Categories
e-democ / e-gov

The Labour Party Conference

This year we have the Labour Party's conference in Brighton (as if you didn't know). After managing to negotiate Sussex Police's astonishingly large Operation Otter (who comes up with these names?) I've slipped into quite a few fringe meetings already.

Before reporting on the fringes though, a few other items. The main thoroughfares in Brighton have become banner battle-grounds with supporters of the new stadium in Falmer making some creative entries (unfortunately as I'm rather opposed to building a football stadium in the countryside next to my University!). e.g. 'Professional football club, GSOH, looking for new home' or something to that effect.

Still the most striking banners are the primary colour New Labour ones which strike me as being odd in a number of ways…

  1. The 'New Labour, New Britain' thing just seems remarkably hackneyed and dated in any context including the banners.

  2. The statements on the banners are just so banal, meaningless and impossible to verify as so they do nothing for the casual observer. 'A better life for children' or 'A better life for communities' means what exactly? Labour has made many good changes (along with several bad) but these banners don't highlight the good work, they're almost aspirational – if they mean anything at all.

Robin Grant over at Perfect.co.uk (who is making blogging ever so challenging, he's posting on everything before I ever get a chance to!) has noticed that there are matching banners being advertised on the web. Nice to see some banner ads being used, but the same comments above apply to Labour's particular implementation.

The banners link through to the Labour Virtual Conference which does provide quite a decent conference experience with webcasting, live chats and… a blog ('conference diaries' in Labour.org.uk lingo) with comments enabled and even some entries from Party Chairman Ian McCartney. Some of the posts are a little garbled but I'm really rather impressed. Again Robin at Perfect.co.uk has more on Labour conference blogging.

Well this has turned into a rather large post in its own right so fringe reports in a later post…

Categories
voting

E-Voting: Policy and Practice event

NMK/IPPR are hosting 'E-Voting: Policy and Practice' in London on 4th November. Lots of interesting people will be speaking: Stephen Coleman, Louise Ferguson, the director of policy at the Electoral Commission (Nicole Smith) and Jonathan Briggs from Kingston University. Oh, and me!

More info and signup

Categories
voting

Chimp hacks Diebold audit log

Yes, it's a dumb PR gag, but I like it!

Bev Harris got a chimp to change the audit log on a Diebold system.

Categories
current affairs

Pro-hunt madness in Brighton

Today is the big Countryside Alliance demo in Brighton thanks to the Labour Conference (which I will report on fully real soon now). The madness has begun, around midday all roads were closed around the centre and several dead animals were found.

Yes, dead animals. A dead horse was dumped on Queens Road, the main road leading from the railway station to the sea (picture). Two dead calves were dumped by the conference centre (BBC News report). What this achieves for who is unclear. Two men have been arrested but did they want to undermine the pro-hunts people or support them?

I tried getting a picture, but didn't of a massive Countryside Alliance banner by the Clock Tower in central Brighton. Strangely as the conference delegates began arriving the banner mysteriously 'fell' off the scaffolding so that no delegates could see the message. I'm anti-hunting for sports myself but the way banners and posters have been covered up in the run-up to this conference is just appalling.

UPDATE: Some pro-hunting women have jumped in the sea half-naked. Not surprisingly this has got the interest of press photographers. More on Sky News. Thanks to Dave Walsh for most of the links in this post.

Categories
e-democ / e-gov

Links 24-09-2004

  • Louise Ferguson has posted a useful roundup of recent e-voting articles and upcoming events

  • Brighton & Hove City Council have launched an intriguing site which lets you navigate the text of their Local Plan through maps. It's a fantastic idea but you can't actually post comments online and the usability leaves a LOT to be desired. Perhaps Louise could give them a hand.

  • Perfect.co.uk had a great post on online consultations back in June. The link has been sitting in my 'to read' folder all that time. It packs together a lot of good stuff, some of which I'll comment more on next week. (Oh what a tease… I know).

Categories
voting

Communications of the ACM: Special Issue on E-Voting

The world's most widely read academic periodical on computing has dedicated its October issue to the issue of e-voting. I was honoured to be asked to help with this issue which was guided to completion by Peter G. Neumann (of RISKS fame), Rebecca Mercuri and Tom Lambert from ACM.

I contributed “Source availability and e-voting: an advocate recants” where I argue that open source e-voting software is not enough to ensure a secure, private and accurate election.

Full table of contents for the Special Issue

Categories
voting

Geneva pushing Internet voting

Michel Chevallier from the Geneva State Chancellery emailed me a press release announcing that without any special registration 22,000 Geneva citizens will be able to vote from anywhere online in six referenda on September 26th.

Personally I don't think technology is ready for such matters but Michel and the team in Geneva very strongly feel that e-voting is the way of the future, especially with the preponderance of votes Swiss citizens encounter in their civic lives. The Geneva election is probably a world first as it uses only the standard voting credential citizens receive no matter which channel they use to vote.

The system is merely an SSL-based website, so how security and anonyminity are delivered is unclear. I've put the original PDF press release on this site as I can't find it anywhere else.

Categories
e-democ / e-gov

Perfect.co.uk on political blogging

Perfect.co.uk has an excellent roundup of political blogging in the UK, including the announcement that Boris Johnson has started blogging (thanks to Tim Ireland's encouragement). Fantastic news, Boris is the only man who could have spearheaded the Tory blogging charge.

Categories
voting

No e-voting in 2005?

Following on from the Electoral Commission's report on the all-postal ballot pilots this year there is news that e-voting may be put on the slow burn, thanks in part to the Commission's view that all-postal ballots should no longer be held.

There was some pretty tame debate on the Commission's report in Parliament recently. Thankfully there was also a rather decent debate held yesterday (Thursday 16th) in Westminster Hall discussing the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee report on postal voting.

KableNet have put some rather selective quotes from this Westminster Hall debate together with a quote from the Electoral Commission to suggest that there will be no e-voting trials before May 2006 at the earliest. We shall see if this holds true but the new foundation model for multi-channel voting which the Commission wants to prepare will take time to develop and so such delays sound realistic enough to my ears.

In their Government Computing Weekly email the folks over at KableNet write:

This may be a problem for e-voting enthusiasts and for IT companies wanting to get a market going, but it is also bad news for the democratic process.

It's not that e-voting can improve turnout levels – the evidence on this is inconclusive – but what it does mean is that our election system only falls further behind the times.

If e-voting is ever going to work, and to provide what could be an extremely useful service for people, it needs much more testing. It was just this that the local pilots provided. Gaining public trust and confidence in e-voting will only have suffered a serious setback if the pilots don't go ahead.

Two problems with this view…

  1. It assumes that e-voting one way or another is inevitable. We have seen from the all-postal pilots that just because something new is tried doesn't mean it will inevitably adopted.

  2. The comment also seems to suggest that e-voting isn't happening anywhere else in the world. It is… the US presidential elections in a few months will be just one of many opportunities to learn about how hard it is to get e-voting right.

Categories
voting

E-Voting article published

I'm very proud to announce that the excellent journal Information, Communication & Ethics in Society have published my article 'Government and ICT Standards: An Electronic Voting Case Study'.

It's in Vol 2, Issue 3 which I only just got hold of (having been so busy I haven't been into SPRU for a while). Please do support this journal by subscribing!