Category: Politics

BerlinInOctober e-democracy summit

On October 15 and 16 I attended an un-conference called BerlinInOctober, organized by politik-digital.de, e-demokratie.org and mySociety. For the third time, people from several international e-democracy projects met in Berlin to exchange experiences and collect inspirations for new services.

That’s why a big share of time was reserved for presentations for individual projects. Many portals are dedicated to bringing more transparency into parlamentarians’ work. Services such as OpenParlamento from Italy and NosDéputés from France analyze the activities of representatives.

NosDeputés tags speeches of congressmen. This way the discussion around a certain topic can be summarized. The site TheyWorkForYou.com on the other hand lets users link videos from the English House of Commons to text from the Hansard, which includes notes from the speeches that are not verbatim.

Thereby the site is one of the few that let users become actively involved themselves to establish transparency. In a session on “action-based sites” it became apparent that still most e-democracy portals are mere services for citizens and rarely offer opportunities to them to take action themselves.

One important task for such participatory sites named in the session was that they have to take up emotions immediately as they evolve – e.g. as someone has to pay a bribe. Therefore it is important that services are structured accordingly. One could use the Obama iPhone app as an example, where the first option was “call friends” – which is the most obvious action to be taken with a mobile phone.

Rob McKinnon of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz made a point in his lecture that it is important to establish transparency apart from big politics. He used the concept of a “web of power” to show that there is a lot of influence located within companies – probably even more than within parliaments.

Therefore it needed more projects that focus e.g. on making lobbyism more transparent, McKinnon said. The goal is to “disentangle” the various circles of influence – politics, media, money. One example for that is journalisted.com, a site that collects information on journalists.

But there was criticism towards those efforts for more transparency as well. Tobies Escher of the Oxford Internet Institute referred to a recent essay by Lawrence Lessig provocantly entitled “Against Transparency“. It is a fact, Escher said, that online even more than offline it is the most well-educated part of society that turns to political activism. E.g. two thirds of mySociety users are academicians. Eschers point is: To only establish transparency isn’t enough, as long as people don’t use the publicly available data.

William Perrin thinks he has found a solution to this problem. He advocates “hyber local community websites”, such as his own project Kings Cross Local Environment. By breaking down information that is available, but hard to understand to its importance for a small neighborhood local initiatives are empowered, he said. This way things could actually be done. Perrin also wants to further spread this approach through is project Talk About Local.

This is a translation of my post for netzpolitik.org (where I am doing an internship at the moment). There’s another report at e-politik.de (in German), and you may have a look at the tweets from the conference, tagged with #bios09.

And everybody goes: “yeaahh”. Why a nonsensical flashmob is the ultimate answer to Germany’s election campaigns.

There’s not much time to go until the German federal elections on Sunday, but we are far from any election fever. Angela Merkel’s success seems inevitable, the only remaining question is whether she will be able to lead a coalition with the libertarian FDP or if she will be forced to maintain the current coalition with the Social Democrats. It’s been a boring pre-election time.

And everybody goes:

But if it’s getting bored, the Internet strikes back. It all started with the photo above. It shows an invitation to an event with Angela Merkel in Hamburg, saying “The chancellor’s coming”. Somebody has scribbled beneath it: “And everybody goes ‘yeaahh’”.

Initially posted on flickr, the photo has made its way through the German blogosphere. As it was taken up by Spreeblick, somebody proposed a flashmob in the comments: “I’d like to be in Hamburg tomorrow! Who’s going? A ‘yeaahh’ flashmob?”

And they went there. The flashmobbers were only a small minority among the 2000 people that had come to listen to Mrs. Merkel, but they certainly had their share of attention when they commented each sentence of the chancellor with an enthusiastic “yeaahh”.

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The thing didn’t end there. When Mrs. Merkel went to Mainz, people showed up to shout “yeaahh” in Mainz. When she spoke in Wuppertal, flashmobbers were already awaiting the chancellor, accompanied by reporters of the honorable “Tagesthemen” newscast.

In a comment for “Tagesthemen“, Thomas Hinrichs complains that the “yeaahh” flashmobs are nonsensical. He’s right about that. In fact, that’s the only point about them. Hinrichs attributes the emergence of the flashmobs to the failed communication between politicians and netizens. The latter, he said, had to stop calling everybody stupid who’s not using social networks, while the parties should start to step up to each other on the internet. I differ on that.

During the last years, Germany has seen the rise of an unexpected civil liberties movement. Fighting against data retention, tens of thousands took to the streets. Fearing the installation of an internet censorship infrastructure, more than 130.000 people signed a petition to the parliament. They went unheard.

Especially the latter case has led to a lot of frustration. The so-called “access aggravation act” proposes the introduction of DNS blocks to complicate the access to child pornography on the internet. On the one hand, these blocks are easily to be circumvented, on the other hand the sites should be deleted, not blocked. The act is, in one word, nonsensical.

This is what experts and activists told the politicians. Over and over again they repeated what they see as reasonable arguments, only to be ignored. In the end, only four politicians of the governing coalition dared to vote against the bill.

That’s why people are on the streets today, parodying the chancellor’s speeches with choruses of yeaahh’s. As all reasonable arguments have failed, people join the meaningless play called politics, answering nonsensical phrases with nonsensical shouts. Mr. Hinrichs is wrong: People don’t want to befriend their chancellor on Facebook. They want to be taken serious. The flashmobs are just the ultimate mirror they hold against those who have ignored them when they came to them with arguments and petitions.

No Country for Young Men

I have translated this post to German here.

I must admit, I took the headline from Ahmed Al-Omran, who used it to refer to his home country Saudi Arabia.

Ahmed utters a complaint that is quite common among young Saudis and other Gulf Arabs: In a move to, as they say, protect women from sexual harassment, many cafés and malls only allow families and single females into their locations. As a result, even though these societies are often very restrictive towards women, these have more opportunities to go out than their male counterparts.

Abdu Khal writes, “If you count the number of youths who have nowhere to go to because malls, parks and beaches are dedicated to families, then you would be appalled. What will the youth do when they find themselves trapped and discarded?”

It is this a problem I encounter day by day. Social restrictions force young people to hang out on the streets. Walking for my favorite café on a weekday’s eve, I will observe youth, probably a little younger than myself, hanging out at dimly-lit bus stops and abandoned playgrounds. They might not even notice because they are so used to it, but I bet they would trade their situation for mine.

Only, they can’t. My favorite café is closed for minors (under 18) after 8 pm, and so are most locations. A recent reportage on the backgrounds of three teenagers that beat up several people in Munich cites one young Swiss: “In the youth center there are only high school students and pussies. The bars we don’t get in. So we hang around here [at the train station] every day.”

A few days ago in an article on Braunschweig’s ban on flashmobs, I cited the city’s conviction that “the public space in Braunschweig serves exclusively traffic, i.e. the transfer from home a to home b, from home a to business b or from business a to business b.”

This is devastating for teenagers that might not find rest at home, nor in commercial cafés. Where are they to go if “public space serves exclusively traffic”? Ahmed gives an answer that is true for Saudi youth as much as for Swiss: “Well, they will do other things that you probably will not like.”

This could be a story about the need of teenagers for a place to hang out at. Indeed, it is. But at the same time, I would like to see this in a broader context. Why are young people forced to hang out on the streets? Essentially, because they don’t own a place of their own. At home, there are their parents, in the café there are owners that are just not their generation.

They don’t own a place because they can’t afford it, and for the same reason they can’t buy access to one (you won’t find the son of a millionaire hanging out on the streets). In this, teenagers share a problem with other groups that are socially marginalized.

The answer to this situation could be the creation of commons. If you have ever been to one of the existing commons after dusk you will know that most of them are far from inviting. Barely lit parks are much more welcoming to those who seek darkness than to good citizens.

But does it have to be like this? In ancient times, the town square was a meeting place for all citizens. A public space, open to the social activities of whoever went there. Today, we have shifted this place to Starbucks, have shifted it from a commons to private property.

Imagine commons, places that are not socially exclusive, but open (and inviting) to everyone. A good market square should be just like that. I have experienced this in Brussels: Hundreds of people sitting on the Grote Markt in the evening, chatting.

Lawrence Lessig describes the internet as a “creative commons”. This square I would call a “social commons”. And just as the internet being a commons enables creative invention, a social commons enables new social networks. It is therefore most of use for those who have not yet established themselves in society. Teenagers are just some of them.

Every time when we talk about integration, we should talk about commons. Their openness allows anybody to participate in them, weaving new networks and building a better, a more equal society. For that a state become a country (also) for young (wo)men.