Not just e-democracy, new democracy, says MySociety founder

Tom Steinberg and his crew of smart developers at MySociety have produced e-democracy tools that manage to win plaudits from politicians, civil servants and citizens. Tony Blair joined Pledgebank and got more than a hundred other public figures to agree to become patrons of community sports clubs, for example.
So when I met Tom at the e-democacy '06 conference yesterday I rather expected him to want to talk about the e-petitions system that enables you take your collected signatures to Downing Street without having to knock on the door in person. Nope. As you'll hear from the video, his horizons have moved from how do we do e-democracy, to why are we doing it.
Once you have managed to achieve the funding for tools, fix the bugs, get people interested it's time, says Tom, to reflect on what changes we might want to see in the system, as well as in policies. What should we be pushing for, and what are the dangers in doing that? After the rush to practical solutions, it's time for some theory.
Put around the other way "what could be the wrong philosophy of representative democracy that would lead to us all building and spending time on tools that were actually unhelpful".
Tom wants people who are building sites in the e-democracy field to start talking about what sort of democracy they are building those tools for. He's happy to meet, host discussions, or get things moving in any other way.
Maybe there's some common ground with Matthew Taylor, who earlier in the conference was urging a rethink of the role of e-democracy tools - and in particularly urging tools that assist deliberation. I'm sure they'll find somewhere to talk about it. Online?

Comments

[Kevin Harris]

All very well David, but can I ask:
(i) was the e-democracy conference just about the converted preaching to themselves? (Not that that's always necessarily a bad thing);
(ii) why is anyone still using the prefix 'e-' for anything except possibly e-electronics (the invention of which will confirm the folly of the affectation)?
and (iii) there's a separate discussion been going on for a while now about a new form of local democracy - engaged democracy - implicit in the white paper and the community engagement movement... where are the connections? I don't see them. (Maybe we got a job to do there).
best
k

[David Wilcox]

Kevin ... yes, definitely a job to be done on making connections between local governance/community enagagement interests and e-democracy enthusiasts. But how? Start with one of the other? Another event? Get a mixed group together?