Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-115)
MR TOM
STEINBERG AND
MR TOM
LOOSEMORE
16 JANUARY 2008
Q100 Rosemary McKenna: Talking about
the Number 10 site do you think that the expectations of both
the members of the public who use the site and Number 10 have
delivered?
Mr Steinberg: I do not know. There
are 4.3 million different people whom we believe have used the
petition site so far and I do not know what most of them think
about it. We are actually talking with Number 10 at the moment
about getting an evaluation done, but even then with so many users
it is impossible to know what they all thought. I believe Number
10 were pretty happy with it; as I said, it was historic in terms
of the reach, the proportion of population that used it, the cost
per person involved, the ability to write back, all these things
are without precedent. I suspect that some of the users will be
dissatisfied that the Government did not do what they petitioned
for.
Q101 Rosemary McKenna: Actually that
is the next part of my question; was the policy changed in any
way?
Mr Loosemore: You will know that
better than we will, to be honest. It is hard to argue that the
road pricing policy would be similar without 1.8 million people
having expressed an opinion about it. Scale is important in that
as well, the fact that it was millions is important.
Q102 Rosemary McKenna: How were the
reputational risks managed?
Mr Steinberg: Are you asking about
Number 10's reputational risks?
Q103 Rosemary McKenna: Yes.
Mr Steinberg: I cannot really
tell you; I dealt almost exclusively with civil servants so I
do not know about that side.
Mr Loosemore: I would say that
for Number 10 to launch a site that was expressly an experiment
was a relatively brave thing to do.
Q104 Rosemary McKenna: And recognised
as that probably by the users.
Mr Loosemore: Possibly not. I
do not think they would want to necessarily give credit to the
Government if they can avoid it.
Q105 Rosemary McKenna: If you were
doing it all over again is there anything you would do differently
to make it more user friendly and what would you do differently?
Mr Steinberg: It is actually what
I would do additionally; it is all the things that could be done
from now on. I told you before that I believed that with some
investment you could try and have actual deliberation online and
get better ideas for policy and so on and engage lots of people.
I would commission some such systems and then I would use the
fact that there are so many enormous petitions on that site already
to nail people and say here, 10,000 of you, here is your chance
to go and talk about this. Personally I would probably be quite
keen on the ability for the person who made the petition to send
again a maximum of two messages saying you cannot campaign here
but send a mail and the mail says "If you are interested
in being part of a campaign around this go somewhere else."
I believe that even if it does come with costs it can have such
enormous benefit for the vigour and health of our civil society
and the engagement of marginally engaged and totally disengaged
political people that it is worth any possible costs incurred.
Q106 Rosemary McKenna: Going back
to one of the previous questions, should it be a big bang approach,
do it all at the beginning or gradually introduce all these features?
Mr Steinberg: My approach would
be to design a very simple first version and launch it quietly
and then respond to the users. Your users will tell you many,
many things if you let them about how the site would be better.
Number 10 was very concerned that if they deleted duplicates people
would accuse them of censorship. We then got enormous amounts
of mail, please get rid of the duplicates, it is really annoying.
When it comes to all the things that could go wrong—I am
going to cite someone else here. Jimmy Wells is the founder of
Wikipedia, the gigantic online collaboratively authored encyclopaedia,
and he has this great rule of thumb. He says design things on
the assumption that people are good and when they are not good
change the system to handle how they are not good, but do not
design things from the perspective that everyone is essentially
an anarchist and wants to smash everything, or you would in that
case start by building a prison and then loosen things up slowly.
Do it the other way round and ensure that you have staff and processes
so that if someone does abuse it you can fix it in five minutes,
not five months.
Mr Loosemore: I would add one
note of caution to that otherwise admirable approach of start
simple and move on, and that is I would not advise starting simple
to mean not having to adapt any of your internal processes, I
would start simple but radical.
Q107 Chairman: At the outset you
indicated that it would meet most reasonable people's expectations
if three or four petitions a year triggered a debate. When we
started this process, looking at our petitioning system generally,
we were horrified to discover that even with our well-established
written system up to a third did not receive any ministerial response
at all, and that is something which the Government has accepted
is totally unacceptable, and departments are now under an instruction
to respond to petitions. However, when we move into the area of
e-petitions if the House, at least initially, felt it was not
prepared to guarantee debating time until the system had bedded
in, surely it would meet some of the aspirations of people out
there if they were guaranteed of getting a ministerial response
and a response from their own Member of Parliament even if the
petition itself was not subject to the debate. Would you agree
with that?
Mr Steinberg: People would use
the site, yes, if you built it and launched it like that, I believe
more people would use it and the more marginally engaged would
use it if they had the nice clear message that if it is enough
then there will be a debate. I would look forward to the first
petition coming in that said "Please hold debates if enough
people sign petitions."
Q108 Chairman: Also would you accept
that we might have to look for additional criteria other than
pure numbers because we may be faced with a petition with the
highest numbers wishing the British Olympic teams all the best
at the next Olympic Games, but I am not sure that is something
that we would have a debate on.
Mr Steinberg: The criteria by
which the major petitions get picked for debate could have a degree
of flexibility around the edge, but it has to be pretty transparent
what those criteria are otherwise large numbers of people will
cry "foul" very quickly. I had exactly the same thought,
you may well have one or two that it is not interesting to discuss
for half an hour.
Mr Loosemore: I would agree that
as an incentive to broaden engagement offering up time on the
floor of the House is far more compelling than getting a dry note
back from your minister. There is also something important about
how little understood the mechanics of Parliament versus the Government
are by most people, and taking the opportunity to impress upon
people that Parliament is not the Government and that they are
engaging with Parliament which holds the Government to account
I would find most important. I would see that incentivising people
to use the service is a huge opportunity to tell them that this
not Government, this is Parliament.
Q109 Mr Chope: Just on that last
point, do you think it would be important as a condition of setting
up a Parliamentary e-petitioning system we did away with the Number
10 e-petitioning system?
Mr Loosemore: Personally I would
prefer that, I think Tom feels very differently.
Mr Steinberg: I would actually
like there to be a petitions.gov.uk in which Parliament was one
of the things that could be petitioned.
Q110 Rosemary McKenna: They are not
government.
Mr Steinberg: All right, petitions.org,
I do not know. The CLG is currently consulting on petitioning
local government or on making a mandate so that local government
will have itself to respond to petitions. I would like to think
that citizens could get to a stage where they had one nice simple
service rather than having to learn all these different brands,
different places to go, and then the one service would explain
the nature of the different bits of government when people went
to use it, just as when people go to our website writetothem
we explain yes, you can write to your councillor, yes, you can
write to your MP, but here is what they do, here is the one you
should pick.
Q111 Rosemary McKenna: What are the
options for hosting an e-petitioning system and are there risks
attached to external hosting?
Mr Loosemore: You are already
externally hosted so I would advise strongly that you do not let
anyone throw chaff in front of you about where the physical location
of the boxes that do the serving are, all that matters are that
the processes and systems are protected, not their physical location.
Q112 Rosemary McKenna: Do not worry
about it.
Mr Loosemore: Do worry about the
security of them but where they are physically located is irrelevant.
Q113 Sir Robert Smith: The current
written one, where nothing happens to it, in a sense a lot of
people say no one really checks the signatures, checks whether
they exist. Do you think if you are going to have an interactive
system there needs to be an element of whether it will be self-checking
to some point that they are actually generally responders that
have signed the petition?
Mr Loosemore: As I said earlier
today a validated email address is about the right level of protection,
it is a good level of protection to ensure that it is an individual
and they are not pretending to be 20 different people. It is quite
hard to get 20 different email addresses and validate each of
them.
Q114 Chairman: Presumably the way
to deal with that is once they have signed the petition they get
an email straightaway confirming you have signed this petition,
so if someone has used a friend's email address that person is
then alerted.
Mr Loosemore: Exactly, and that
is exactly how all of the mySociety sites including Number 10
works. "We believe you have signed a petition, if you have
click here if not let us know." Going forward, the Internet
is full of cunning people despite Jimmy Wells' best endeavours
and keeping one step ahead of the worst case is certainly something
to keep in mind, but you have got their postcode and their physical
address which you can validate against and at least keep, at the
household level if you so wish, so there are mechanisms to put
in.
Q115 John Hemming: Can I clarify
one of the points? If you use a friend's email address an email
goes to the friend who has to click on it to say, yes, that is
me, before it actually gets signed, so it is not that they just
find out that somebody is trying to sign something in their name,
they have to take a further step to authorise that it is in fact
them that wants to sign this petition. If they do not it raises
the problem for the lobby group signing everybody else and then
having to click on something, but at least they do have to authorise
it, which is the point that it is easier to forge a written signature
because you write a random written signature down whereas okay,
you can set up a G-mail account, a hotmail account and all sorts
of different things like that, but that takes more time than writing
a fraudulent signature down.
Mr Loosemore: I would say that
it is not a system you currently have on your department website
where people contact you by writing letters. You can abuse that—or
some people do—and I think that is strange.
Chairman: Gentlemen, on behalf of the
Procedure Committee can I thank you not only for your time but
for sharing with us your judgment, based on your considerable
expertise in this area. We have found this most valuable, thank
you. I declare the meeting closed.
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