Why are there so many e-petition platforms?

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve noted what I think are pretty interesting examples of markets developing in the public services space – one in social care comparison sites, another in crowdfunding platforms.

To these two examples there’s a third to add: platforms for e-petitions. A traipse through the tweets of the Generally Annoyed of Twitter quickly reveals the different petition platforms that people use, as follows:

• The government’s own e-petition site, which, as far as I understand, is the only one that potentially leads to an issue being debated in the House of Commons*
• 38 degrees
• change.org
• avaaz.org
• Petition buzz
• Go Petition
• Live Petitions
• The Petition

I’ve been pretty selective in what e-petition sites are included above. For example, they don’t include US petition sites (such as MoveOn.org or Causes.com); nor does the list include businesses that offer petition platforms for public bodies, or the dedicated petition sites that local councils and others themselves have.

Of course, I haven’t just discovered that such “competition” exists, but I do find it fascinating there are so many e-petition platforms.

When it comes to an e-petition, I’d have thought the point would be to (a) get as many signatures as possible; and (b) have something happen as a result of the amount of support. To increase the number of e-petition platforms people can use is to potentially divide the number of signatures any one e-petition could get by the number of platforms. And to not use the e-petition platform which guarantees debate by elected politicians if an e-petition does get the required number of signatures seems bizarre.

So why are there so many e-petition platforms? Here are 3 reasons to start the discussion:

1. Ego: someone or some organisation sets up a new e-petition platform because they think they can do it better (see also the amount of duplication generally in the voluntary and community sector)
2. Money: someone or some organisation spots a business opportunity to make some cash, and so pursues it
3. Conspiracy: why would any government promote their e-petition platform when people do such a good job and dividing and conquering themselves?

*This post isn’t intended to worry about the effectiveness of online petitions. I modestly direct you to some recent analysis on this to draw your own conclusion.

 

Sharing #dpulo data

Earlier on this week during the excellent #dpulo Twitter chat, there were lots of requests for Disabled People’s User-Led Organisation data.

I’m therefore pleased to say that below is embedded a public Google spreadsheet which contains the names, websites and locations of all DPULOs that the Strengthening DPULOs Programme is currently aware of.

A few points:

• This is publicly available information. (In fact, this public spreadsheet is a version of a more substantial spreadsheet we have, which does (potentially) contain data that might not be publicly available.)
• I would never claim this is a full list of DPULOs. As such, if you know of a DPULO that isn’t on the list, please (a) add it to the list (making it obvious you have!), and (b) tell me about the DPULO in the comments below or by emailing richard.watts1@dwp.gsi.gov.uk or tweeting me @rich_w
• If you do anything interesting with this information, please let me know (using the details above)
• I’ve created a map of DPULOs, which I can’t quite get to embed below. However, you can view the map here: Map of DPULOs
• If you are so inclined, any help you can give with the income/expenditure columns of the spreadsheet (using the Charity Commission website or Open Charities) would be much appreciated
• I am by no means an expert in all this fancy Google stuff. If anyone out there (a) is, (b) is mortally offended by the amateur-ish nature of my attempts above and below, and (c) fancies spending some time with me to help, then all assistance would be warmly received and appropriate praise lavished upon you.

The Google spreadsheet is here: Mapping Disabled People’s User-Led Organisations v2 – public. It is fully shared so you can edit and add to it as you see fit. The same spreadsheet is embedded below.

Have fun!

Disabled people and gadgets: assistive technology in action

Earlier this month I wrote about how iPads (and touchpad devices more generally) have the potential to “change the lives of disabled people”.

The Oxford and Oldham ACE Centres have created a set of amazing films showing how assistive technology supports and enables disabled people to access things like education, work and leisure, and so achieve their potential.

Two of my favourite examples are below: Tiago and Darren

If you have a spare 30 minutes and have even a passing interest in tech, disability and the possibilities when those two things come together, I can’t recommend highly enough watching these videos.

iPads, accessibility and disability

Experience and evidence would suggest that when great leaps forward are made – in the form of transport, education or the internet, for example – disabled people often don’t have equal chance to benefit from the progress the leaps represent.

Insofar as generalisations across all impairment groups can be made (for example, for people with learning disabilities, hearing impairments or visual impairments), I’m inclined to think that iPads and apps* are, unfortunately, in much the same category of great leaps forward.

This article, though, suggests at least some room for optimism, even if it is from Mashable.

It suggests there are four main ways in which touch devices such as iPads are “changing the lives of disabled people”:

1. As a communicator – touch devices are making text-to-speech or touch-to-speech technology more affordable
2. As a therapeutic device – touch devices are both motivating and enabling disabled young people to develop or use their motor skills
3. As an educational tool – touch devices can act as very useful supplements to (or replacements for) traditional education tools
4. As a behaviour monitor – touch devices can quantify behavioural progress, either through recording notes / videos etc. and/or charting graphs. Similarly, apps can remind people to take medication.

There is undeniably a medical model focus in these benefits: they tend to focus on what “deficits” someone’s impairment represents and how these can be addressed. This is rather than highlighting, for example, how technology can be used to overcome the barriers that society puts up for disabled people (a great example of this is the Hills are Evil app, which enables people to identify inclines, raised kerbs and impassable streets).

Nevertheless, it’s good to see tech so widely known and appreciated as an iPad being seen in the context of what good it can provide for disabled people too.

*I’m not sure, though, if social media is in the same category. I’m not aware of any work that has been done on this particular topic – i.e. disabled people, social media and accessibility. If it has, please let me know.

Man walks into a column, no.25: Technology

Data from a web analytics firm released earlier this week suggests that (in the US at least) a possibly momentous threshold has been passed: people are now, for the first time, spending more of their ‘online time’ using mobile apps than browsing the web.

Based on data that apparently accounts for one third of all US mobile app activity, our North American (non Canadian) cousins (or those who go online at all, one assumes) seem to be spending an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes daily on the web. The positions were almost exactly reversed (in terms of percentage difference) just six months ago: this is happening fast.

Like many, I’m very interested indeed in how technology drives behaviour, but even more interested in how we preferentially adapt to one new set of technology more happily, naturally or quickly than another. It took us a long, long time to get used to web browsing, but we’re taking to apps like a duck to water.

Personally, I think aside from the mobility advantage itself, the biggest reason for this is that apps help us to overcome the stress and confusion caused by intense information overload. There’s a really excellent post by US author Nicholas Carr in which he argues that because ‘The great power of modern digital filters lies in their ability to make information that is of inherent interest to us immediately visible to us’ we are increasingly powerless to switch off:

As today’s filters improve, they expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases.

I don’t know about you, but this resonates with me. SPAM is one thing, the answer is to ignore it and that’s easy to do. But time and again I’ve felt a sense of frustration at not being able to give everything that it looks like it might be interesting in my Twitter timeline due attention.

And this is where apps come in. The latest generation of apps in particular – something like Flipboard for iPad is the best example – present (just) enough information to allow you to make a more informed decision about whether or not to engage more deeply with a post or update but, absolutely crucially, make the experience of moving between ‘information item A’ and ‘information item B’ not only bearable, but actively pleasurable. It’s as simple as being able to flick, rather than fiddle around with different keys/mouse buttons to scroll, and it’s no surprise that further new technology looks set to replicate the ‘app feel’ on normal websites. The closer that ‘being online’ begins to feel to something we’ve felt comfortable doing for decades – reading a magazine – the happier we are.

This is not to say that behaviour change and technological advance are in perfect lockstep, one need look no further than Anthony Weiner (a familiar friend from last week’s column) to know that. With rather purple prose, The Economist sums up some other challenges with adaptation to technology:

Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and impart information, but they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to cultivate our narcissism without the risk of disapproval or criticism. To use a theatrical metaphor, these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets and status updates, of texts and pings. This illusory state of detachment can become addictive as we isolate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are flawed, powerless and inconsequential.

So here’s my argument, in a nutshell: the web makes you feel powerless in the face of information overload, but apps can set you free.

Scientists find God (particles)

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about why I’m a Liberal Personal Atheist and why it’s bizarre to pretend that someone can’t both be scientific and personally religious.

It was with this in mind that I enjoyed the following passage in the Guardian’s Notes & Theories science blog, written about the search for the Higgs Boson (the full article is here):

I groan at the name ‘God particle’ (so why use it?), but it is hard to ignore the loose parallels that occasionally exist with religious endeavour. Physicists, like believers, build impressive structures to help them find meaning in the world. Among Higgs hunters, there are the faithful who assume the particle is real, though most are surely agnostic. There are those who disbelieve too. When one researcher suggested – he claims unintentionally – that the Higgs boson might not exist, he drew angry fire from a good number of fellow workers.

Man walks into a column, no.17: Privacy

There was coverage at the weekend of a meeting at the NUT’s annual conference at which teachers were warned about the dangers of pupils and potential employers getting hold of data posted by teachers on social networking sites. It caused me to think about the general factors that determine whether blurring the personal and the professional – through the means of the online – is or is not appropriate in a particular situation.

Like many, I’ve changed my attitude towards keeping my personal and online (public) worlds entirely separate. At first, the barrier between them was a solid concrete wall. Now it’s a flimsier wire fence. The cause of the change is simply, experience, which both breeds confidence and demonstrates that, frankly, very few people read what you blog/tweet about anyway.

But there’s also, I’ve realised, something about remembering that normal human relationships can exist in the professional world too. In most lines of work – certainly in mine – you wouldn’t think twice about sharing modestly personal details, of holidays or family or the weekend, with a client. It’s about knowing where to draw the line: no-one wants to hear about your verruca, but it’s also stupid to act as if you flick an ‘off’ switch at six o’clock. And this principle extends to social networking: it’s a case, if you will, of bearing in mind what’s a verruca and what isn’t.

The crucial difference between me and a teacher is that the people I work with are adults who I can trust to behave maturely. If they don’t, which is thankfully a rare occurrence, there are established means of recourse to stop things escalating before serious damage is done. Part of this trust means expecting colleagues and clients to maintain a separation in their minds between what they know about me personally and what they expect of me in the workplace or, as Paul Carr once (slightly less delicately) put it:

People know what to expect and they either hire me or they don’t based on that. If the writing stays decent and I hit deadlines, all is well; if not, I’m fucked. Apart from that, my time is my own.

For teachers, on the other hand, an ill-judged tweet which falls into the hands of a child has the potential to wreck professional status and capacity to do the job almost straightaway. We can’t realistically expect kids to exercise the same level of maturity and judgement. But this surely doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t be publicly online at all, just that the ‘verruca threshold’ (sorry) is considerably lower. The teacher who posted ‘OMG must stop pissing about and get my maths boosters planned as I go to teach kids it in about one and a half hours!!!’ is demonstrably an idiot: we can safely assume the web was merely the messenger of this idiocy rather than its cause.

So much for pupils: what about the second warning at the NUT conference, that online information is being misused by employers during recruitment processes? This, for me, is a red herring. When seeking to recruit, an employer has two important responsibilities: to apply set criteria consistently between candidates, and to be open about the evidence used to come to a judgement. Recruiters should certainly not be assembling online profiles of candidates on a whim, but if this is done properly and openly, with a right to reply, then why shouldn’t this valuable additional source of information be used?

Where it all gets more complicated is when pictures are involved (if this feels like I’m waging a one-man-war against Facebook then, well, I guess I am). All of the above assumes that the individual in question is producing and sharing the content, and therefore responsible for deciding what is and isn’t ‘too personal’ to share with a colleague, student or potential employer. But unless you’re willing to set injunctions against your friends on a night out, anyone can take photos of you and post them online. Profoundly terrifying.

Man walks into a column, no.15: Atheism

A little over a year ago, I went to a lecture given by a Christian academic, who amongst a few other things, said that whilst there is nothing fundamentally illogical about God, you have to have had a personal experience of him (it?) in order to be persuaded that he/it exists.

I’m a big fan of this idea. I’ve had no such personal experience and, quite on the contrary, the whole notion of a divine being seems to me to be most odd. But I’m entirely relaxed with the idea that others have and, so long as they don’t try to (a) force non-converts to share their belief (for example through state education), (b) use their faith as pretext for aggression, or (c) misuse their status as ‘religious people’ to wield influence over political processes, say, then why on earth should I care what they believe in?

I guess you could call this position Liberal Personal Atheism. For me, God does not exist: there’s no doubt about it (which is why I’m allowed to call myself an atheist, not an agnostic; don’t even get me started on those sitting-on-the-fence-types). But if others truly believe that he/it is real, who am I to argue?

As well as being attracted to the idea that we should let religious types get on with it (as long as they don’t flout (a)-(c)), I suppose I go a little further, in thinking that attempts to refute, undermine or otherwise attack the concept of God are unnecessary, counter productive, and, ultimately, arrogant.

The frequently eloquent and funny Steven Baxter wrote a great post on this subject earlier this year, in which he said that despite being a rationalist and an atheist he felt strongly that:

…curiosity is such a valuable part of science and exploration; without curiosity, we wouldn’t have the scientific near-certainties we enjoy today. I don’t like dismissing anything that doesn’t fall neatly into certain parameters…

I couldn’t agree more. Just one glance at the latest amazing advances in science and technology is all one needs to confirm how weird, counter intuitive and unpredictable this world of ours often is: everything from the Higgs Boson to the kind of neuroscience wizardry I blogged about in this column a little while ago. If a person is able to find some personal comfort from religion, and even some inspiration, and that leads them to make some important discovery in their field, then surely we would be mad to deprive others like them of the same?

All of the above explains why, like many people, I found the apparent furore over Martin Rees receiving the Templeton Prize completely bizarre. This is an eminent scientist receiving an award from an institution that has funded research that showed prayer to have – at best – no effect on heart bypass patients’ chances of recovery. A man that refuses to assume he has all the answers:

Doing science made me realise that even the simplest things are hard to understand and that makes me suspicious of people who believe they’ve got anything more than an incomplete and metaphorical understanding of any deep aspect of reality.

But at the same time Rees isn’t saying that religion has any place in science, in fact in the full Guardian interview he says that the two do not ‘have much scope for constructive interaction, but they have in common perhaps an awareness of mystery’.

One of the things that appealed to me most about Rees’ position was his insistence on prioritising outcomes, and in particular the outcome of a good education in science, over atheistic dogmatism, or as he put it: ‘If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school and you tell them they can’t have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science’.

I fully support humanist and other attempts to stamp out overweening, illegitimate religious influence over politics and education, but I can’t help but feel that hardline atheists, who pride themselves on protecting science, aren’t cutting off their nose to spite their face. I’ll leave the final word to Michael White, writing in The Guardian:

many of our greatest scientists – Darwin, Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton – were men of faith. If Newton, perhaps the greatest scientific mind in history, could reconcile faith and reason (“Gravity is God”) Rees should be able to sleep soundly, cheque in hand.

Amen to that!

Man walks into a column, no.8: Brains

With apologies to fans of the waking dead, this is a post about the amazing advances in neuroscience and what they mean for society and politics, not a ‘braaaiiinnnnzzzz’ style post about zombies. It is an ‘edited highlights’ version of a new publication by the Royal Society, with the picking-and-choosing driven entirely by whatever piqued my interest, so do check out the full thing, available for download here. With that said, things I learned include:

Despite impressive advances in non-invasive neuroimaging technology, you’re still better off using a polygraph test if you want to know whether someone’s lying. This is because, at the moment, and despite the proven flaws in the standard lie detector tests, most experiments to measure changes in the state of someone’s brain when lying have been conducted with young people who are simulating deception, rather than actually lying. Real-world deception may (or may not) produce quite different brainwaves. We are therefore, perhaps thankfully, a long way off using neuroimaging in the criminal justice process, for example to check whether a witness is credible.

Many large pharmaceutical companies have closed down their psychiatry and neuroscience programmes. This is because there hasn’t been as much success as hoped in developing new chemical compounds to treat common and less-common mental health conditions. It’s also because companies have become risk averse in the face of adverse side effects of previous experiments. With patents for many compounds due to expire soon, there could be real problems round the corner caused by lack of availability of existing and new drugs.

The brain easily decouples from the body. There’s a newer branch of neuroscience which aims to restore lost functionality to people with particular impairments. This can include stimulating neural activity, but also recording and decoding brainwaves in order to predict cognitive intentions, such as that associated with the plan to perform a movement. In an ongoing and thus far successful experiment, this has allowed severely paralysed people to perform basic movements using a robot arm. The brain’s ability to control movement does not diminish when such movement is physically impossible, even for a long period of time.

Mind-controlled computer games may be nearer than you think. The games industry has already developed non-invasive neural interface systems which record and interpret brain activity recorded from the scalp rather than via implants, using these signals to, for example, manoeuvre a small ball through a maze. Admittedly it’s not exactly Call Of Duty (or even Doom, for that matter), but still – controlling a ball with your mind!

Our brains are conditioned to care more about novelty than long-term reward. Experiments show that the reward processes in our brains tend to discount the value of future rewards, meaning even if we know something is going to be good, we’ll focus on something less good if it’s more salient (if it stands out from what’s around it). On the plus side, social co-operation activates the reward centres of the brain that are more ‘plastic’ and involved in learning.

Our brains remain massively underexplored. To date, drug companies have invested by far the greatest effort in research into neurotransmitters (chemicals that send signals between cells) and their receptors. But these comprise less than 10 per cent of all synapse proteins, which leaves 90 per cent to investigate. As one of the authors of the report says:

…from data on genetic disorders that affect the nervous system, it was found that over 130 brain diseases are caused by mutations in synapse proteins. It is already clear that autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder involve dozens of synapse proteins.

So: massive amounts of uncharted territory, and loads of potential for life-changing future discoveries. A nice point to end on.