Interviewer:	And Steven is truly one of, if not the, E-Democracy pioneers of the world and remains to this day on of the best online strategists and public speakers focused on the use of the Internet democracy, governance and community.  Steven, welcome to the show, and I wanna get started right away with your latest project The United Kingdom Issues Forum Pilots.  And if you would, just tell us a little bit about what exactly it is and how it's working out so far.

Steven:	Sure.  Well, thanks for having me on your show today.  Gosh, it must’ve been about eight months ago, nine months ago, some representatives at the UK Local E-Democracy Project as well as the Office of The Deputy Prime Minister, the funders of the project came through Minnesota, and I gave them a little tour of E-Democracy here and the grassroots.  And three things that they saw they thought that they'd like to bring back to the UK.  One was the web cast scene - enhanced web casting that the Minnesota House deploys, another was web logging of public officials, some stuff from Northfield Minnesota and the third was issues forums.  And I can talk about that for a briefly.  E-democracy.org, the Non-profit that I've been involved with since 1994, hosted the first world's first election oriented web site, but what happened after the election or actually before the election is we had a forum on Minnesota politics where citizens could talk to one another and when the election was over people kept talking.  In '98 we took that model local, and it was much more dynamic at the local level than anything we had seen even at the state level.  And the UK thought that they'd like to create some pilot forums.

Interviewer:	And so how has the response been from the citizens, the folks who, I guess, are at the grassroots level?

Steven:	Well, most of the UK pilot projects, there's like 30 of them, are more government driven.  The government is interested normally in consultations, so they need a platform in order to reach out to citizens and survey them, or they want to reach out to young people, or to older people and do some special things on the web.  Our model is specifically based on a citizen model where volunteers must come forward to create this for their community, working in a positive way with the local counsel.  The issues forums are not set up as a place just to bash your government.  There not set up in an advocacy mode, which might be kind of strange, at least, for Americans listening to this, the idea is using the Internet to, from the middle, actually bring people together.  It's something pretty unique and so what happens is a mix of technology, e-mail, discussions and web forum technology, and new technology actually called a group server kind of optimizes the connection between them.  We create a space where citizens can talk to each other about local issues.  And they key thing is that through the volunteer citizen base, we've created a model where there's facilitation, where's there's an expectation of civility, where people actually sign their real names and are accountable to what they say, which is very important if you're trying to build trust.

Interviewer:	Unheard of here almost in the US.

Steven:	Yeah, we've been doing it since '94 and it's been hard to convince others to basically adopt real name policies, but if you're a non-profit organization and your goal is to improve democracy right, it's just you're not gonna waste your time with a bunch of anonymous speech that has political value whatsoever.  Now, if you're - if you have your own blog or if you're a political party and you wanna do a little interaction you can just delete everything you don't like.  But if you actually believe that citizens can have an exchange from the right and the left together, and set some agendas and - the local piece is really a key because it makes it less ideological.

Interviewer:	Tell me this, what about the government participation?  Are members of parliament or local officials, are they doing monitoring, are they talking or how are they involved with it?

Steven:	That is one of the cornerstones of our model.  We say, "Where is power, and how do you stick an online commons right in the middle of it?"  If a forum - for example, Brighton and Hove is one of our two pilot forums.  The other is in Newham, a Linenborough.  And in Brighton the forum has about 150 participants and so far we've seen about three or four local counselors post.  We actually had a councilman post like the 2nd day, which really surprised us because we don't put it on the shoulders of the local counselors to participate.  But we are very focused on trying to make it an __________ a more safe environment for people who actually represent citizens to participate.  And that's really important because a lot of online spaces are very critical of anyone who has responsibility because - well let's just - ‘cause they're disconnected from things that are real, but if people who are actually able to allocate a budget toward a problem say like graffiti, they’re talking about graffiti right now and __________ is talking about recycling contracts.  And the citizens have picked it up pretty quickly that, "Hum, this is a different kind of forum than we're used to.  This is one where if we actually say something worthwhile, it might actually have some influence."  And that's a really important aspect to build.  I'd love to see these types of forums all over the United States, the UK, all over the place.

Interviewer:	Well, you mentioned a couple of issues that they're talking about right now, has anything happened as of yet, or have people taken the online talk to the next step where they're implementing policy or anything like that?

Steven:	Well, we get that question a fair amount the pilots that open a month.  And in Minneapolis where we've had the Minneapolis Issues Forum going since 1998, every few months we can point to something where, "Aha, that helped effect the agenda."  We had issues about whether Dairy Queen should take over the public concession stands in the park by the lake.  And the huge controversy - it was actually a park board member, an elected official, in Minneapolis actually posted a note saying, "We just talked about this tonight, what do people think?"  And it exploded in a discussion, and newspaper articles and the next week they changed their mind.  And without the forum, it probably wouldn't of seen the light of day.  It just wouldn't have gotten the attention 'cause the local media just doesn't have the capacity to cover things in - well, the neighborhood media once every two weeks or whatever.  So on the daily media, which is region wide often misses a lot, so it misses obscure, interesting issues.  And in Brighton, so far we haven't had an example where discussion has emerged into the newspaper yet, but it will happen.  There's definitely places where a counselor has gone to the city hall and gotten a civil servant to write up response about where does our recycling go?  I mean, people ask the question, “Is our computer equipment that we put in the recycling bin, is it being shipped to China and are children having to strip the wires?”  I mean, really specific question and I don't know if an answers came back on that specific question, but I've seen a number of cases where there's been some back and forth with a counsel administration then through the counselors have gotten the feedback back.  And that's great ‘cause it allows the counselor to be representative.  I think you're gonna find much more likely with these forums and what we've found is that they have ________ agenda setting rule in the local media.  They're great sources and the media then is an even further democratizing force that brings the smaller discussions, 900 people out of 400,000 people in Minneapolis, for example.   That brings that discussion to a much broader audience and that helps improve the legitimacy of citizens.  Those who show up online having their discussions make a difference.

Interviewer:	A question for you, for someone who could only answer, who's traveled the globe as much as you, you've had a chance to see a lot of e-Government or e-Democracy implementation, or at least shots at it.  And is what's taking place in the UK and also what you mentioned in Minnesota, is that relatively unique or are there other countries that you think are kinda even more advanced than what's going on in the UK right now?

Steven:	Well, what I have found is that countries often have strengths based on their historical direction, so the United States as a whole is a leader in online campaigning and in online advocacy.  The UK is experimenting in the large scale with government based e-democracy project to try to reach out to citizens.  A lot of it is reactions to low voter turnout the last general election, we’ll see about this one.  In Europe, there's - the European Commission has spent millions of Euros on e-government and, in some cases, e-democracy projects creating consortiums.  There is - in the United States, for example, there just isn't any - as far as I'm concerned, a large national pool of resources to foster innovation in e-government or e-democracy that creates tools that are available to more than one unit of government.  There just isn't that sharing aspect here, but that does not mean that the United States is far behind.  A couple places I think are really important to take a look at would be South Korea.  It's a broadband heaven there in a sense.  I actually visited their electoral commission there in Seoul just before the recent - well,  I guess, a year ago, elections for parliament and what they put together in terms of an online voter guide is years ahead of anything I've ever seen in the United States from any of our governments.  Our FCC -

Interviewer:	But do you think it's just the broadband technology or do you think it’s part of the culture too?

Steven:	Well, they're very - South Korea is considered to be a young democracy and in some ways the younger democracies take much more seriously actions of a democracy.  I think in the United States we tend to take things for granted.  We allow - the media does some things, the foundation's totally pulled out in the United States context, and so I think it - I don’t know if it’s a culture thing, but it's definitely a youthful experimental democracy emerging in South Korea and so the net has definitely been brought into that.  And it may also be counter action; maybe people feel that the main line media there was even more disconnected and so sites like Oh My News, sort of, citizen based journalism.  And this is a bizarre story, but in 2001, the National Government Election Commission actually in UK, which is independent - sorry in South Korea, actually funded the creation of online forums for the discussion of the elections.  And then in 2004, they were dealing with policy issues about - they're proposing to require people to use real names when they post on discussion forums about elections because their laws say you cannot tell a falsehood about a candidate.  And so they've realized the only way to enforce the law is to require people to sign their real name.  Well, they abandoned that policy because it was suppose to go into effect the week before the election and they gave up on it for that election, but they claim they're gonna do it in the future.  And so - and they've got youth websites as well which are phenomenal.  They have this site where it tells you how to use your camera phone to take photos of election law violations and then e-mail them or send them in.  It has like James Bond music in the background and some cash being handed over from one politician to - or from a lobbyist to a politician or something like that and then a kid with a camera catching it and it’s just fascinating stuff.  And that is flash based and so the broadband enables that kinda multimedia expression.  It's definitely a place to watch.  One other place I think is kind of interesting is Mongolia, another far away place that I managed to be invited.  And they actually have a site called Open Government, I think it’s open-government.mn and there they actually put out in both English and Mongolian draft legislation.  When do our governments, like when does George Bush put up draft legislation on his web site before it's officially introduced to try to get some extra feedback?  Although, obviously, Congress plays a much, much larger role than anything the President does, but it's - the site by the prime minister there asked the world for input to help him improve their legislation.  That's pretty nifty.  I'm not aware of many governments that are attempting to use the net to gather input like that from experts on policy issues, like their insurance legislation or their telecommunications legislation.  But they're kinda rebuilding a country sort of post Soviet so they had a lot of legislation to work on, it’s very fundamental.

Interviewer:	Wow, that is amazing.  I wasn't aware that it was - that they were looking for input from such a wide extent.  Well, let's move back to the UK for a minute and for a couple final questions.  As you know the elections are only about a month long in the UK and it was announced a couple of days ago that the season had began, and I've already seen a few news articles about how it's being compared in some ways to the 2004 elections in ways that the Internet is being used.  You have any thoughts on this, on how in such a short time period, tactics, or which tactics from the US might be effective to run a campaign in 30 days?

Steven:	Well, I think that while the official campaign period is 30 days, all the parties and particularly the media have been ramping up for this election cycle online.  And so if you go to e-democracy.org/uk05, I’ve created a quick link already that will take you to the open directory projects listing of UK election 2005 sites.  And just glancing at that so far, the BBC is gonna be a big player in, as they are in all, things UK.  The parties will continue to have - they have much stronger websites than the individual candidates and so they've been building the lists.  They don't have to build this from scratch, like a presidential candidate here often does from e-mail, it’s gonna be an e-mail opt-in.  But I think that this - I was kinda disappointed in 2001 in terms of the sort of online activity and part of it was because everybody figured La Rue was gonna win and so the internet makes a much bigger difference when there's a closer margin, like we had in the US here.  And so I think there's that since that voters are fatigued there or they are not as interested in politics right now in the UK.  There's the assumption that Blair will win, but by not as much and so this is an environment where if it does closer the net may be used in ways.  And I think in the large part it might be the liberal party that might benefit the most in this environment, the underdog doing some third party maneuvering, so that's what I'm gonna watch for to see what happens there.  There's a new web site called notapathetic.com, all one word and it's put together by a group called My Society in the UK.  And that's a clear project where if you're not gonna vote you can tell the world why, the slogan is "Don't let your silence go unheard."  And so they had done a lot of vote trading four years ago when folks said, "Well, let’s not that conservatives back, but let's do some different things."  And so those kind of sites got a lot of attention, and I think the Brits are gonna have some fun with some online satire, like we've seen here in the US.

Interviewer:	Well, I hope so, but -

 (Laughter)

Interviewer:	- that keeps people sane I think and breaks attention sometimes.  At least, it did for me during the 2004 election.  Well, one last question for you and it is related to voter apathy.  I think I read a newswire today that the UK is planning online voting, not this election, but the next election.  And I know there's been some test pilots there, and they've been relatively successful and they were hoping that that would cure, if you will, voter apathy.  Do you have any thoughts on that and if that's even a good idea with all the security issues out there now surrounding e-voting?

Steven:	Sure.  Well, for the last three or so years, four years, the UK has experimented extensively with different types of electronic voting, from voting with your mobile phone and SMS to voting via telephone or voting online.  And the one key thing that has emerged out of all this is that the voting by mail experiments have been the most successful and powerful, and they actually do have postal voting apparently.  Just an article by the BBC Today, I believe it was the BBC - Guardian actually, excuse me, noted that 15% of people ____________ expect to vote by mail and it was 5% last election and so that's a key aspect of the election.  And to note, they do not have an incumbent infrastructure like we do with all these optical scan machines and the like.  They have paper ballots they count by hand and so if a country's gonna start interesting in investing in electronic technology to enhance their voting process, they don't have a lot of incumbent technology in the way.  The thing that I think is most important to note is that as far as I can tell with national elections, convenience does not necessarily raise the turnout, where electronic voting or voting by mail, which I'm more of an advocate for, will have a greater impact.  I think it was probably local elections and that's where they had their experiments there.  And to build it into both local and national elections I think will make it likely that local elections will end up resulting in more legitimate elections, which is a good thing.  And the reality to those people, if people don't trust the outcome based on the technology, then even if technology's secure, it doesn't really matter.  So they really have to work to preserve people's trust in the integrity of the voting process, which is probably technology based, but a lot of it's legally and politically based so that if there are problems that they actually get down to them and people have penalty for violating laws around elections.

Interviewer:	Well, that's all the time we have for today.  Steve, this has been great.  I appreciate you taking you time out to join us and just wanna mention to everyone out there for more information about Steven or his E-Democracy Project, he's mentioned 
	e-democracy.org.  You can also visit publicus.net to find more about what he's doing.

Steven:	And one more site, you can go to dowire.org, which has links to all those sites as well.  That's where my newsletter is.

Interviewer:	It does and I'm a subscriber to your newsletter, and I would encourage everyone else to sign up as well.  So thank you everyone and goodbye.

Steven:	Bye now.

[End of Audio]
PoliticsOnline	Interview with Steven	Page 1 of 8
Interviewer, Steven


www.escriptionist.com		Page 1 of 8