The maintainer of FaxYourMP — the amazingly effective, volunteer-run "e-democracy" service that has been instrumental in defeating such bad initiatives as the UK national ID card — posts a terrific rant about how easy e-democracy is to accomplish and how flimsy governmental arguments to the contrary are.
* The service has delivered almost 50,000 faxes from constituents to MPs
* Marketing spend to date: 0 GBP
* Marketing to date: 1 Press Release sent to friends, (December 2000)…
* 67% of our users report that they have never contacted their mp before, dispelling the suggestion that we simply lower the barrier to entry for the already politically engaged. We are bringing mostly new participants to the debate.
* We are the first organisation to measure MPs responsiveness and performance in a systematic way, applying the same performance criteria to them as are applied to government departments. Performance: not that good, although some shine…
* hardware: a couple of old PCs
* budget: less than 3000 GBP and the donated resources of our helpers, which amounts to a few hours a week each.
* abuse rate: we estimate that less than 1% of faxes are abusive or inappropriate, based on the samples we see via feedback or bounces (we don't read the messages)…
I believe that Faxyourmp is the leading e-democracy tool in the UK. We demonstrate daily that almost every single one of the excuses and apologies for the slow development of e-democracy in the UK are due to a lack of will, inertia, and inability to take notice of either best practice online, or select appropriate solutions. I don't blame individuals (as everyone I've every encountered in the civil service or parliament has been well-intentioned, dedicated and hard working), but we make it plain that this stuff is trivially doable.
(via Oblomovka)
