Prime Minister’s Advisor Addresses e-Democracy’06

Taylor challenged the internet campaigning community to use the internet to build constructive tools of community engagement and responsible self-government.

"The internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands," he told the audience of annual conference e-Democracy'06.

Taylor said while the big breakthrough on the web in the last few years has been the rise of blogs, these are "hostile and, generally speaking, see their job as exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are."

But he urged the audience, made up primarily of local and central government delegates, to be part of changing the "net-head, culture of anti-establishment" prevalent on the internet to one of "problem solving and social enterprise."

Taylor, who is soon to take up a new post as chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts also said, however, that the web could be "fantastic" for democracy. "E-democracy has got to be about a richer dialogue [between politicians and citizens] and not contribute to an incommensurate set of demands," he said.

A videoblog of the conference by reporter David Wilcox is live at:
http://digbig.com/4pjrm . And a report on Taylor's speech has been published by the BBC at: http://fastlink.headstar.com/mt2 .

The conference also featured the London Premiere of 'Hacking Democracy', with a private screening for delegates followed by a Q&A with the film's co-director Russell Michaels.

Michaels said the
film serves as a warning
for European governments considering introducing
e-voting. It focuses on an attempt
to discover how voting machines recorded
minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in
Volusia County, Florida in the 2000
presidential election, and what potential
scope there might be for
system errors, malicious damage or corrupt
practices.

"What's happening in America is a warning," Michaels said. "This is the
opposite of what is good about e-democracy".

The film shows electronic voting
software held on memory cards
created by technology giant Diebold apparently
being hacked by a
security expert as a result of software code being
accidentally left on a public web server. According to the film, the numbers
of votes for
candidates were altered without leaving a trace of the
intervention.