I’ve woken up early (am in PA, US – more later) and just discovered a tweet which pointed me to the recent action of the Open Rights Group on digital democracy – democracy about digits and digits supporting the democratic process. First the ORG, and then the contents of the tweet (about MEPs and candidates’ stances):
Politicians and the media don’t always understand new technologies, but comment and legislate anyway. The result can be ill-informed journalism and dangerous laws.The Open Rights Group is a grassroots technology organisation which exists to protect civil liberties wherever they are threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital technology. We call these rights our “digital rights”.
In 2005, a community of 1,000 digital rights enthusiasts came together to create the Open Rights Group. Since then, ORG has spoken out on copyright term extension, DRM and the introduction of electronic voting in the UK. We have informed the debate on data protection, freedom of information, data retention and the surveillance state.
These are issues that affect all of us. Together, our community, which includes some of the UK’s most renowned technology experts, works hard to raise awareness about them. If these are issues that you care about, become part of our community and support the Open Rights Group today.
Not surprisingly there is an overlap of people with mySociety and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It’s heartening to see these grass roots movements growing so widely and rapidly. As a commenter replied to me “democracy is alive and well, it’s politics that is sick”.
The ORG has run a campaign to find out MEPs views (Do your MEP candidates care about digital rights?) and has summarised the issues (Voting in the EU today: why it matters for digital rights). The tweet pointed me to (Do Your MEP Candidates Agree with ORG? ) with summaries for the regions (http://euelection.openrightsgroup.org/constituency/eastern) It shows me that the Lib Dem candidates – you will remember I wrote to Andrew Duff – have a 57% support for Reform Copyright Privacy Online Surveillance State Open Internet (Follow the links to find out what these headings mean – in general “agree” means they support ORG.)
The table is slightly misleading as it conflates the percentage response with the number of agreements in those responses. So the Lib Dem is better expressed as 57% recall (i.e. 4/7) and 100% agreement. The conservative 0% on copyright is 100% recall and total disagreement with statements such as:
Europe should not extend copyright terms as longer terms damage innovation and reward the estates of deceased artists rather than working creators.
Labour had 0% recall on all issues. What really gets to many of the electorate in the UK is that they see evidence of politicians who simply don’t care. If the candidates cannot take the trouble to reply to well-presented important questions of policy then what right have they to ask us to support them.
This is real democracy. I know what my candidates stand for. And whether they care.