner merger shows you that a traditional
media company is turning to the internet. The rate of change of
technology is enormous and will continue, yes I am afraid so.
227. I do about a quarter of my casework by
e-mail at the moment and the other main use of my time is research.
One of the things that concerns me—it happened in Sweden,
in the US and in Australia and it is starting to happen to MPs
who use e-mail a lot—is if you get general e-mails from
all around the country how do you go about dealing with that?
If you get a piece of paper from somebody who is not in your constituency
you can throw it in the wastepaper basket. It is easy enough to
delete but are there sufficient tools to monitor that?
(Dr Bratt) The discussion did throw up some issues
on that, which Stephen mentioned. It is not quite why we are here
today but I am very happy to answer that. It is quite a big issue
and I think it probably needs more time than available today.
In principle I would answer that in two ways, just like you throw
a piece of paper in the bin you can throw an electronic e-mail
in the bin, it is probably arguably easier to do and quicker.
I think once you are used to e-mail it is easier and faster to
read than conventional mail. As Stephen mentioned, and I am not
in a position to give you a lot of facts today, there are e-mail
sorting pieces of software coming on to the market—they
have been round for a bit but the current ones are much more efficient.
I am talking `beta test' at the moment which is not released at
the moment and that will give you some chance to sort. However,
in the end you will still have more mail than you particularly
want or desire or is outside your constituency and there will
be some human sorting as part of that. Nothing will take some
human sorting away but there are some tools to take the worst
away for you.
(Dr Coleman) If I can add one quick supplement to
that point. As people find themselves involved more and more in
the government services being delivered online they will find
themselves having passwords. They have discrete symbols that indicate
which ward they live in, which community they live in and that
will be very useful in identifying them when they write to an
MP or a local councillor because it will enable them to use those
discrete passwords or convey that discrete information to you
straightaway. If somebody does not come from your area then it
would be very clear that they would not have that information.
(Dr Bratt) May I give you a very quick anecdotal example
for 30 seconds? I spoke to somebody about two months ago who said
they wanted to e-mail their MP but that MP was not e-mail enabled
so they picked the nearest name alphabetically to send it to!
Perhaps as more of you become e-mail aware and e-mail friendly,
it will reduce slightly.
228. Can I ask two questions about campaigning?
The most successful use of campaigning electronically has to be
the disruption of the WTO talks last November in Seattle, which
was primarily organised online. Are we seeing different ways of
campaigning rather than the traditional way of lobbying a representative?
(Dr Coleman) It is much more inertia campaigning because
a lot of the people who join these campaigns say, "We are
interested in this", they are, perhaps, emotionally committed
for the moment or whatever, although insufficient research has
been done about this. What we do know is that they can then say,
"We want to be updated when something is happening".
If you are a campaign organisation, that is an ideal relationship
to have with a member. You can send them an e-mail at any time
when something is being organised. You can also do that in a fairly
discreet fashion. From both of those points of view it enables
campaign organisers to move fairly quickly in mobilising groups
of people to take particular courses of action. Secondly, it enables
them to do it in a way that is relatively self-contained and does
not give a lot of publicity to projected actions.
(Dr Bratt) The internet and all of the things surrounding
it is an entirely new medium and will be used in new and different
ways. It is not a translation of the conventional way of doing
things. That applies to absolutely anything and equally it applies
to campaigning. Also a slightly different story, when I was preparing
this we were looking at a number of sites to show you and we considered
looking at the Countryside Alliance site who, for obvious reasons,
are using it. You may be interested to know if you type in "www.countryside-alliance.org"
you will get the Countryside Alliance site but if you type in
"www.countrysidealliance.org" without the hyphen you
get one of the anti-hunting group sites who hijacked it and registered
the name. The medium is different and can be used in very interesting
new ways.
229. Quite right too. When looking at the presidential
elections in the US is there a difference between the presidential
election, where everybody knows who the candidates are, and the
state and the local elections that happen on the same day? Is
there a correlation between the medium profile/high profile ones
and the more local and less high profile ones?
(Dr Coleman) I do not really know the answer to that.
Certainly the evidence as we have seen from some of the sites
in the United States is that some people who have come from relative
political obscurity have built a reputation for themselves online.
Certainly in Minnesota, with e-politics, which I have studied,
that seems to be the case. With the presidential sites the main
use of campaign web sites has been to solicit donations. The Federal
Election Commission is currently running an online consultation
on the subject of campaign finance through the internet which
is a separate but related issue. I suspect these things are going
to have more effect in relation to local campaigning than they
are in relation to presidential campaigning, which is bound to
be based much more on the traditional medium.
Chairman
230. Can I ask one question about the exercise
that you engaged in? At least when you have a discussion you have
a topic for discussion, you discuss the topic and you then decide
what you have learned from it. What I am not yet clear about is
what were these people talking about? What conclusions did they
come to? Did you give them a specific task to talk about and is
it possible to talk coherently about what the conclusions might
be?
(Dr Coleman) I hope it is possible to talk coherently
about the conclusions because that is what I thought I did. The
conclusions were a contribution to the formation of what they
saw as an agenda for discussion. We presented them with an agenda
to get started and we put the agenda into the report we have given
to you. They stuck to that agenda, to a great extent, although
they expanded on it and they brought their own experiences to
it. At the end of it they said, "We think the Public Administration
Committee should be thinking about these matters". We had
one thread, which is, "What should the Public Administration
Committee learn from all of this?" Perhaps one of things
we should do is print all of that out and let you have a copy.
It is much more difficult to go on from there and say, "Can
you arrive at a consensus or a general point of view?" There
are two views about how you use this kind of medium. One of them
is you use it as a consensus building device, and that is certainly
not what I am in favour of. I think we should replicate real politics
to a greater extent. We should enable differences to be explored,
the agenda to be fleshed out, experiences to be shared so that
at the end you have, if not a consensus, a greater sense of where
different people are coming from and what sort of things they
want. There were some different points of view in the discussion
which were conflicting points of view. If we compared this with
a meeting called to discuss electronic democracy I suspect there
would be more of a consensus about the policy and the important
issues for the future at the end of this than there would have
been at the end of, say, a two or three hour meeting.
231. I had not seen your paper until this morning,
I had not had a chance to read it properly, I am grateful to you
for it. The thing we are after all the time is what is the pay
off? Question. I can understand much of the useful information
sources, I can quite see that here is an explosion of information
sources which people have access to, they did not have to before.
Questions about reliability and so on I understand too but nevertheless
it is there. In terms of affecting the political process as opposed
to—I was going to say—self-indulgent, I do not mean
self-indulgence but I mean people liking the process rather than
being concerned with the product. What I have not yet been able
to quite get hold of is where is the pay off? Where is the product
in this in terms of how do people process this? Apart from examples
like Brian's example of the campaigning groups who were able to
be stirred up through online sources to disrupt the World Trade
Organisation talks. I can see that but more generally, can you
take us through some of it?
(Dr Coleman) I think there are three types of pay
off. I think there is the pay off in terms of institutions. If
they are seen in a very real sense to be more accountable - obviously
they are only seen to be more accountable if they are actually
more accountable - but nonetheless I think that institutions like
parliament which want to seem accountable are going to be much
more accountable using this sort of method rather than anything
else. Secondly—
232. Just pause for a second. We all nod our
heads, that sounds all very splendid, but what does it mean?
(Dr Coleman) I think what it means is that one of
the things that those of us who have been spending a lot of time,
I know you have in fact, looking at public perceptions of Parliament,
find that there is a common belief that you cannot get it at it.
It is aloof, it is out there. I think that this sort of connection
giving the opportunity to take a particular piece of legislation
as it is being made and at least have some sort of an informed
discussion which links in with other people who are having informed
discussions means that you are broadening the traditional connection,
the connection between lobby groups, or the connection between
civil servants and those deliberations and broadening it into
a wider section of the public. That is something you will have
to resolve because first of all you do not get all of the public
doing that, as you will not get all of the public doing anything
political, but you will at least make that opportunity available,
you will make that part of this changing perception.
233. I understand that and that is very positive.
More informed discussion, more extensive discussion about things
that Parliament might be doing but where is the pay off in that?
(Dr Coleman) The pay off for parliament or the pay
off for the participants, for the citizens?
234. We have got to the point of more discussion,
more people are tapping in, they are looking at legislation, they
are having exchanges of views but then what happens?
(Dr Coleman) It depends on how you define discussion.
Discussion is expertise, knowledge and experience being organised
in such a way as to try and have a political effect. Nobody I
suspect takes part in anything that is called a political discussion
if they do not think there is some sort of a direct or indirect
pay off for them. What they think they are doing is having an
influence. They think they are having an influence upon politicians,
the people who vote for politicians or upon the media, they think
they are entering into a space which is different from just going
down to the local pub and saying to somebody "I think this
is terrible". In that sense there is a feeling on the part
of people participating in this discussion, for example, that
something at some stage might shift. In this particular case there
is no doubt that one of the reasons that this was a much more
legitimate discussion than some of the others I have seen run
on the internet have been was because it was connected with a
parliamentary committee. That is one of the reasons why when people
heard about it they were writing to the Hansard Society and saying
"We want to be involved in this". You may say, and I
think in candour one would have to say, that it was not that much
connected to a parliamentary committee but it was more so than
any had been before. This Committee is in fact the first one in
the history of the House of Commons that has seen something which
is rather like evidence, one cannot necessarily call it evidence
because of all sorts of things to do with privilege, but something
rather like evidence from people whom you did not choose to ask
for evidence, in a way that did arrive and arrived in a fairly
organised fashion. Now one of the ways that the process needs
to be improved is the means of collecting that evidence and organising
that evidence at the end of the process needs to be sharper. In
fairness this was a discussion about a very amorphous sort of
subject and when you are discussing say the Data Protection Bill
or when we are about to discuss Domestic Violence we will get
much clearer, much sharper policy recommendations. On e-democracy,
on some of the recommendations that people had to make that I
have mentioned, most of them were genuinely rather more about
spotting future patterns and wanting to inform you of what they
saw those patterns as being. That is the pay off institutionally
for parliament or councils or whoever and the pay off for participants.
The other one, in terms of deliberation, is about good citizenship.
I wrote the appendix to the Crick Report on Education for Citizenship,
on the use of information technology, and one of the problems
that we have is that we are training young people or educating
young people to be engaged citizens but we do not actually have
enough avenues for them to use in order to be engaged citizens.
We are telling them these are all the different things you can
do but the connections are not there or they are not seen to be
there. Opening up some interesting and rather exciting new connections
is one of the things that may well make that engaged citizenship
better and make people want to deliberate more. Thirdly, I think
that there is a pay off in terms of legitimacy. I think that all
of these things ultimately lead to a sense of ownership. I know
that is a very trendy and overused term but it does lead to a
sense of ownership of the parliamentary process. I think that
if one has for example in most select committee inquiries an opportunity
for people to give evidence online then a sense of ownership of
those inquiries by the public would be much greater than they
are going to be when people feel that this is all something going
on in the system.
Mr White
235. What is to stop that happening?
(Dr Coleman) They cannot send evidence to parliamentary
committees. At the moment what they have to do is to write to
the committee.
236. You can e-mail them.
(Dr Coleman) Yes. I am not saying they cannot do it,
what I am saying is there is not the availability for discussion
to surround that process. At the moment one sends something in.
Mr Browne
237. I think it is instructive that we are discussing
this and you are reporting to us in a room that we could not put
a telephone line in.
(Dr Coleman) Yes.
238. This online discussion that you conducted
on our behalf, we were disconnected from by the infrastructure
that we have to work within. I am sitting here listening to all
of this. I endeavour to use as much e-mail and electronic communication
as I can but that is to the extent that the infrastructure that
I operate in from here allows me to and that the finances that
I am given to deal with allows me to. In the knowledge that if
I buy a piece of hardware to do it then at the end of the year
I am taxed upon it. This is madness. It seems to me that if we
are to open the democratic process of this Parliament to the people
out there who clearly want to communicate with us in this fashion
then at the very minimum we need to be given last year's technology
to do it if not next year's.
(Dr Coleman) I agree entirely. One of the other studies
that I have been involved in is the use of information technology
by parliaments in different countries. This is probably one of
the most advanced parliaments in the world in some respects now
in terms of the use of information technology. That simply tells
you something about the others, it does not tell you about this.
One could not possibly ask Members of Parliament to participate
in any kind of serious online activity with the current level
of technology. If one moves in this direction, which I think parliament
should do, there will have to be some significant infrastructural
changes in parliament which could happen. They are not huge or
very expensive in terms of the possibilities that will exist within
say a year or 18 months from now, particularly with some of the
digital technology that is available using digital cameras and
so on. All of those things are perfectly possible but unless one
equips MPs and MPs' offices with that sort of opportunity, it
would be unreasonable to start blaming MPs for not being active
enough on this front if they cannot be.
Mr White
239. From what you are saying it is interesting
that one of the areas that will benefit is that as we move to
more pre-legislative scrutiny that there ought to be this kind
of forum for each of the bills in the Queen's Speech.
(Dr Coleman) Yes.
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