Examination of witnesses (Questions 240
- 252)
TUESDAY 11 JANUARY 2000
DR STEPHEN
COLEMAN and DR
PETER BRATT
240. Is that what you are saying?
(Dr Coleman) Absolutely. Yes. I would like to see
almost all pre-legislative scrutiny having an online discussion.
A civic forum to which people would be invited. Even rather dull
technical issues like leasehold reform, we are going to be running
something on that. There are a lot of lawyers and there are a
lot of residents organisations and landlords organisations and
all sorts of other people who desperately want to get involved
in this and get it right and they want to be able to inform parliament.
It seems to me that what one is doing there is not anything different
from what is happening at the moment with lobbyists having that
sort of access. We are simply opening it up to everyone. That
is the only difference. The technology does open it up to everyone.
Certainly every piece of pre-legislative scrutiny - certainly
select committee inquiries - could on a regular basis go out to
online discussions and perhaps publish those as an appendix to
a select committee report. Certainly one could even tie that in
with certain standing committee recommendations and of course
one could have public discussions on post legislation as well.
One could have discussions looking at the effects of legislation.
It is, in fact, the public who have the clearest sense of the
consequences of legislation and may well be able to provide some
very interesting reports on those matters.
Mr Browne
241. I, like the Chairman, have not read your
memorandum. I am glad to see you are coming back this afternoon
so I will keep my powder dry until then and I will do some better
preparation. I am interested in the observation that this type
of communication generates some different form of participation,
some different form of lobbying or communication. My experience
is not that it generates anything different, it just generates
a lot more of what we presently get but in different forms. It
reduces the time barriers, it reduces the geographical barriers
and it broadens the ability for individuals who do not have the
resources to employ political lobbyists to participate. To that
extent even my limited experience of e-communication has indicated
to me I am shortly going to suffer from some form of overload.
What are the technical solutions for avoiding overload that you
made reference to earlier?
(Dr Bratt) There are two answers to give you. In terms
of discussion groups, let us assume you had the technology and
let us assume you had your own web site for your constituency,
a discussion group like this could run on that web site. We built
this with very simple technology quite deliberately with the possibility
of discussing this sort of thing. This means you could have this
discussion on your web site and that would not involve you in
very much work, you could look at it from time to time and you
could contribute from time to time.
Mr White
242. If you do not respond you get into trouble.
One of the reasons I stopped mine was I did not respond quickly
enough for those people.
(Dr Bratt) I do understand. You could go on site once
a day for a few minutes. I know you have very busy schedules,
I appreciate that, but you could actually participate in that
discussion in the time it takes to write one letter to a constituent.
In doing so you could address everybody in this discussion. The
point I would like to suggest to you is that the discussions reach
their own conclusions, they are not like you are receiving 50,
100, 200, 500 e-mails. There might be 500 contributions on the
discussion but at the end they are running towards a conclusion
which you can lift out from that discussion. The discussions might
make your life easier but they do have to be correctly run and
so on; that is one side of it.
Mr Browne
243. I picked that up, at least. In a sense
the discussion moderates itself because people pick up on themes
and respond to other people. Common themes or regular responses,
no doubt, distil issues out of the discussion as they do in any
group discussion, even in a pub—it depends how early the
discussion is in the pub. I have another interest in this, were
I to do this—I am certainly interested in the idea—is
it my responsibility to moderate?
(Dr Coleman) I think the point about it is that there
is a very big difference between these things being run by an
independent organisation and these being run by individual MPs.
I think you need to have an external organisation running these,
whether it is the BBC or whatever. You need to have these discussions
organised on the basis of people feeling there is no bias in the
agenda setting.
244. One of the reasons I ask that is, and this
is a point that my colleague raised earlier directly, whose responsibility
is it if defamatory information is published?
(Dr Coleman) The person who runs the web site. The
person who owns the web site has the legal responsibility. It
is a publishing process, would you not agree?
Mr White
245. This is a bit of a grey area for me.
(Dr Coleman) As far as the Hansard Society is concerned
when we put up a web site and we invite people to speak on it
we assume that if anything illegal is said on that we are responsible
for it. That gives us an incentive to make sure that does not
happen.
Mr Browne
246. Unlike the letters page in my local newspapers
or in the Herald or the Guardian, in an online discussion,
what is said, goes instantly into the discussion and is instantly
published.
(Dr Coleman) Not necessarily. You can moderate any
discussion. That means that anybody wanting to put something up
on to a web site has to have their message seen first by a moderator.
When we ran the discussion on women and science it was not something
that involved very much defamation or illegality. We had hundreds
of messages and we looked at each one of them and there was a
gap, only of minutes on the whole, between messages coming in
and going up on to the site. There was only one of them, which
we did not actually delete but we advised the person putting the
message up not to put it up—she got irritated by somebody
else and told him she was irritated. We thought it was intemperate
and so we wrote to her offline and said, "Do you not think
it would be a good idea not to put this message up?" You
can pre-moderate, that is something that several Government web
sites do.
247. Is that an expensive thing to do?
(Dr Coleman) It is only the cost of the moderator's
time.
248. Which is presumably charged by the hour,
and the number of hours involved depends on the number of items
and contributions.
(Dr Coleman) It depends on the traffic coming into
the web site. The Welsh Office used to have a web site which they
had to take down because a group of young people were abusing
it and kept sending messages. They were playing games of trying
to beat the moderator. In the end the Welsh Office took down the
web site altogether rather than running it. These are real difficulties.
Again I come back to the old analogy about phone-in programmes,
where there is a similar thing. Everyone who is on a phone-in
programme goes through all of the vetting procedures but then
they can get on the air and shout out something rude. In the end
there is only so much you can do; that is life. I do not think
that anybody is going to sue somebody running a web site if an
offensive message appears for a short period and then it is taken
down. There has to be a lot of vigilance in running all of this.
Chairman
249. Can I just ask one or two things? This
Committee's inquiry is looking at innovation in a general sense,
what I am wondering is if you think of things like citizens' juries,
is the suggestion that a citizens' jury in their real form could
be displaced by virtual forums? If the point is to have deliberations
amongst jurors about issues this could happen online. People do
not need to meet, do they?
(Dr Coleman) It depends on how much people need to
look in each other's eyes. The question was asked before about
whether something different is happening. I think something different
is happening. I think I could demonstrate there is a different
style of discourse which takes place online than in a crowded
meeting room, for all kinds of reasons. It is largely to do with
the amount of time people have. It is also to do with the fact
that people cannot look in each other's eyes and that can make
for sometimes intemperate comments. On the whole it makes people
more considerate because they are not quite sure who they are
dealing with. They are dealing with the arguments not with personalities
as such. I think that you can probably put most of these forums,
deliberative polls and citizens' juries on to the internet. Incidently,
it would not make them more or less democratic: if they have flaws
in them offline they are going to have flaws in them online. I
suspect that citizens' juries online may be more like online focus
groups than some of the e-democracy projects that we have been
looking at, in which participation is by self-selection. Anybody
can theoretically join in these on the basis of declaring an interest.
250. Yes. It is very interesting as to whether
these are the same things or not. What you said earlier on about
the question of trust is important too. I am thinking about what
you said about receiving information, how select committees could
receive information material online. When information is received
now it goes through some kind of process. People have looked at
it, it is structured in a particular way.
(Dr Coleman) Yes.
251. People have debated it before it comes.
It comes in some kind of finished form. My sense is that a lot
of information you are talking about now is almost by definition
unstructured, that is one of its claimed merits, it is unstructured,
it is untidy, it is messy, it is spontaneous, it is ragged. Does
this not absolutely produce the problem just referred to of information
overload? How on earth does one go about handling information
of that kind?
(Dr Coleman) I think there have to be intermediaries
whose job is to make sense of this but to make sense of it in
rather different ways because it is untidy and because the untidiness
is a part of the process. I think it would be unwise, for example,
for a Select Committee, to take evidence directly from the internet,
to take an extreme, that would be absurd. It would make much more
sense for this evidence to be taken through a process of deliberation
that is then analysed and presented as evidence.
252. One final question, I would like to know,
you talked about Parliament and things Parliament can do which
offer concern; you were rather dismissive of the idea of Government,
but it is Government that engages in consultation about all kinds
of things. If you could tell Government to do things differently
on a consultation front, what are the kinds of things it ought
to be doing that it is not doing now?
(Dr Coleman) I think that again it is back to the
issue of trust. Government has to be very careful that when it
is addressing people it is not both setting the questions and
setting the rules of discussion. I am not certain whether there
is sufficient public trust in some of the online Government consultations.
I am not sure whether people feel that the pay off which you spoke
of earlier is actually worthwhile because they thought that when
they were speaking to their representative through Parliament
the pay off in a sense is "If they will not listen—",
you know "I wrote a letter to my MP, he did not reply, I
am not voting for him again." It is rather different in relation
to Government sites. I think one of the other things is that these
discussions have to be very carefully structured so that people
feel that they have the opportunity to set the agenda, to expand
the agenda and not necessarily be constrained by questions that
civil servants think the public want to discuss. Again, going
back to the way the traditional media ran some of the audience
participation programmes, it was usually unwise to try and say
to people "We are discussing this today and you will call
in to talk about these things". People do not do it. But
if you allow people to develop a sense of what they themselves
think the agenda should be they very often come up with some quite
interesting good ideas which add value that you might not have
known was there.
Chairman: I know we are very grateful. I think
we ought to stop now because we are going to have another go at
you this afternoon along with others. It has been very helpful
and illuminating this morning. Thank you for coming. I am sorry
about the limitations we have on the technical side with the room.
You have done a sterling job. Thank you very much indeed.
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