Spalpeen

I’m helping to run a campaign to free Benjamin Geen, a former nurse who was wrongly convicted of killing and harming his patients. Please check out the campaign site, where we will be posting news and information about the case as it proceeds. Make sure you add your email address to the mailing list so we can keep you updated.

Also please read the Independent on Sunday’s report into Ben’s case, and have a look at the Innocence Network for more information on the London Innocence Project.

“We ran Barack Obama’s fanclub”

Thomas Gensemer, Managing Partner at Blue State Digital which ran Barack Obama’s pioneering web campaign during the 2008 US Presidential Election, came to talk at City University. I made some notes from the last few questions, specifically why he thinks Twitter is a gimmick for political campaigning. City should be posting the video of Thomas Gensemer’s talk pretty soon.

UPDATE: Read The Guardian’s great interview with Thomas Gensemer. He has some great tips for Labour! Listen up Tom Watson and Derek Draper!

How do we shake it up in UK, and get broader adoption by politicians for new online tools?

“You can’t create a Howard Dean moment in the UK.” Instead, you’re got to start a small project, and show quick results. Spread “buy-in” from constituencies to other constituencies. Not helpful to think of a top down perfect solution. Best to say, here’s the budget, here’s the goals, here’s the community we’re mobilising. Best way to grow an idea is to start small and let it spread.

How do you manage expectations and prevent later disillusionment?

No possible way to have 15 million mobilised people at the end of first year to be as gung ho as they were in the days after the election. But, can identify niche issues and mobilise people. Segment out who are health care advocates and build something for them deeper than the campaign rhetoric. Understand that the other 80% will be less responsive (but build niches for them too). If you keep core bases of support alive, there’s no reason why it won’t turn into 15 million come campaign time again.

Why do you think services like Twitter are gimmicks?

Let me say that I think there are interesting consumer applications. Will be interesting to see Facebook’s biz model, and to see if Twitter has a business model [implication being it might not get one].

The problem is that the new tool on the block tends to distract. It’s easy for a lazy and unimaginative campaign flack to sell story of “politician on twitter!”. Case of shiny object moving to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep relationships, new services like twitter are scattershot and dizzying. They burn political capital. Besides, they don’t talk to the people you want to talk to [case of early adopters not being very useful to political campaigns? I'd still consider Twitter to be an early adopter service - won't change until it has 60 million users, not just 6 million].

For no particular reason, here I repost my essay on the differences between Classical and Structural Realism in International Relations.

Which provides the most convincing account of the current security environment, Classical or Structural Realism?

by Conrad Quilty-Harper

This essay comes at a time of crossroads between classical or “human nature” realist thought on one side, and systemic or structural realists on the other. The rise of structural methods of thought in the 1970s saw a decline in the popularity of classical realist thought, although it has seen a recent resurgence in popularity at the start of the 21st Century. Does the end of the Cold War justify a return to classical realist thought? Did structural realists misunderstand and unfairly dismiss Morgenthau’s work? Or does Mearsheimer’s policy advice stemming from his offensive realism extend structural realism’s relevance to the extent that we do not need classical understandings of realism? This essay will argue that structural realists incorrectly interpreted Morgenthau’s stated importance of human nature, and that a reaffirmation of the importance of classical realist thought is justified. This essay will also show how Mearsheimer’s advice to contain China’s rise is dangerous and unnecessary, and the inevitably fatalist consequences of structural realism are neither desirable nor necessary.

Continue Reading »

Catch21 got Emily Thornberry MP, Mark Field MP and Nick Harvey MP on to talk about Boris Johnson’s off-hand suggestion for National Service for young people, knife crime and how to encourage young people to volunteer.

The British National Party’s membership list got leaked. For people not familiar with the Party, it’s an extreme-right wing group that is based around racist policies (they only allow whites as members, and want to kick everyone of any other ethnicity out of the country). You can download the BNP Membership list over at Wikileaks.org.

I’ve been poking around the list, and found some interesting figures about the members. At a brief count, there are the following numbers of people in “important professions” on the list.

-1 currently employed Police Officer.

-1 currently employed NHS Doctor.

-17 former or retired Policemen, including one detective, one inspector, and one who claims to be a “human rights lecturer” which I don’t quite understand.

-15 people currently employed as full or part-time teachers, or with teacher qualifications, including secondary school teachers in subjects like Maths, English, and Physics.

-12 former or retired teachers.

-114 ex-servicemen. Army, Navy, RAF, Intelligence, MoD Police. 

-18 current servicemen. Army, RAF.

Check the Google Maps mash-up of the BNP membership.

I support Obama for President (the opponent would be a disaster for America and the world), but this video the campaign aired recently is essentially propagandist drivel. Who would in their right mind sit through a 30 minute commercial?! I expect that it’ll come off cheesy for uncertain voters, and probably patronising for most supporters of Obama. The only group I can see actually sitting through it are hardcore fanatics of Obama, but they would have watched this if it had been published solely online. Seems like a waste of money to broadcast this on the networks. Then again, most of this $1 Billion “race” to the White House comes off as a waste sitting from all the way over in the U.K.

Some points about The Guardian’s Tomasky videos. First, let it be known that I really enjoy this series. It’s a very level headed take on the U.S. election, and follows the latest developments very closely. I also admire The Guardian for jumping into this field.

However, there are some technical issues with the way the video is being published.

-Why is there no link to the NYTimes columnist’s story in Tomasky’s latest video? If not in the video, then it should be linked to in the notes.
-Why is there no way to respond with a video comment? Plenty of online services out there solve this problem (Seismic being one - although I personally don’t like their solution).
-Why is the flash player lacking other basic features (full screen mode? download link? RSS/subscribe?)
-Where are the links to previous videos? A link to Tomasky’s blog on a sidebar isn’t enough.
-Why aren’t these videos being distributed on every other video platform out there? (Go to TubeMogul and send this video to 10+ top video sites, for nothing).
-Why is the title/tagging/description of this video not SEO friendly? The Guardian produces some great video content, and this should be up there on the most popular search topics. It’s not going to be if the meta data is as vague as it currently is.

-Also, pre-roll ads? Ugh, but whatever.

I friggin’ love The Guardian’s content, but this is yet another example of a newspaper company getting A for effort, but C for achievement when it comes to publishing on the web.

It’s also why Tina Brown is a complete idiot when she says “I’m not completely sure how a printing press works, but that never stopped me” as a way of justifying her naive entrance into the world of internet publishing. Sorry guys, if you don’t know SEO, you ain’t gonna win the internet.

Jeff Jarvis writes on the subject of open source polls: “I say that if we could easily poll people about, say, indecency, we could counter the assertions of pressure groups that there’s an outcry — sufficient to threaten the First Amendment — when, in fact, there is no such outcry, only media spin and hype.”

Would that really work? If the media has published that there is an outcry, then it usually has the byproduct of creating one. Newspapers and media in general need to stop relying on polls, which, thanks to the nature of statistics (73.53% of all statistics are meaningless, don’t you know?) can be manipulated to show one point of view. An open source poll would guarantee the reliability of the statistics, but those statistics can always be interpreted to show the other side’s point of view.

The problem isn’t necessarily with the practice of polling, but with the actual implications of polls. The Guardian in particular seems to be fond of flashing headline stories based on poll results (Google reveals dozens of matches, and you can bet on seeing at least one front page story based on a poll result every week). I’d be very surprised if the data behind these polls was gained in an actively manipulative way, but I also know that all polls have an inherent bias: if not in the collation, then in the interpretation! Besides, nine times out of ten, the “controversial” poll tends to disappear from the headlines within the week, only to reappear the next time another controversial point of view is garnered from another commissioned poll.

Polls, like petitions, give the impression that society as a whole cares about things (and believes it’s possible to change the situation). The reality is that Government tends to do whatever it wants if it can reasonably expect to get away with it. The fundamentally ambiguous nature of polls and petitions means that they can never be considered a limitation on the power of Governement. An open source poll solution would be great of course, but just don’t expect it to be the solution to end all solutions.