One  of the many strands of discussion at a Ditchley Foundation conference on climate change last week was the vexed question of how public opinion shapes the political space open to leaders on climate. There were many furrowed brows on this, not least given that the polling numbers on climate change are all heading the wrong way, all over the world – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the combination of the recession and media coverage of ‘climategate’.

My own take on this is that when we think about public opinion in the climate context, we’re a bit too fast to look at it through the lens of NGOs and the media – both of which had, I think, a terrible summit at Copenhagen.

Take NGOs first. For the most part, they concentrated on highly technical issues, as they have throughout the past decade – acting, in other words, like negotiators despite not having any bargaining chips. When they tried to look up a bit, and set an overall agenda, it was so vague as to be meaningless (“ambitious, fair, binding” – more on that here). Finally, as the summit fell apart, they retreated to their habitual comfort zone of arguing that it was all the fault of the US and EU, who had been unforgivably horrid to poor old China. (See Mark Lynas for a blistering critique of that view.)

Then, of course, there’s the feral nature of the 24/7 news media, which cheerfully overlooks its own agenda-setting role even as it peddles its sensationalised stories of stitch-ups, scandals and show-downs.

The Guardian’s John Vidal deserves singling out for an especially dishonourable mention here. Just two days in to Copenhagen, he ran a breathless piece saying that Copenhagen was “in disarray” following the leak of a draft agreement that “would hand more power to rich nations”. Never mind that the content of his piece was highly questionable (as we pointed out on GD at the time). The effect was to poison the atmosphere just as the summit began – leading the Indian environment minister to say in April this year that the summit had been “destroyed from the start” by the Guardian leak. Nice one, John!

So given that it would appear to be unwise to expect either NGOs or the media to help shape public opinion more constructively, what’s left? One suggestion at the conference was a bigger role for faith leaders – who are indeed getting steadily more active on climate.  

But my hunch is that it’s social networking technologies that are the key opinion formers to watch.

We’ve seen how breathtakingly fast they are at aggregating information – as during the Mumbai attacks, for instance, where Twitter was consistently 60-90 minutes ahead of the news media.  We’ve seen how they aggregate opinion as well as information – which can of course be as much of a curse as a blessing.  And we’ve seen how they can organise action – not just protest, but also more proactive policy solutions.

But what we haven’t seen, yet, is how all these elements could combine in the face of stronger climate impacts  - not just an extreme weather event, but an impact that could really trigger awareness of the potential for irreversible shifts. Strikes me that social networking technologies would be a highly unpredictable and interesting wild card in such circumstances – and potentially rather more useful than either NGOs or the media.

Given the chaos in voting during the General Election, here’s how to do it better, while making elections a more televisual, social media-friendly experience.

As I argued in October:

Some thoughts on elections, which are – as things stand – the epitome of everything people hate about the public sector (inconvenient, confusing, dingy, etc). With a little redesign, we could make them so much more entertaining, user friendly, and festive: fit for the modern media age.

Consider. We live in the age of live. The online revolution has destroyed many business models, but it is driving the value of one-off events through the roof. Rock stars release albums to promote their live shows (ten years ago, it was the other way round). Sky’s business model is based on the capture of live sport, especially football.

Master manipulator, Derren Brown, understands this better than anyone. His recent series was structured deliberately as a series of events – designed to provoke and gel together a stream of frenzied media and online coverage.

To be sure, a British general election is gripping, but almost inspite of itself. We’ll soon be having the first British general election of the Twitter era, but as always the results will dribble in the middle of the night (thus ‘were you still up for Portillo?’).

That didn’t matter a jot in the print era – and television has learned to make the most of the bad timing. But it’s surely wrong for the new media age. When we next go the polls, most of the British public will be asleep when we get to the climax.

My suggestion:

• A Democracy Day, either every two and a half years – with a general election in June and a mid-term in November, or every two years, moving British politics onto a fixed four-year cycle.
• All elections – Westminster, devolved government, councils, European parliament, referenda, etc – will be held on one of these days (by-elections would be the only exception).
• Voting would be as easy as possible, with polls open throughout the week before, and voting could be made compulsory (with a ‘none of the above’ option, of course).
• Democracy Day – a Monday – would be a public holiday – with polls closing at 6 o’clock.
• Sunderland would then do its usual party trick and gets its result out within the hour. The rest of the action would then unfold across prime time; even in the closest years, the result would be clear before the nation went to bed.
• The TV audience would be huge; Twitter and its ilk would go berserk (think of all the local coverage from counts); while election parties and victory rallies could happen at a sensible time.

Some advantages:

- Fixed terms: a predictable, harmonised electoral cycle, with a clear rhythm for politician, bureaucrat and public.

- The creation of a consistent democratic system, even as devolution leads to confusing fragmentation.

- Economies of scale for electoral commission, political parties, media, etc, from running fewer, bigger elections.

- Opportunities to expand the role played by direct democracy in British political life, by running more referenda, elections to quangos and other public bodies, etc.

- More time to vote – which seems pretty important today.

- An unmissable media event.

Details:

- The June election might need to float slightly, depending on the date set for European parliamentary elections (though hopefully Europe will settle). But – before Eurosceptics start frothing at the mouth – there are great advantages to having national and European elections in the same cycle. The party in power in Westminster would also lead in Brussels, providing a much more consistent voice for the British electorate in Europe, while turnout would be much much higher, ensuring a better reflection of UK opinion.

- The general election would cover the House of Commons, Europe, and the devolved administrations, plus some councillors and seats in the (new) House of Lords. The minor election would be just local government, the Lords, and any odds and sods (referenda, quangos, etc).

- In a remodelled Lords, I’d like to see elected members able to serve only a single 10 or 8-year term – staggered, so a small number of members would be elected each Democracy Day (a small enough list for people to vote for individuals, not parties).

[Read the rest of our After the Vote series.]

For a while today, Twitter lit up with speculation about a couple of bombs in Aldgate, East London – rumours that swirled around long after the Metropolitan Police had declared the incident a false alarm.

The scare was fuelled by tweets from those inside the security cordon, such as those from consumer affairs journalist, Sarah Modlock, who reported that there were “two IEDs, one in car, one in phone box. One dealt with and one being dealt with. Two roads reopened.”

Modlock has lots of very plausible detail, some of it from “mates” at the Royal Bank 0f Scotland, whose office she said was being targeted by the attack. “I just said what came up here as we were told – no spin,” she said, after the all-clear was given.

So… (i) Modlock is in her office desperate for information about what is happening out on the streets; (ii) she is picking up rumours and passing them on; (iii) her ‘privileged’ position within the evacuated zone gives her reports credibility – weak signals become strong ones.

These feedback loops are not new to social media. Something very similar happened when Katrina hit New Orleans and the media covered, as fact, an orgy of violence in the Superdome, where many of the city’s poorest and most disadvantaged citizens were sheltering.

Extremely graphic tales of how the poor were raping and murdering one another (30-40 bodies in the convention centre’s freezer, for example) turned out to be vastly exaggerated. Few of the reports of violence were later confirmed (though police are now known to have executed civilians).

According to Ed Bush, a public affairs official for the Louisiana National Guard, those inside the centre were hearing reports of atrocities from the media. They were then telling these stories back to journalists, creating a perfect storm of misinformation.

A lot of them had AM radios, and they would listen to news reports that talked about the dead bodies at the Superdome, and the murders in the bathrooms of the Superdome, and the babies being raped at the Superdome and it would create terrible panic. I would have to try and convince them that no, it wasn’t happening.

The Dome, of course, was characterised by information scarcity – “Cell phones didn’t work, the arena’s public address system wouldn’t run on generator power, and the law enforcement on hand was reduced to talking to the 20,000 evacuees using bullhorns and a lot of legwork.”

In contrast, Twitter (plus the rest of the social media) multiplies connections (absent a loss of power/Internet etc.). So, in a more complex emergency than today’s, can we expect denser networks, with the potential they allow for correction and multiple points of view, to provide a quicker or more tortuous route to the truth?

Update: According to the Sun:

Fake improvised explosive devices made up of artillery shell casings, mobile phones and Plasticine were spotted in the Suzuki Ignis car.

But it turned out the men, who work for a legitimate counter-terrorism firm, had just been showing them to business leaders in the Square Mile to warn of the dangers…

A police source said: “They couldn’t have picked a worse day. We will be having strong words with them over their stupidity.”

Ooops. (If true, of course. Maybe the Met could, y’know, put a statement on its website.)

In the first three parts of this series (1, 2, 3), I have suggested reforms to make the British parliamentary system better equipped for what could be an especially turbulent period in our history. I proposed: greater devolution; a slimmer, punchier House of Commons; and a House of Lords with a mix of elected, co-opted and politically-appointed members.

Now: some thoughts on elections, which are – as things stand – the epitome of everything people hate about the public sector (inconvenient, confusing, dingy, etc). With a little redesign, we could make them so much more entertaining, user friendly, and festive: fit for the modern media age.

Consider. We live in the age of live. The online revolution has destroyed many business models, but it is driving the value of one-off events through the roof. Rock stars release albums to promote their live shows (ten years ago, it was the other way round). Sky’s business model is based on the capture of live sport, especially football.

Master manipulator, Derren Brown, understands this better than anyone. His recent series was structured deliberately as a series of events – designed to provoke and gel together a stream of frenzied media and online coverage.

To be sure, a British general election is gripping, but almost inspite of itself. We’ll soon be having the first British general election of the Twitter era, but as always the results will dribble in the middle of the night (thus ‘were you still up for Portillo?’).

That didn’t matter a jot in the print era – and television has learned to make the most of the bad timing. But it’s surely wrong for the new media age. When we next go the polls, most of the British public will be asleep when we get to the climax.

So I suggest:

• A Democracy Day every two and a half years – with a general election in June and a mid-term in November.
• All elections – Westminster, devolved government, councils, European parliament, referenda, etc – will be held on one of these days (by-elections would be the only exception).
• Voting would be as easy as possible, with polls open throughout the week before, and voting could be made compulsory (with a ‘none of the above’ option, of course).
• Democracy Day would be a public holiday – with polls closing at 6 o’clock.
• Sunderland would then do its usual party trick and gets its result out within the hour. The rest of the action would then unfold across prime time; even in the closest years, the result would be clear before the nation went to bed.
• The TV audience would be huge; Twitter and its ilk would go berserk (think of all the local coverage from counts); while election parties and victory rallies could happen at a sensible time.

(more…)

Sweden took over the rotating EU presidency in July, and has already raised eyebrows by its decision to allow Twittering during meetings of senior eurocrats. Yet few state secrets will be revealed, judging by early posts. One reported that the “meeting went well although I think I was the one who enjoyed the cinnamon rolls the most.” Such behaviour is apparently standard in Sweden—one minister recently updated his Facebook profile during a dull cabinet meeting, only to receive a reply within minutes. “Shouldn’t you be paying more attention to the discussion,” said the message, which turned out to have been sent from the other side of the table, by Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt.

- From Prospect

Via Amanda Ripley.

Courtesy Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey has been talking to the LA Times about his early sketch (from 2000) for STATUS, a service that would eventually be launched as Twitter.

What’s interesting is that urban resilience was a core part of Twitter’s inspiration:

Twitter has been my life’s work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what’s going on in them right now. That led me to the only thing that was tractable in discovering that, which was bicycle messengers and truck couriers roaming about, delivering packages.

That allowed me to create this visualization — to create software that allowed me to see how this was all moving in a city. Then we started adding in the next element, which are taxi cabs. Now we have another entity roaming about the metropolis, reporting where it is and what work it has, going over GPS and CB radio or cellphone. And then you get to the emergency services: ambulances, firetrucks and police — and suddenly you have have this very rich sense of what’s happening right now in the city. 

But it’s missing the public. It’s missing normal people. And that’s where Twitter came in. 

“A congressional trip to Iraq this weekend was supposed to be a secret,” reports Congressional Quarterly. “But the cat’s out of the bag now, thanks to a member of the House Intelligence Committee who broke an embargo via Twitter.”

The leak came from Peter Hoekstra, “a former chairman of the Intelligence panel and now the ranking member, who is routinely entrusted to keep some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.”

Best twitter reaction: “Me in Baghdad. That’s Rep. Hoekstraover my shoulder, head-down cause he’s tweeting our location.”

Q. What is the capital of Iceland?

A. About two krona.

Shouldn’t laugh, I know, given that we’re next. 

H/t The Economist.

The vast potential of social networking technologies to aggregate people and effects is something that we’ve been interested in for a while now here at Global Dashboard.  In the blue corner: Linux, Wikipedia, anti-FARC protests organised over Facebook.  In the red corner: insurgents in Mumbai using Twitter to help them to co-ordinate their attacks.

Well, the last two days have brought another couple of examples.  As David noted yesterday, one of them is the current spate of wildcat strikes in the UK, where strikers have been using bulletin board sites like BearFacts and informal text messaging networks.

The other was to be found yesterday on Twitter.  As the strikes gathered pace and as heavy snowfall brought much of the UK’s transport system to a standstill, one Twitter user whose updates I subscribe to posted this:

I can confirm that the Co-Op in Forest Hill is out of stock of Heinz Tomato soup #uksnow #blitz #panicbuying

Now, if you’re not familiar with Twitter, then you won’t be aware that the practice of putting ‘#’ in front of a key word is designed to help users to search rapidly for all tweets related to the same topic. So during the Mumbai attacks, for example, you could immediately gather all tweets on the subject simply by searching on #Mumbai.

Image Author: Flickr user ~Molz~

What was interesting to me about this particular tweet was the fact that it was the first on the subject.  The user who made the post was not commenting on an existing subject of chatter on Twitter, nor merely observing that tinned soup was moving fast at his local supermarket, but intentionally turning his observation into a new meme designed to spread infectiously.

(more…)

Wildcat strikes have gone viral in the UK – oil, power and nuclear workers have all walked out and the government is scrambling to get the situation back under control.

No panic buying as yet, but if the strikers push a little harder, we might see signs of a systemic disruption.

Of course, no 4th generation strike would be complete without an online presence – Twitter doesn’t seem to be playing much of a role as yet, but there are a number of bulletin boards out there. Bear Facts is one that’s providing coordination for an otherwise highly distributed action:

This site has been specifically designed for engineering construction workers i.e. Welders, Platers, Erectors, Pipefitters, Mechies, Scaffolders etc for the purpose of improved communication and the sharing of information.

We all know how hard it is to keep in touch with what’s going on in this game when we all work on different sites across the country.

Action is now taking place nationwide. Demonstrations are taking place outside sites from Teeside to Wales. Scottish workers have downed tools and taking part in demonstrations in support. The government is being lobbied by the trade unions, in other words…the gloves are off and the fight is on!!!

Of course, half of those registered on Bear Facts are probably infiltrators (both journalists and spooks) – informal SMS networks are probably carrying most of the sensitive information, as they’re so much more secure.

There were scenes of raw and ghastly panic on the interwebs today as Google went into meltdown and declared every site in the world (including their own) a security risk. Fortunately everything is now OK again, with other ongoing minor problems put firmly into perspective.

(Nouriel Roubini, who just knew this was going to happen, is available for interviews…)

Update: Here’s Google’s explanation of what went wrong. It appears a slip of the hand nearly destroyed the universe.

Considering Nouriel Roubini has so many fans these days, it’s reassuring to know he’s still his biggest one:

• Time on Twitter: 11 days
• Number of tweets:  36
• Number of tweets that aren’t about how great, intelligent, prescient and – above all – popular Nouriel is: 4

Two of my favourite blogs, MountainRunner and Danger Room highlight the IDF’s attempt to win over the blogosphere using Twitter and You Tube. Why? Because according to the head of the IDF’s press team: “The blogosphere and new media are another war zone, we have to be relevant there.”

The YouTube channel was created with the aim of distributing footage of precision airstrikes. Interestingly YouTube took down some of the ‘exclusive footage’ showing the IDF’s operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, but appears to have returned some of the footage due to popular demand.

Elsewhere the Israeli consulate in New York hosted a press conference on Twitter in order to answer the public’s questions regarding the situation in Gaza. How one measures the success of the twitterference is difficult but, as both Matt and Nathan point out, reducing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to tweets of 140 characters or less makes for interesting reading:

‘We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?’,

‘we’re not at war with the PAL people. we’re at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org’.