But we don't live in an ideal world. People are ignorant and selfish. Councils are cash-strapped. So, once in a while, I'll go litter picking. I strap on a high-vis jacket, take a grabber, gloves, and refuse sack. Then I get to work. It feels like the least I can do. I want to live in a pleasant environment and spending a few hours in the muck is a small effort which gives meaningful change.

That's also how I feel about most online activity I do.

I recently took part in Democracy Club's General Election Data Gathering exercise. A bunch of us went through all the election documents published showing who was standing. We (semi) manually transcribed documents, checked they were accurate, added details about candidates, and generally gave the data a good scrubbing.

I made over 200 contributions⁰.

In an ideal world, the local authorities would publish all these data in a standardised format, with appropriate metadata, and digitally authenticate the documents. But councils are cash-strapped and many of the people involved come from a paper-based world with little thought for digital technologies. Despite repeated efforts¹, local authorities seem reluctant to engage in the data-driven world.

I want to live in a world where every voter can quickly and easily find out who they can vote for - and where they can vote². So I engage in digital litter picking.

It isn't glamorous or sophisticated work. It doesn't require much training, or a huge time commitment. But it's the sort of thing that I think can make a real difference to the civic environment.

If you've ever corrected a typo in an Open Source readme, or added alt-text to an image, or tidied up some broken references in Wikipedia - you're doing Digital Litter Picking. You're cleaning up after others. And I think that's a marvellous way to spend a little time.

I'm a member of a board and we recently held an election for new board members. We had 8 spaces and 19 candidates. Candidates wrote a short application and we each ranked them in preference order. My most favoured candidate was ranked 1, the worst candidate was ranked 19.

With multi-member elections, there are seemingly endless ways to tally votes. So we tallied them half-a-dozen ways, to see what effect that would have.

It was... interesting. Here's a lightly redacted screenshot.

The green colour in the top half represents a "top 8" vote. The pink colour in the bottom half represents someone who would have been elected using one of the various proportional representation voting systems.

This is my imperfect recollection of the process - again, lightly redacted - that we went through to pick the winners.

Firstly, anyone who received a complete vertical pink streak was in. Candidates 8, 12, and 19 were duly appointed. Congratulations!

Secondly, anyone who didn't score in the top 8 under any system was out. 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 14, and 17 were thanked for their application and asked to apply again next year.

That left 9 candidates for five seats. What should we do? Pick one counting method and stick to it? Count up the winners of various different systems and weight them accordingly? Run another election which just those candidates? Expand or contract the seats available?

What would you choose?

Remember, this isn't a straight democracy, it is a board deciding who to work with. So we discussed it, like rational adults.

Candidate 10 didn't have a particularly strong showing, but they brought a lot of experience that wasn't found in any of the winners. So they got in.

Number 13 looked great on paper, but we were over-represented by people from their industry. So they went on the reserve list.

Candidate 6 was polarising. Two voters argued passionately for them, but the division was insurmountable and they weren't chosen. So, as a compromise, we took Candidate 18 out of the running as well.

And so on and so forth. With a bit of good natured arguing, and a little horse trading, we came up with a good set of new board members.

Did we make the right call? I'm not sure. This was a slightly strange election - with more candidates than voters - and there was no clean sweep. Every candidate with a pink mark next to their name was good - and I'd happily have worked with any of them. But, sometimes your favoured candidate just isn't compelling to others. And no amount of reasoning will shift their mind.

Democracy is inherently messy. But we muddle through as best we can and hope that both electors and electees are acting in good faith.

They're currently soliciting for comments on the question:

The system of laws and law-making in the UK is complex, but is that inevitable given the highly developed and interconnected society which laws regulate? Should you need to be a lawyer to understand and use an Act?

You can leave your comment on their forum - here's what I submitted.

Albert Einstein said:

[T]he supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

Or, as it is more commonly paraphrased "make things as simple as possible - but no simpler."

The law applies to every person - we should not have to become experts in how to be governed.

Let's take, for example, the Sale of Goods Act (1979). It is one of the most important pieces of consumer legislation yet is almost completely unintelligible to the lay reader. The state has published hundreds of different pamphlets, guides, posters, books, and websites trying to explain it. Not to mention all the work independent consumer organisations have done in trying to make the legislation legible.

I present a random extract from the act. Before trying to understand it, I'd appreciate it if you were to try to read it aloud on a single breath of air.

Where there is a contract for the sale of specific goods or where goods are subsequently appropriated to the contract, the seller may, by the terms of the contract or appropriation, reserve the right of disposal of the goods until certain conditions are fulfilled; and in such a case, notwithstanding the delivery of the goods to the buyer, or to a carrier or other bailee or custodier for the purpose of transmission to the buyer, the property in the goods does not pass to the buyer until the conditions imposed by the seller are fulfilled.

I've read this several times, and I think it means that "If you buy something, it doesn't become your property until you've fulfilled all the parts of the seller's contract. If you don't meet those conditions, the seller doesn't have to give you the goods." Am I close?

The law doesn't need to be in iambic pentameter - but it does need to be readable and understandable to those to whom it is targeted.

This may mean, in future, that an Act isn't written in paragraphs but drawn out as a flow chart or as UML diagram.

Ambiguity only enriches lawyers. Any adult with a GCSE in English should be able to parse a law and understand its impact. To often legal disputes seem to arise not from a willing breach of the law - but by misunderstandings.

I work on user-interfaces for software. If a user doesn't understand that how she has to fill in a form - I have failed. I would suggest that any law which requires a professional to assist with its understanding has also failed.

My suggestion is that all proposed bills undergo a period of UAT (User Acceptance Testing). This UAT would ask members of the public to try and interpret what a law does - and whether it meets those goals.

This can be done online - for example a quiz showing a paragraph of a bill, and then a multiple choice question to see if it has been understood.

Denny is standing for parliament in Hackney South and Shoreditch. He is standing on a platform of Direct Digital Democracy.  If he is elected, he will run an online poll for his constituents.  Whichever way they vote, he votes.

Why This Is a Dumb Idea

• The wisdom of the crowds relies on an informed crowd.  Asking people to guess the weight of a cow relies on them having some understanding of weight, density and - crucially - seeing the cow.
• Who would vote against The PATRIOT Act?  Aren't you a patriot?
• The Sun lies to its readers - what if people are motivated by misinformation?
• Will only extremists vote for certain bills?
• Engagement.  Not everyone has access to a PC - those that do often don't have access to their own PC.  Who wants their partner looking at their votes?

Finally, Denny says that

There are three exceptions; three types of law which I will always vote in favour of. I hope that you will agree with me on these three points:

1. I will always vote for laws which improve equality.
2. I will always vote for laws which improve civil liberties.
3. I will always vote for laws which improve our democracy.

I'm reminded of that old joke. A man asks a woman if she'll sleep with him for a million pounds. She says yes. What about ten pounds? "What kind of woman do you take me for?" She says. "I already know what sort of woman you are," he says, "All we're doing is haggling on the price!"

What other issues are so important that he's willing to sacrifice the ideals of DDD? Which issues couldn't be shoehorned into one of the above categories?

Besides, what if Denny's constituents want to disenfranchise black lesbians and place them in labour camps? If voters can't be trusted on those issues - how can they be trusted with tax, pensions, the Digital Economy Bill, etc?

Why I'm Supporting Him

Denny de la Haye

@DemoexDenny

I have just received (in person) the final donation I needed to raise my deposit - thank you @edent!

---

While chatting with him, he mentioned that he was just £10 short of raising his deposit. So I gave him the tenner I had in my wallet.  Why?

Because I might be wrong.

I think that DDD is a flawed idea. But I don't know. We need experiments within a democracy. We need to have our assumptions challenged.

I hope - I really hope - he gets in. I want to be proved wrong. I want to live in a world where single issue candidates can make a difference. Where experimental democracy thrives.

If you live in Hackney, Vote Denny

His central thesis is that we, the taxpayers, have paid for government research and data - we should be able to access it. Easy, free and unfettered access to raw, unadulterated data will allow us to do wonderful things.

Take a look at his recent TED Talk, it's inspiring stuff.

I think there's a fatal flaw in his plan.

Data, in its raw form is hard to come by. Data in databases is, in my experience, a rarity.

Data is usually held in Excel workbooks or Word documents or, more likely, random emails.

Let's take, as a perfect example, the Post Office.

Tom Taylor wanted to know the location of every postbox in the UK.

This is the sort of information which could be very useful to all sorts of projects. A widget to tell you where the nearest postbox was which hadn't missed the last pickup. If you were looking for a new place to live, knowing where the postboxes were would be helpful. Perhaps there is a public health implication that none of us are aware of yet.

It's the sort of small, bespoke manipulation of information which having free access of data makes possible.

So Tom makes a Freedom of Information request to the Post Office.

You can read the whole story yourself, but in synopsis, the Post office doesn't hold these data!

Local Post offices may do - but it's probably on scraps of paper, old print outs, a list in an obscure data format on an old PC that's never backed up.

So, some bright spark creates a database in Microsoft Access. Not only is Access a barely credible alternative to a database but (and here's the punchline) the database they've created doesn't record post codes properly!

Now, this isn't a crappily designed products built by EDS or Captia to an ever changing specification - this is a in house design. Probably specced and built by someone with a day's training in Access. People who only think they know what they're doing are dangerous.

Because it's only designed for internal use - and light use at that - the data and its structure are of extremely low quality.

At best, huge tranches of data are held in barely functional, imperfect databases. The rest as flat files on individual computers in multiple inconsistent revisions.

Now, it's been several years since I've worked for a local government, but I can't believe too much has changed since then. Especially given what I see in day-to-day business. For some of the companies that I do business with, the very idea of having a database is akin to science fiction. Everyone knows that best practice is to keep data centralised location in a well maintained database. But everyone knows that's it's easier, in the short term, to keep the data in a spreadsheet on your desktop.

So, the challenge is 3-fold. 1. Convince people that placing information is a good thing to do. 2. Designing databases which are both correct & useful. 3. Freeing the data from their hellish-Excel bondage.

It won't be easy. However, the end result will be worthwhile.

But it's up to all of us - whether we're in public or private service - to make sure the data we're creating is rational, well formed and accessible.

Raw Data Now.

Edit: 29/06/2009 Tim has posted about Putting Government Data Online.

The chances are quite high that the data your department/agency runs off will be largely in relational databases, often with a large amount in spreadsheets.

I'm what you would probably describe as a natural Labour voter. I'm middle class, the son of teachers, University educated, member and representative of the NUS, I'm employed by a big British company, I'm a proud union member and a home owner.  I even spoke at the TUC before Gordon Brown took the stage.

I probably won't be voting Labour in the next General Election. I say probably, because you still have a chance to win me back.

Allow me to explain.

I was a few months short of being able to vote in the 1997 general election. But I campaigned hard for you; as hard as a 17 year old can.

I was ecstatic when you won. I stayed up all night celebrating.  This was going to be the start of a bright new future. I was looking forward to voting for you as soon as possible.

Then a strange thing happened. You hit me with tuition fees. My family could just about afford it, but it felt like a small betrayal.

You introduced the minimum wage - you set it too low, but that's the compromise of politics. What hurt was keeping it artificially low for younger workers.

There were many other ups and downs - no party is perfect - but I was generally happy.

When it came to the first election, I tried really hard to vote for you - but you wouldn't let me! In every ward and constituency I have ever voted in, you've not either not fielded a candidate or had such a poor showing that I would be wasting my vote.

Your intransigence in sticking to the first past the post voting method caused me to hold my nose & vote for the Liberal Democrats; anything to keep the Tories / UKIP / BNP out.

You've stymied my attempts to vote for you! The outdated method of voting discourages new voters. This needs to be remedied. It may mean you lose some of your power - but that's democracy.

I'll skip over House of Lords reform and a lot of other issues - creationism in schools, corruption, -  all of which I'm passionate about, but they're better addressed by more eloquent bloggers. I'll  concentrate on the three points which now prevent me from voting for you.

The Iraq War

You knowingly lied to us and, in my opinion, allowed this country to become involved in War Crimes. Millions of us marched against this war and you ignored us. Then you had the temerity to say that people were disengaged with the political process! We are not disengaged with you - you have abandoned us!

ID Cards

These are symptomatic of the utter disregard with which you hold our civil liberties. They are a costly boondoggle which have no tangible benefits. Make no mistake, there are thousands of us prepared to stage mass civil disobedience - including imprisonment - to convince you to scrap this illogical and wasteful plan.

Your slavish adherence to The Daily Mail

It seems that you would gladly abandon any principle in order to get a good write-up in the gutter press. Every time they run one of their petty, bullying, coniving "campaigns" you feel the need to cave in to them. You've failed to realise that the mainstream press is rapidly becoming insignificant. Every time you give in to them, you abandon your supporters a little more.

...and breathe...

Now, obviously you're doing something right; you keep winning elections. Albeit with a smaller & smaller share each time.

But you have lost me - a natural Labour voter.  At the European Elections, I'll be voting for the Liberal Democrats.

However, it's not too late! You can still win me back.

• Grow a backbone. Stand up to your detractors. Keep your principles. When the Daily Mail has a pop at you - ignore them.
• You have a mandate from the people; act like it. Let people judge you on your record, not on the lies they read in the press.
• Give us the reforms which you started in 1997.  Make British democracy a shining beacon to the world - not a fusty, dying, inefficient relic.
• Remember that you govern at our pleasure. Keep us free, safe and happy.
• Apologise.  You've done wrong. You know it.  We're smart enough to know the difference between a course correction and a U-turn.

I'm enjoying what I see of the Lib Dems. They have smart policies and relatively uncorrupted MPs.  If you don't start addressing your problems, you'll find more and more of your natural voters abandon you.

I know you can change. Remember, while the polls for you are at rock bottom; things can only get better.

Yours etc...