New Media, Old Statesmen?

Attended the New Statesman New Media Awards last night, for those people interested in Politics 2.0 it threw up a number of interesting directions that the "new" internet will potentially be driving politics. (These awards are for innovative use of New Media in the realm of "transforming communities, connecting government" to quote the program.)

There were a number of categories, and the winners were.....(tah dah)

Education - Create-a-Scape (a runner up was the elgg open source SocNet system which looks pretty useful btw)

Advocacy - Stop the Traffik - a global anti-slavery campaign site

Modernising Government - No10 Downing Street Petitions - allows you to set up petitions online, and people to vote for them

Elected Representative - David Cameron (represented by his Avatar on the night) for best MP's website

Young Innovator - Livebus - James Wheare built a system on his own time that mashes together a bunch of disparate datastreams to discover bus routes and real time bus running times

Contribution to Society - Neigbourhood Fix-It - a sort of "report minor vandalism to the local council" site.

Information and Openness - Intelligent Giving - It profiles 1,500 charities and gives interesting data such as salaries of main employees - a darn good idea, as the charity sector is one that could definitely do with lights being shone in dark places.

These - and many of the runners up - are harbingers of the sort of early day services that the broadband internet will bring into politics, and that will change it fairly radically. (An aside - we are currently investigating ways in which the broadband net, and all it entails, can actually change the structure of governance - a sort of "how would you do all this starting today" project*)

The ones that are especially as "game-changers"were:

No 10 Downing Street - as it allows the Vox Populi to set up and vote on petitions - makes it harder for Our Elected Representatives to ignore / mediate vie the press / otherwise obfuscate the direct opinions of We The People. Our hypothesis is that this is part of the user generated content revolution - ie unbundling issues from packaged goods aggregators (party politics) and being able to select and vote on the most relevant. (Probably) the only reliable way to stop people gaming systems (e.g. Spinning) is to make them very, very transparent

Livebus - not so much because it gives you real time bus info, but because it represents the use of a "mash-up" to put together data that exists in a variety of disparate databases into new services at very low additional costs to current systems. Its hard to value this one owing to the externalised nature of the cost savings (the saving in wasted time over a year for eg) , but some of these future mashups we suspect will have major impact on external and direct costs as well as time wastage, resource usage etc

Neighbourhood Fix-It - its again a sort of User Generated Content play, using the eyes of the many to identify issues - and it keeps a record of rates of offence, resolution etc too - quite interesting if you believe the arguments around "broken windows" policing - fixing small acts of vandalism being a very useful tool for preventing larger problems.

Intelligent Giving - the delicious irony of a not for profit acting as a watchdog on the not for profit sector is a great start, but what this really shows is a new role for the use of not for profits, using new technologies, to start to watch areas that traditional politics has either had to pull out of, or has never really examined too closely.

Sure, a (still too small) number of Old Statesmen MP's are using New Media, and the ability of new media to magnify the impact of more traditional campaigning work is a good thing, but these can more be seen as evolutionary, whereas the ones quoted above are much more revolutionary in nature.

And will Old Statesmen evolve into New Statesmen, with avatars on Second Life, profiles in Facebook / MySpace / The Next Sexy SocNet - it will be interesting to find out......for what its worth, it was compered by the BBC's Rory Cellan Jones, who has a Facebook profile !

* Given that we most certainly will not be able to afford today's systems in the medium term...but that is another post