18 Sep · Sun 2005
Oops - did I blink and miss it?
How remiss of me. It appears that the UK government has just spent a whole week convincing us how wonderful ID cards are, and I had no idea. Thanks goodness for the Register. Now all I need to do is find how what Home Office minister Andy Burnham means when he asserts (no, it's a claim) that: "It may sound like a bold claim but our ID card system will protect personal data and privacy." Hmmm. They can't tell us how much it will cost yet, but they already it will do some pretty tricky stuff. Nifty.
The participation age in action...
The Beeb's News Site has several stories about the growing number of e-democracy initiatives. One phrase which really caught my eye was this one:
"Debate will be less likely to be dominated by professional lobbyists or single issue zealots, he believes." (Tom Steinberg, architect of the FaxYourMP site).
I've been tangentially involved with local politics on a couple of occasions, always in addition to my day job, and I was struck by two things:
1 - the motivation of local politicians seemed to me to be sometimes obscure and frequently strange;
2 - it takes a lot of time and effort to apply even slight influence to their deliberations, let alone successful influence. As a consequence, the motivation of the small band of regular lobbyers seemed even weirder.
My own experience leads me to agree with Mr Steinberg that anything which lowers the barrier to broader participation is a good thing, in that it extends the input beyond those two small groups mentioned above.
However, it's also worth bearing in mind that many of these e-democracy initatives are in their infancy. Whenever I have wanted to contact my MP, I have felt it to be in my interest to give a name and a return address (my own, even!). However, traditional petitioning is not that strong on authenticating the people who sign up. If e-petitioning can also be anonymous, there's potential for the system to be easily abused in some volume.
These are the early days of e-petitioning, and my bet is that we're currently in the 'idealistic' phase, where the novelty is enough to outweigh a few shortcomings in areas like authentication. I'd also bet that it will mature pretty quickly, though, giving rise to some major authentication and entitlements requirements on a mass scale.
The trick will be to ensure that, in enforcing stronger authentication, we don't inadvertently re-introduce the kind of barrier which reduces participation. To my mind, that has been one of the failings of online e-government projects in the UK to date: for example, by overly resctricting the number of acceptable certificate authorities, the UK Government Gateway failed to capitalise on large numbers of already-issued credentials of adequate quality.
At the time when I wanted to enrol, I was a Thawte 'Web of Trust' notary with a healthy number of Trust Points, having registered by presenting myself in person with my passport. There was no mechanism for the Government Gateway to recognise that level of trust, though, which was inconvenient and tended to discourage use of the Gateway.
Posted by racingsnake
@ 01:56 PM GMT+00:00
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