On Monday 16 November 2015, Tinder Foundation's CEO Helen Milner OBE visited a Parliament Week event in York to deliver a public lecture entitled 'Does Parliament Dream of Electric Sheep?' These are the slides from her speech.
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Does Parliament Dream of Electric Sheep?
1. Helen Milner
Chief Executive, Tinder Foundation
Commissioner, Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy
@helenmilner
helen@tinderfoundation.com
Does Parliament Dream
of Electric Sheep?
6. Online conversations did drive street protests
• Conversations about liberty, democracy, and
revolution on blogs and Twitter did immediately
precede mass protests
• 25 January 2011, Tahrir Square protests had
600,000 views on YouTube; 23 hyperlocal Egypt
videos on the protests had 5.5 million views
Opening Closed Regimes: What Was the Role of Social Media During the Arab
Spring? University of Washington, 2011
7. Arab Spring: What did we learn?
• Authoritarian regimes didn't understand that social
media platforms are fluid tentacle networks and
therefore harder to restrict freedom of speech than
traditional media
• Social media and online activities did provide the
organisation and logistical support for offline
demonstrations but ultimately it was people and not
laptops that marched on Tahir Square
11. UK spends most in world shopping online
• UK spends £2,000 per person online shopping,
significantly higher than the next highest
markets Australia (£1,356 per head) and the US
(£1,171 per head).
• More than £1 in every £5 of UK retail spend
(other than food) is now online.
13. 30 million35 million
UK Facebook Users UK 2015 General
Election Turnout
693,800
Membership of political
parties
(inc 190,000 new Labour
members since election)
14. “Over the past 25 years we have lived through a
revolution created by the birth of the world wide web and
the rapid development of digital technology. This digital
revolution has disrupted old certainties and challenged
representative democracy at its very heart. With social
media … and 24/7 media, the citizen has more sources of
information than ever before, yet citizens appear to
operate at a considerable distance from their
representatives and appear ‘disengaged’ from
democratic processes.”
15. DDC: we opened up our channels
• Input via email, video, a web survey, and a web
comment thread
• Roundtable discussions
• Interactions on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• A letter to the vice chancellor of every
university in the UK
• Online student forums
• We held formal, open (and live-streamed)
evidence sessions of the Commission
16. Five headline recommendations
1. By 2020, the House of Commons should ensure that everyone
can understand what it does.
2. By 2020, Parliament should be fully interactive and digital.
3. The 2015 newly elected House of Commons should create
immediately a new forum for public participation in the
debating function of the House of Commons.
4. By 2020, secure online voting should be an option for all voters.
5. By 2016, all published information and broadcast footage
produced by Parliament should be freely available online in
formats suitable for reuse. Hansard should be available as open
data by the end of 2015.
25. 25
• Digital Tasks
• Such as: sending an email; filling in a form;
shopping online
• Digital Literacy
• Confident and able to do a number of
tasks independently
• Digital Fluency
• Confident to try whatever need to
do on the internet without help
28. 28
Young People need support to use
the internet too - it’s not just about
old people
29. 29
Smartphone and tablets are intuitive
to use but no evidence (yet) a tool
for digital inclusion
in UK 6% of online people ONLY use a
smartphone/tablet for their internet use
30. 30
Broadband access is not digital
inclusion
Having access is important
Having good access is important
Using the internet = digital inclusion
31. 31
We can’t CAN help
(almost) everybody
to be digitally included
35. Some good news since report
» Parliamentary Digital Service set up
» E-Petitions new site and clear processes
» 100,000 signatures considered for debate in
Parliament
» Heatmap - petition signatures ‘near you’
» Transparency
» Open Hansard hansard.digiminster.com
35
36. The reality …
» Parliament ≠ Uber/Amazon/Air BnB
» Not same incentives or business models
» Can’t choose customers: all citizens ‘use’
Parliament
» MPs could get overwhelmed
» Need digital tools to help them
» MPs important but not whole story
» Committees, Lords, Parliament Staff
36
37. This stuff is hard
» Democracy must be about more than elections
… real engagement
» Digital isn’t a silver bullet … need systemic and
culture change .. and more internal champions
and role models
» Tinder Foundation experience .. not digital
alone, face-to-face important too
37
38.
39. People are just people. Just because someone has a
smartphone and uses social media it doesn’t mean they will go
on to use a political app. People need to be engaged, they
need information, they need to be listened to, they need
dialogue.
Technology is just a tool that people use to get things done.
Digital only exists with people. It’s not separate.
We can’t talk about digital democracy without talking about
democracy.
In December 2010 a young vegetable seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself on fire outside a Council Building as a protest against police corruption following the police confiscating his cart. Bouazizi dies and the Arab Spring was born.
What distinguished this specific act of protest was that Bouazizi’s friends and family wanted to get his story shared and in order to get around the country’s heavy censorship they used social media. Later that day a cousin and a friend of Bouazizi’s held a peaceful protest outside the same Council building, a friend filmed it and posted the film on Facebook. The Tunisian Government didn’t think they needed to censor Facebook.
The film was picked up by Al Jazeera, sparking other activists to take to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, to keep up with what was going on and to organise further protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere.
As a result of the protests sparked by Bouaziz’s self-immolation and the film made and posted by his cousin, less than a month later Tunisia’s ruler Ben Ali stepped down.
This is a picture that I, and thousands of others, tweeted in January 2011. It’s thousands of protesters gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo, again these protests were organised through social media, and again they led to the resignation of their President - Mubarak - less than a month later.
I remember the huge optimism we all felt in January 2011 when we read this story - a new born baby (a new life) and a new democracy, with democratic change brought about by a relatively new digital tool - social media.
Keen to get below the surface of anecdotes about the role of social media in the Arab Spring I looked at an analysis by academics at the University of Washington. They found that conversations about liberty, democracy, and revolution on blogs and on Twitter did immediately precede mass protests; the 25 January 2011, Tahrir Square protests had 600,000 views on YouTube, and 23 hyperlocal Egypt videos on the protests had 5.5 million views; in the week up to Mubarak’s resignation, tweets from and about Egypt rose from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day.
Social media alone did not cause political change in North Africa, but mobile phones and the internet did provides new tools for activists to produce and share information, to inspire one another, and to share hints and tips on how to use digital to start a revolution. But ultimately it was people not laptops who marched on Tahrir Square.
I’m not going to comment about democracy in North Africa; I’m not qualified. But I will say that the initial wave of optimism that followed these internet enabled people revolutions hasn’t materialised into democratic stability. And, it’s clear that people who have had power and wish to keep power are also using technology to their own ends - for example, employing hackers in Morocco, or utilising face recognition software as they have in Bahrain to locate, identify and punish activists.
Authoritarian regimes in the MENA region didn't understand that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are fluid tentacle networks and therefore harder to restrict freedom of speech than traditional media outlets (often run by pro-regime editors).
When people like Muhammed Bouazizi and Khaled Said were murdered by their respective regimes (Khaled Said was actually murdered outside an internet cafe) it released a public cognitive recognition of anti-regime sympathy on social media that had previously remained private.
Social media and online activities did provide the organisation and logistical support for offline demonstrations but ultimately it was people and not laptops that marched on Tahir Square.
Carly Floriana
This is John Bercow, as the Speaker of the House of Commons he set up a commission to look at how digital technology could and should change the way in which the UK Parliament works. He asked me and 8 others (including two MPs) to be Commissioners.
I was really pleased to be asked by John Bercow to be a Commissioner - it was a way to bring together two things I really care about - digital and democracy - and I was pleased as my role on the Commission was to be the person who knew about inclusion - social and digital inclusion.
I’m not a policy-wonk, a politicians, nor an academic. My day job is working with people out there in our communities who are struggling with basic technology, through thousands of hyperlocal partners, and in Westminster, with policy people, politicians, and current and future Governments.
The UK is a country of early technology adopters. In the UK we love to use the internet. We spend the most per head shopping online than in any other country. At almost £2000 per person in the UK, significantly higher than the next highest valued Australia (£1,356 per head) and the US (£1,171 per head).) More than £1 in every £5 of retail spend - other than food - is now online.
There are more UK Facebook users than the number of people who voted at the 2015 General Election.
So in my view the Digital Democracy Commission was about balancing the UK people’s positive appetite for digital tools with an opposing negativity about politics, politicians, including voter apathy, low turnouts - and seeing if we can do something about it!
Membership of Political Parties 693,800 at August 2015
nb this does include Labour spike
Twitter @Number10gov 3.9M followers 13th Nov 2015
We engaged with a lot of people, we wanted to demonstrate the type of methodologies we were suggesting - openness, online-ness, getting to people who are usually engaged, lowest barriers to participating. Practicing what we were preaching I guess. We opened up channels:
Input via email, video, a web survey, and a web comment thread
Roundtable discussions
Interactions on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
A letter to the vice chancellor of every university in the UK
Online student forums
We held formal, open (and live-streamed) evidence sessions of the Commission
We had informal meetings with a wide range of people.
I ran lots of roundtables up and down the country including in a fish and chip shop in Stockport.
The headline recommendations from the Commission are:
By 2020, the House of Commons should ensure that everyone can understand what it does.
By 2020, Parliament should be fully interactive and digital.
The 2015 newly elected House of Commons should create immediately a new forum for public participation in the debating function of the House of Commons.
By 2020, secure online voting should be an option for all voters.
By 2016, all published information and broadcast footage produced by Parliament should be freely available online in formats suitable for reuse. Hansard should be available as open data by the end of 2015.
We need to empower people to take part of our digital society so that they can be part of:
daily life (such as communicating, information gathering, shopping, banking)
using flexible and convenient public services
and now, to take part in a more interactive and participative democracy through digital.
We can’t have full digital democracy without digital inclusion. This infographic shows the UK’s digital divide.
social inclusion - social justice - equality of opportunity
Phillip K Dick novel which the film Bladerunner was based upon - like lots of sci-fi - future Earth where the haves and the have-nots have been uber-polarised in a post-apocalyptical (post WWIII) type scenario
Theme of book - is it ultimately empathy that determines our humanity?
This is my summary of how we should think about digital democracy.