The Campaign Company Blog

Developing online Political Book Groups - the easy way!

I think we would all recognise that to help make democracy work we need to develop more ongoing political education. One way to do this is to run an online political book group. The easiest way to do that is to obtain daily or weekly email parts of books, which you can obtain at The Daily Lit.

Once one person has subscribed to a book they can then upload it to a Ning social network group and then invite others to join the book group of that book and comment on the daily or weekly parts. There are free books like Machiavelli's The Prince that one could read or institutional economist Thorstein Veblen's.Theory of the Leisure Classes which I am just reading myself. I should add there are also many non political books at the Daily Lit if you want to run your own personal online book group on a hobby or on a piece of literature.

I also think this concept of an online book group could work well on Facebook too. If it does take off there you heard it first here!

From Elliptical Galaxies to Potholes......

I have previously mentioned Grid Republic as a social network for a scientific or medical purpose, whereby a community of people across the world get together to use their spare computing power to do distributed computing with a capacity in terraflops - ie very big - through a rather clever screensaver download.

However this is a passive form of science where one just allows one's computer to be used for a wider purpose.

Yesterday evening I discovered Galaxy Zoo - a far more exciting piece of scientific endeavour where you can directly contribute to the scientific work online.

In this case you are helping astrophysicists to map distributions of various types of galaxy (elliptical and spiral are the two broad forms, but there are lots of sub-groups) by joining the online team (now 115,000 strong since the project started in July 2007) assessing photos of over 200 million objects taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This will assist with a far greater understanding of the lifecycle of galaxies, many of which go through mergers to move from spiral to elliptical - our own Galaxy's probable fate.

Whilst computers can be used to assess many things, when it comes to indistinct photos of two merging galaxies edge on to earth view the eye and the brain are still superb tools. However the sheer amount of data being generated means scientists and their students do not have the time to do this themselves and should they be wasting their discovery time anyway?

This is a project where anyone online at home can help.

You need no prior knowledge to take part in the work. Once you join Galaxy Zoo you are given simple online tutorials and in order to start assessing pictures you then take a short online test where you have to get 8 out of 15 pictures right - this is because they get up to 35 people to look at each photo and then recheck any disagreements between viewers.

Having passed the test you can then assess photos. For someone like myself who spent every non cloudy night from the age of 10 to 11 outdoors in the evening doing astronomy, this is a much warmer experience and could get quite addictive in a Sudoku sort of way! I did 45 galaxies last night and have resisted doing it tonight only so I could blog about it.

Apart from its benefits to astrophysics, I have started to think whether such a system could be used in other more terrestrial areas of activity.

A few came to mind:

• Assessing the millions of earth satellite photos to identify issues such as climate change and land use. On a more local level TCC has a project called Carbon Crime Stoppers and I wonder whether a photo assessment system could work with that?
• It could be used for community engagement where residents could both submit and assess street scene photos that either other residents had taken of the Council regularly took from its front-line staff going about their daily duties with handheld PDA's. This of course would be a culture change for local government where it effectively employed teams of online resident non-professionals. However creating resident buy in with the prioritisation of street scene issues could be a great way of developing community cohesion in the future.
• Assessing biodiversity in local authority parks and gardens through the taking and assessment of photos. Again this could bring together communities in worthwhile projects.

The above are just tentative thoughts and I would welcome further suggestions.

What is interesting is that this sort of project could give young people a strong and empowered role in any local activity. Galaxy Zoo says it has young people from 8 years old upwards assessing photos.

Therefore in years to come both science and community cohesion could strongly benefit from online communities collaborating to solve problems. What might have started as project to understand galactic evolution could be just the thing to massively expand the collaboration between local authorities and the communities they represent.

Football: The Democratic Debate

Football clubs, at least in the UK, have always tended to have an authoritarian structure.Traditionally this may have been a family at the helm but the recent trend has been toward extraordinarily wealthy foreign individual ownership.  Either way, there has been a fairly rigid structure in place with one party controlling the purse strings which all but total control over the choice of a manager who in turn would have dominance on the football pitch.

However, the accountability of owners to the supporters has been steadily eroded by the relative fall in real power of the ordinary supporter.  Match day gate receipts are still hugely important to top British clubs, much more so than their European counterparts, but the emphasis is now on the more passive corporate 'clients'.  The ordinary flag waving supporter has very little power and nowhere was this better highlighted than the failed attempt by Manchester United supporters to prevent the takeover by Malcolm Glazer.

So, how have fans fought back?  Well, this is where football's greatest strength, the passion it evokes, is exploited so ruthlessly.  As a product for consumption, football is unique and any attempt to apply the normal rules of economics will fail dismally.  Football fans are irrational consumers and will compulsively 'buy' their product no matter how expensive it is, how poor the quality is, or how shoddy the 'customer service' they receive.  This is why despite their noble intentions, the examples of AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester (set up by supporters as alternatives to the existing clubs) will never be the answer.  While most fans want representation, affordability and passion, they also want to support their club and are not willing to go to the lengths of shunning the team in pursuit of this.

Two recent and well publicised examples have thrown up fascinating possibilities for the future of British football.  The first, myfootballclub.com and their purchase of Ebbsfleet United by a collective of over 25,000 members.  The second is the suggestion of a takeover of Liverpool by a fans consortium of over 100,000.  These options both offer some element of accountability and above all a genuine feeling of association with the club.  However, whilst both are intriguing propositions, there is only one that could ever offer a real solution.  A football club needs leadership, and democracy on a day to day basis is totally unworkable.  The prospect of 25,000 people collaborating to pick the team is a nice thought but crazy in practice. 

The Liverpool option though, is one that could potentially reinvigorate football and put the considerations of supporters at the forefront of thinking.  'Member share' schemes have been in place in Europe for decades and recent success of such clubs in the European Champions League demonstrates that it need not be any barrier to success.  Although supporters may crave the power to make decisions when they shout from the stands, accountability not control is what is required.

Such is the ridiculous price put on football in todays world that even for a collective of 100,000 supporters, it would require an investment of £5,000 per supporter to mount a bid even worth consideration for Liverpool.  However, such is the money pumped into season tickets and merchandise every year by fans without return, some might see it as a worthwhile investment....