Jason Kitcat

I'm afraid there's no way around it, the new youth participation site Being Heard is disastrously bad. It's a terrible shame as creators the Hansard Society are brilliant, switched on people who get it – they're just not technology implementers. (Which could lead me on a long conversation about why delivering web site projects is hard, but I've said it all before). The ever interesting David Wilcox mentions that the site is supported by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport which I guess means they paid for the competition which created it (see end of entry for more on this as its very confusing).

So what's so bad with the site? Where to start: It's difficult to use, half-filled with inane content, re-invents the wheel poorly and is destined for failure.

Let's work through some of the problems…. Firstly I tried to register as that seemed to be the thing to do, I dutifully filled out the short form and here's what I got back:

Looks like the registration form, no? It is with a small bit of additional text saying I'd be sent an email. Unfortunately I never received an email and I couldn't login so I imagine some sort of verification has to be done before everything works. Which is a shame because I can't see all of their pointless Contact Your MP feature.

Surely, but surely Mr Steinberg of MySociety has been to enough Hansard sponsored events by now that they would all have WriteToThem in their bookmarks? Instead of linking to or partnering with this cracker of a service for contacting MPs, MEPs, councillors etc they've gone and built themselves a 'find your MP by constituency or name' system. What the flipping point is that? How on earth is the youth of today supposed to know their constituency let alone MP's name when most adults don't?!? I'm truly depressed that a Hansard Society built site does this.

Let's move swiftly on. You may notice in the above screenshot that the site also offers the opportunity to contact the Royal Family. “Crikey, this could be good” I thought. It's also promoted in their sidebar so my expectations were raised to the heady heights of perhaps an email form…

In the name of all that is sweet and good… All they had was a link to the royal.gov.uk site which tells you to write a letter to the listed addresses as email correspondence is not yet available. Onwards and upwards I say. Or not. The sidebar also offers the exciting opportunity to change the colour scheme to something truly retina scalding – see the samples at the top of this post. How 'fun for the kids' I thought aimlessly clicking on the Explanation of the colour links, which presented me with the following geek-speak:

Why? Sounds like a proud geek showing off his latest copy-and-paste skills. Completely un-called for.

I steeled myself to delve deeper and whilst trying to ignore the interface. The forums were a desert interspersed with the odd post about the cheeky girls and posts by grown ups. I nearly cracked up when I saw a 'Did you know?' about Michael Howard, poor chap:

I had a look at the content in the 'InfoBase' only to be depressed further. It's poorly written, with no byline and questionable sources. It's very, very difficult producing lots of consistent, quality content and there's no need for a site such as this to attempt it when there's so much to link to. I include a snippet from the awful article on P2P, the only item in the Internet articles section.

Being Heard should be firmly smothered now. We desperately need to engage young people (all people in fact) and draw them into the democratic process. But there's loads of popular sites, excellent content and busy forums out there. Instead of empty, bland money wasters like the Being Heard site politicians and activists should engage through the channels already available. It would be so difficult and expensive for the authorities to create a meaningful, long-lasting youth site I just don't believe they should try. I bet most people visit Being Heard are e-democracy types like me, not young folks salivating over the Xbox 360. Being Heard does nothing new and most importantly shows no more likelihood of voices expressed there actually being heard by those in power than any other participation modes out there.

Made by kids in a competition – or not?

It's not clear entirely but according to this government page the Being Heard site was made as the result of a young people's web design competition. The Microsoft sponsored competition homepage is in hibernation mode but implies that Being Head was the winning entry. Yet the government page implies that the brief of making a site called 'Being Heard' was defined and the kids just made the design. Ok, so they made the design – but who decided on the content, functionality and usability. If it was the kids then I think the entire site should be appropriately marked out as such. The Being Heard site's introduction claims it was design only, sort of:

Being Heard is a brand new website from The Hansard Society that was designed by young people for young people. Supported by Culture Online, part of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the three Year 8 winners of the national Web Design Challenge have created a meeting place where you can talk to others, learn about the things that interest you, and tell the world what you think.

I'm confused and partly feeling like I've been too hard on them and yet feel like the site isn't well explained and has deeply flawed functionality and content. The Hansard and DCMS links give the site authority – does it deserve it?

Comments most welcome.

Comments from the previous version of this blog:

Being Heard

Jason

The Hansard Society always welcomes constructive criticism of its projects.

Being Heard was the result of a national competition in which hundreds of entries from secondary schools was received. In the interest of youth participation the website as you see it is an exact replica of the design and content that was produced by the competition winners (13 year olds). Young people were asked to design a website (with budgetary constraints) that was targeted at 11-14 year olds on the theme of ‘Being Heard’ and that would enable young people’s voices to be heard in the citizenship and political arena. The competition winners carried out research with hundreds of young people their age, the Hansard Society did not in any way alter the design or content of the site as we wanted the site to truly be designed by young people for young people, rather than what adults think young people want to see. Finalists had to deliver a pitch and show that they had researched content with their peers.

Being Heard is a new site and we are constantly looking at ways of improving it. We take all opinions into consideration including yours and the young people and teachers who have emailed us, but with over 100 registrations a week we feel we have made a decent start.

Fiona Booth
Director Citizenship Education Programme
12:03:40 GMT 15-12-2005 Fiona Booth

Fiona – thanks for your response

I really appreciate you clarifying the source of the Being Heard website. I think this is the key point – for students of that age it’s an excellent website.

For a professional, commercially produced site it’s not so great. Perhaps this needs to be made clearer especially as the competition website is just a holding page now.
00:03:02 GMT 18-12-2005 Jason Kitcat

Professor Eli Noam has a very short, very challenging article in the October issue of Communications of the ACM. Titled Why the Internet Is Bad for Democracy Prof Noam argues that those who are positive about the Internet's role on democracy are making errors of 'composition' and 'inference'.

By 'error of composition' he means that to observe micro behaviour (the Internet helps a small group of activists) and then propose a macro conclusion (the Internet is helpful for society) is erroneous. I think it's a powerful argument and certainly an important one to hear in what is, at the moment, a primarily technologically deterministic culture. The media seems to portray technology shaping humanity and enabling new things to happen – rarely do we get mainstream portrayals of a social constructivist approach of our societal needs and biases creating the technologies – no, they're happening to us is the implicit message of modern reportage.

The second error, the 'error of inference' is a weaker argument in my view. Noam argues that it is false to argue that if the Internet is good for democracy in North Korea or Iran it doesn't follow that it is also good for developed countries such as Canada, UK or US. In social sciences we need these kinds of comparisons but of course they are fraught with difficulties and no doubt the Internet's impact on an established democracy will be different to it's impact on an oppressive regime.

I won't rehash the rest of the article, it's very much worth the read. I'd say the key theme behind Noam's thinking is that more isn't better – more participation just makes it harder to be heard, more information makes misinformation harder to spot.. and so on.

But it's not all doom and gloom for the e-democracy supporter – if all the Internet can do is reignite interest in Democratic values then, Noam writes, there is hope. I flipping hope so!

Having had a few days to chew on last week's conferences the theme inclusion or its evil cousin the digital divide keeps bubbling up in nearly every presentation.

Those of us in this webby e-democracy aware world are getting a little better at realising that we're unusually connected and ahead of the curve. So presenters are looking over their shoulders – looking at those barely or not connected. We realise how empowering much of the Internet can be and we want everyone to be invited to the party, whether out of altruism or because it means more potential customers!

Inclusiveness is difficult to argue against, but we do need to remember that some people just don't want to use the Internet. But perhaps they want to use a phone? Tom Hume's presentation at d.construct [PDF] re-aligned my thinking when he reminded us just how pervasive mobile phones are by starting his presentation with:

“There are twice as many mobile phones, than there are internet users of any kind. There are three times as many mobile phones than there are personal computers. There are more mobile phones than credit cards, more mobile phones than automobiles, more mobile phones than TV sets, and more mobile phones than fixed/wireline phones… 30% of the global population carries a mobile phone… Over 30 countries have achieved over 100% cellphone penetration rates…”

Many of us are ignoring the mobile medium – but Tom reminded us that the massive lack of standardisation in software and form factor along with the necessary role of the network operators does make developing for phones extremely tricky. Yet there's a huge market there – SMS gateways ahoy!

So whilst mobiles are getting people connected to a network of sorts, until we see improved standardisation we're going to need to be very creative in providing simple usable, inclusive services through mobile phones.

One e-voting nugget, from e-democracy '05, was Stephen Coleman's hilarious and spot-on comment that to see improved turnout government money would be better spent putting kettles and buns in polling stations rather than lining technology vendor's pockets!

Comments from the previous version of this blog:

Kettles or mobiles?

Hi Jason,
I would fund the kettles. Did you know kettles have a remarkable level of penetration in UK households – more even than mobile phones.

People bang on and on about mobiles for e-democracy access, but if you are motivated anough to want to interact somehow with government, you almost certainly can access a computer somewhere (eg a library).

What on earth do people think users will actually do with their mobiles? How much deliberation or debate can you get on a mobile phone screen? I think the ‘mobiles as solution to access’ idea is overstated.
17:16:01 GMT 17-11-2005 Lee Bryant

Overstated?

I don’t know how far some are going with mobile rhetoric but I don’t see massive textual deliberation through phones.

But I do see lots of simple services being deliverable via SMS and/or WAP which aren’t now.

Within the context of the conferences I attended last week mobiles just weren’t on the agenda at all – it was so web-browser centric that I thought discussing mobiles was a useful reality check.

Hurrah for the kettles I say!
12:34:30 GMT 19-11-2005 Jason Kitcat

Democracy and SMS

Jason: +1

Why don’t my utility providers text me when a bill goes overdue? It’s cheaper for them than sending stamps, and quicker. Why can’t I report in electricity meter readings over text? Why can I get my bank balance whenever I want? Or find out when the bins in my street will be emptied? Or report vandalism to the council? Get alerts of local building plans which affect me? And so on.

There are a million beautifully mundane uses for even the most basic connectivity that SMS provides. I’m not sure I’d be in favour of voting-by-text if it were possible… but it looks to me like participation in a democratic society involves way more than just popping into a polling centre every 4 years to scrawl your X.
19:27:46 GMT 21-11-2005 Tom Hume

Tom – spot on!

I agree absolutely…

Out of interest LloydsTSB do offer a weekly balance SMS which is fairly useful when out of reach of the Internet banking. But as you point out, there are so many useful, simple services that could be run through SMS.

The one I love is from somewhere in Scandinavia (Sweden or Denmark I think). Every year you get an SMS saying how much income tax the gov believes you owe. If it looks totally wrong then you can log on, visit the tax office etc and sort it out before the deadline is too close. Most of us know roughly how much tax we should pay but in the UK we have to pro-actively go onto the Inland Revenue site to get any sort of calculations done.

Tom – there’s loads of work for you Future Platforms lot there if only people could see it!
22:37:27 GMT 22-11-2005 Jason Kitcat