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The government’s Localism Bill was published yesterday, as was a guidance document. The latter confirms that power will be devolved to the community and that data will be made public for the scrutiny of that power.

“The Big Society is what happens whenever people work together for the common good. It is about achieving our collective goals in ways that are more diverse, more local and more personal.

“The best contribution that central government can make is to devolve power, money and knowledge to those best placed to find the best solutions to local needs: elected local representatives, frontline public service professionals, social enterprises, charities, co-ops, community groups, neighbourhoods and individuals.”

Central to this is a continued commitment to releasing public data for the public to use:

“Public access to public data provides the evidence base for public pressure and action, both on the part of those proposing new ways to deliver services and on the part of service users thus enabled to make an informed choice. This is what we mean by ‘transparency’: the ability to see how government actually works - or doesn’t work.

“…there can be no local innovation without local control of resources. Nor can local decision- making succeed without access to the government data on which informed judgement depends”.

The approach is to “focus on outcome, not process, and to release such knowledge into the public domain as raw data - so that anyone can analyse and visualise the information, spot trends and make connections that would otherwise go unseen”.

I haven’t yet seen anything that puts an expectation on the voluntary sector to release data, and to do so in an open format, but if they are to deliver services that the public are expected to scrutinise then inevitably it will need to happen. And it will, rightly, need to happen across the board - regardless of whether an organisation is delivering a public service or not.

The question then is what data should be released, and how? NCVO is already encouraging charities to release data and Open Charities has opened up the charity register; the Charity Commission itself, however, seems to be lagging behind at the moment.

I expect it won’t be allowed to lag for long though. The voluntary sector may well be about to find itself under a lot more scrutiny, not just from government and funders but the general public too.

There is more discussion around open local data on the Open Local Data Blog.

At the end of October I went to a conference in Birmingham about ‘delivering public services for less’, which looked to digital technology for the answer to delivering more efficient public services for less money. It seems to me, though, that it’s a lot more complicated than most people want to admit.

The strapline on the Beyond 2010 conference programme was ‘More for less’, which was challenged by one or two of the speakers. In the words of Robert Hardy, of Robert Hardy Consulting: ”It’s not more for less, and it’s not less for less: it’s different for less”. In other words, we shouldn’t delude ourselves that technology will somehow allow us miraculously to squeeze more out of existing models with less expenditure: a radical change of culture is required.

That was refreshing, but on the whole it felt that radical change was being expected to come from the adoption of technology rather than being the driving force for it.

There was a lot of talk (particularly in light of the recent Comprehensive Spending Review) of opportunities to bring about these radical changes and efficiencies to public service delivery through the adoption of digital technologies.

Unfortunately I didn’t hear much, over the course of two days, that hasn’t been said pretty continuously for at least the past decade. Back in the late 1990s I was sat in meetings organised by government departments, discussing how technology was going to solve the issues of voter turnout and simultaneously bring down administration costs; little has changed. While the conference speakers seemed oblivious to this, they did seem to believe what they were saying; unfortunately my experience doesn’t tell me that miraculous savings are made by relying on technology, and it certainly doesn’t fill me with confidence that any of them have even half-grasped the challenges they face in transforming service delivery through technology.

Inefficiency is a human trait (or ‘failing’, if you really must): organisations and systems are only as efficient as the human beings running them. And no matter how organised someone is, none of us is a robot: we all make errors of judgment and we all have some days that are better than others. So the inefficiencies of people create complex systems, which in turn exacerbate the problem; if a person is inefficient I expect it’s generally because something about the system allows or encourages them to be. My limited experience suggests that all systems are inefficient but that larger ones are less able to be flexible and responsive. (An example of that might be where an organisation grows because it needs extra capacity to respond to its audience effectively, but at the same time loses valuable internal networks as it becomes less informal.)

And what is meant by ‘efficiency’ anyway, and who decides that? For it to mean anything at all requires everyone in the organisation to be working within the same parameters, which to be set will have to be determined somehow (probably by targets and measurements). And those parameters are themselves the product of the very same inefficient system that they are trying to address.

So how do you safeguard against that? I think skills are the key: if an organisation or system contains the appropriate skills, then human behaviour can be managed and capitalised on effectively. It would seem to me that skills are of fundamental importance if we hope to see such major changes to public service delivery as are being called for. And not just those skills required for using the new tools at our disposal, but skills for every aspect of public life. If we want radical change in the provision of public services, someone in any given organisation needs to champion that and enable it to happen. That in itself requires skills: skills for understanding the nature of the task, for managing people, for identifying issues and solutions, etc; skills even for identifying necessary skills in the first place (a tricky one when you’re at the top of the pyramid). No matter how flat an organisation, there will always be people where the buck stops; if these individuals don’t have the skills to manage the change that people are calling for then it doesn’t matter if everyone else is skilled up to the eyeballs, the exercise will be doomed to fail.

Yet skills were hardly mentioned during this conference.

There was also a noticeable lack of attention paid to other areas of policy, with little acknowledgement that these massive challenges to public services are not confined to their own protective bubble. Formal education, for example, wasn’t discussed as a key component of IT skills development, and yet uncertainty currently surrounds the nature of ICT in the National Curriculum; interrogating and understanding the implications - both apparent and hidden - of all the public data we’re being offered requires skills that currently are tied to the citizenship curriculum, yet there are fears for the future of citizenship too.

Digital innovation in the public realm requires all sorts of other skills, and links across lots of policy areas. In order to for the impending upheaval of public service delivery to have any positive impact, in my opinion, the decision-makers in that process need to be careful not to become blinded by the promises of well-meaning but often excitable digital enthusiasts.

Many thanks to Paul Clarke for his support in writing this.

I’ve just been alerted to the Voluntary Sector Datastore, launched recently by NCVO to encourage the voluntary sector to match government in its release of data to the public.

NCVO, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, has put its ‘toe in the water’ by publishing some of its data to the new datastore in a bid to encourage others to do the same.

‘Essentially, we’d like to see the sector match government in opening up what we’ve got so that society as a whole can realise the benefits of sharing and mashing data together and then visualising it. This space is our toe in the water to start pulling that together.’

The only difference between engaging someone in public consultation and engaging them in user testing is, as far as I can see, the type of reward they get for taking part.

With user testing it’s easy: the client pays a company an extortionate amount of money to test their product; or, if it’s being done on the cheap, buys lunch for a few folk and tests the product on them instead. People might even do the testing as a favour, but that requires them to have some level of emotional attachment to whoever’s doing the asking.

With public consultation the reward is harder to quantify, but it still needs to be there.

On Tuesday evening I was involved in giving some feedback on a local council web initiative. I wasn’t paid or fed, and I had no emotional attachment to the consultant (the council). I do, however, have an emotional attachment to the group that was being consulted and so I was quite happy to take part. But had I been consulted directly I would not have been happy when told that my suggestions would be ‘added to the log’ and ‘may or may not be used’. In fact I would have been angry: they’d taken up my evening and wouldn’t even be bothered to let me know if and how they used my suggestions. (And no, I see no reward in simply helping the council, as I have little faith in its ability to do things well.)

Many public consultations seem to treat their participants as free user testers, which seems something of a paradox. Some reward (which could be simply the satisfaction of doing someone a favour) is important. If there’s no payback – fee, lunch, feedback, satisfaction, etc – then the participant will probably feel used and alienated.

The same goes for ‘digital engagement’ initiatives; which tend, in essence, to be attempts at consultation.

Last night I went to a panel discussion on ‘Connecting with constituents: MPs and Digital Engagement’, chaired by Andy Williamson of the Hansard Society. On the panel were Jon Kingsbury of Nesta who talked about the new MyMP iPhone app (funded partly by Nesta and partly byPublic Zone), Tim Hood of Yoosk and Paul Hodgkin of Patient Opinion.

All three initiatives aim to listen to people and feed their input effectively into the public processes, while also making them a valued and engaged part of those processes. There are in fact lots of online initiatives trying to do this, but I’m not sure many of them have really grasped the importance of payback. MyMP doesn’t seem to have considered it (I may be wrong of course). When I posed the question to the panel last night, Yoosk appeared to put faith in the conversation developing to the point where the participants felt bonded enough in some way (as part of a network perhaps) for payback to occur naturally. Maybe that will happen, but it seems a bit of a gamble.

Patient Opinion was apparently the only of the three initiatives to have understood the importance of payback (feedback, in this case: they gather stories from people and are starting to post outcomes of those stories). It seems telling that Patient Opinion was set up by a doctor – not a politician, charity or think tank – and was the only initiative last night that didn’t claim to connect citizens directly with elected representatives or public figures.

The problem seems to be that perennial one of the Web: lots of people have great ideas for layering technology on top of society, and rush to deliver them. What doesn’t seem to happen is a questioning of the underlying processes; it’s all very well encouraging conversation, but what do you do with it?

Someone asked why on earth there were all these different tools available when there should simply be one in the obvious place: Parliament’s own website. One reply was that if people don’t trust a site or organisation (or they don’t have a connection with it) they won’t use its tools, and so these third-party tools are crucial to engagement. While I agree with that I also agree with an assertion made by Andy Williamson: people already have social tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc) that they use to talk about general stuff of interest to them, and when those conversations wander into politics it is in those spaces that they’re conducted; in general people won’t seek out a dedicated site or application for holding those conversations.

Last night the old adage seemed to ring truer than ever: meet people where they are. And having a voice is great up to a point, but feedback – or reward – is critical in the end.

—

Cross-posted from citizensheep.com.

Note: in this post I use the definition of ‘consultant’ as that of someone who asks questions, not someone who gives professional advice.

Ordnance Survey recently released the boundary data for council wards so that anyone can use it. On Saturday we built a demonstration of what can be achieved by combining it with other public data.

A bunch of us gathered in Birmingham to spend a day looking at data and mapping, at Andrew McKenzie’s Mapitude event on Saturday. It was hosted at Aquila TV and sponsored by Digital Birmingham.

Although there were a number of presentations from the likes of OpenStreetMap, Mappa Mercia and OpenlyLocal, I spent the bulk of the day helping to build a demonstration of what can be achieved by combining sets of data that are available from Ordnance Survey and National Statistics.

The brief, which had been suggested by Gavin Wray, was to choose a ward and layer information over it. Dan Slee was keen to map St Matthew’s in Walsall, and the group agreed that we should try and compare it against an adjacent ward if possible. While the others searched for datasets, I threw together a web page; Stuart Harrison and Chris Taggart worked on the hard task of writing code.

We ended up with this: http://www.pezholio.co.uk/mapitude/.

Now this might look like we’ve simply drawn a boundary on a couple of Google maps and embedded them in a web page; and in a way we have: the difference is that the plotting of points and drawing of lines is done automatically, and the information about the wards is pulled in automatically.

In other words, Stuart wrote some code that automates the tasks of:

1. finding the boundary coordinates from Ordnance Survey OpenData;
2. plotting the boundary on a Google map;
3. interrogating National Statistics for our choice of data.

Then the map is simply embedded in a web page. Which, in a fully working application, would also be done automatically (or rather, on the whim of whoever visits the web page).

There are loads of other things I’d like to see, such as users choosing boundaries based on their own understanding of geography (administrative boundaries for religious groups or sports organisations, for example) as well as the official civic ones, and comparisons over time.

But remember this was just a demonstration: surprising as it may sound, this hasn’t really been done before. Prior to 1 April 2010, UK ward boundary data were simply not available for public use; groups of fools like us could not have spent our free time building this tool for the public good.

We’re not the only people exploring how we can make good use of public data, plenty of others are too. The point is that this stuff is game-changing, and it’s being done by volunteers for the sake of it (and a free lunch, if one’s available). People are creating their own ways of making sense of the world around them – of understanding and engaging with civic society – and offering it to others. As a result it is even harder these days to pin down where people are getting their information from, how critical they are in analysing it and what level of engagement they have.

The opening up of public data is not a magic bullet of course, but it is an exciting development. With public data now freely available I suspect civic engagement will become much messier and harder to define than it was before: and arguably a lot more democratic.

On Monday the Local Public Data Panel held a workshop in Birmingham with local council officers, bloggers and activists to address the challenges of releasing local data for anyone to use.

The aim of the workshop was ‘to generate ideas and understanding about what is needed to drive the local public data initiative at a local level’.

When people get their hands on raw data they can develop tools and services that the custodians of that data either don’t have the time and skills to do or would never have dreamed of anyway. DayNurseriesUK, for example, has built a tool for people to find full-day child care, and Adrian Short has built a tool for people in Sutton find their election candidates.

Releasing data also enables members of the public to point out errors, such as an incorrectly mapped bus stop, which - if fed back effectively - enriches that data to the benefit of society. Although there will always be people who want to point the finger, it creates a wonderful opportunity for citizens and state to work collaboratively on issues of social concern.

Obstacles though are complex and numerous: risk aversion, personal agendas (such as job retention), concerns about quality control and fear of how the data might be used are just some of the challenges that need addressing. But challenges they are, and everyone on Monday seemed more than happy to confront them.

By the end of the day we had come up with a list of things we think are needed (this list is from my personal notes and not the official record of the meeting):

• Data disclaimer for everyone to use;
• Clarity and guidance on the release of data;
• More clarity on ‘derived data’ (what it is, etc);
• Training;
• Repeats of this sort of workshop event;
• Business case;
• Stories of good stuff being done, that everyone can relate to, and presented accessibly;
• Research on usage and numbers;
• Budgetry incentives;
• New legislation, or better use of existing legislation, to encourage the opening up of data;
• Untangling of overlapping and seemingly contradictory legislation;
• A statutory right to data.

I have set up a blog for those involved to collaborate on this work: http://localdata.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk.

There has been a concerted effort over the last couple of years to encourage local people to get their voices heard and to take control of local issues.

As a result of this burgeoning ‘hyperlocal news‘ movement, more and more blogs and community websites are springing up: people are finding and reporting on local stories that mainstream media wouldn’t be interested in, challenging and engaging with local civic organisations, and motivating their communities by virtue of being relevant.

With this comes a set of new challenges for them: what do they do when faced with the threat of crippling – though often baseless – legal action; how can they get the most meaningful response from their elected representatives; what tools are available for sourcing stories and enabling engagement; etc.

On Saturday I attended Talk About Local’s second unconference, this time held in Leeds. The last one - in Stoke-on-Trent - was full of enthusiastic people wanting to do great things; now people are finding their feet, a solid sense of purpose and determination has set in, and the enthusiasm to share knowledge and experience is as strong as ever.

I joined three discussions during the course of the day: one on finding stories, one on covering the General Election and one on legal issues.

[What follows is a lightly edited version of posts from my personal blog.]

Finding stories

A brainstorm of the room (and subsequent discussion) came up with an abundance of ideas for finding local stories:

• Speak to people on the streets, in the community, cafes, pubs etc;
• Cycle around the area;
• Read up on local history, for example using:
  • the Old Bailey proceedings from 1674 to 1913, online and searchable (free);
  • the British library’s digitised, searchable archive of 19th century newspapers (£10 subscription);
  • Google Books (free);
• Attend council meetings (the agendas might be boring but the meetings can be lively);
• Read the minutes of council meetings;
• Attend other local meetings (eg NHS, Police and Fire authority meetings);
• Attend inquests;
• Read Freedom of Information requests;
• Read planning applications;
• Read news feeds (eg RSS feeds via Google Reader);
• Scan community websites;
• Subscribe to email forums, discussion groups etc;
• Use Wikisplash, a new guide for helping journalists find UK stories;
• Read the births, marriages and deaths columns of local papers;
• Request press releases from local organisations;
• Attend Family Courts (it’s hard to find out what’s on beforehand, but courtserve.net might help);
• Walk a dog.

It was also mentioned that the government is apparently looking to publish outcomes of magistrates’ court cases online in the future, which would be very useful to local bloggers.

The baton then passed to Tom Steinberg, who went into a bit more detail about how online tools can support the sourcing of news, and how to filter out stuff that interests you from the overwhelming amount of information available.

• Google Alerts will send you email or RSS updates of anything you ask it
  • be creative when you’re putting in search terms
• FixMyStreet alerts for local problems.
• WhatDoTheyKnow lets you subscribe to alerts for when someone asks a Freedom of Information request of your council. (Even though the council may not answer, the more people subscribe the less easy it is for the issue to be ignored.)
• TheyWorkForYou feeds: rich data about the work of individual MPs.
• PlanningAlerts notifies you of local planning applications (although it’s currently limited to what it can do with postcodes due to action by Royal Mail).
• Flickr enables people to geotag photos, which means you can subscribe to a feed letting you know of new ones near to you.
• OpenlyLocal has a Google gadget for accessing local council data, and a Ning application (although sadly Ning is phasing out its free service). I think Chris said he’s also just made available some javascript for forthcoming local council meetings, which you can use on your sites.

For the more technically minded, most of the services listed above make it easy to develop your own tools for re-using their data.

Freedom of Information requests

Tom (as Director of MySociety, the organisation behind WhatDoTheyKnow) was asked to clarify the issues around submitting Freedom of Information Requests. His advice:

• Be faultlessly polite in all your correspondence. The people reading your correspondence are rarely those responsible for the information you seek;
• If you don’t get a response from an organisation, follow through the sanctioning process with the Information Commissioner. Make it clear that you are doing so and that you know what is expected of the organisation legally;
• Be careful not to get labelled as ‘vexatious’. Although there is no hard and fast line about how you become labelled as ‘vexatious’, don’t give anyone the chance do so: once they’ve blacklisted you they will never reply to you again. So be minimalist in your approach.

Election coverage

We heard that whereas it used to be the case (in broadcast journalism at least) that each political party had to be given exactly the same coverage, that is no longer the case. If a party has no history of election success, you are apparently within your rights not to cover them.  Just make sure to list all the candidates who are standing.

Independent reporters should have no extra restrictions for reporting on polling day, although it might be worth trying to get press accreditation.

‘Declaration of Financial Interest’: guideline is apparently now for MPs to make that public, so you can ask if they will give you the same statement that they give to others: they might well see it as in their interest to, particularly in light of the MPs’ expenses scandal.

Some election sites

• TheStraightChoice: uploaded election leaflets
  1. Get your readers to upload theirs
  2. Show them interesting stuff that happened as a result;
• ElectionChampion: a game to find the election billboards that are springing up around the country;
• Democracy Club: ‘working to build the definitive guide to where all candidates stand on major issues, nationwide’;
• yournextmp.com
  • The goal is that after the election what the winners said will be compared with their voting record over the next five years.

Legal issues

Problems faced by people in the room had included: unfounded but effective demands to have comments removed from websites; moral dilemmas about balancing legal rights to publish with social implications for individuals; the threat of crippling court fees.

Some tips from the room:

• Make interaction/commenting guidelines clearer;
• Always check your story with more than one source;
• Consider removing first-post moderation: if you moderate comments you are legally responsible for their content. Instead add a ‘report this comment’ button and ensure you have a tight take-down policy;
• Ensure you have clear terms and conditions are on your site, and review them regularly.

Please remember:
This post is a report of information gleaned at an event, which I may unintentionally have misunderstood or misrepresented. Please do not presume anything here is accurate: check against a reliable source first.

These are exciting times for civic engagement. The internet, coupled with interest from both activists and policy-makers, is daily throwing up new ways to test the relationship between citizen and state. We should grasp the opportunity to explore how to make the most responsible and effective use of these new tools for the good of our democratic society.

The UK government recently took the brave step of releasing government data for anyone to use as they wish. They put this data on the new website data.gov.uk and invited people to use it:

“We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in building a collaborative relationship with you.” (data.gov.uk)

This encouragement vindicated the work that some people had already been doing to improve links between citizens and the state, and enabled others also to create useful tools with the data.

In the United Kingdom we have some great online services that tap into public data for the good of society: some helping people have their voices heard by decision-makers, other making those decision-making processes a little more transparent.

Council Monitor, for example, finds what people are saying online about your local authority. It shows at a glance the topics that people are discussing and how positive or negative those discussions are. It both exposes the perceived success of local councils and provides evidence for them to measure that success by.

FixMyStreet brings the two parties closer together, by telling your council about things that need fixing in your neighbourhood. Similarly HearFromYourMP encourages Members of Parliament to discuss with you things that they think are important, and enables you to talk back; and the Prime Minister’s No 10 Petitions Website gives you the opportunity to lobby the government on issues of importance to you. Although opinion is divided on whether these petitions are a good thing, it has certainly been successful in bringing the strength of public opinion to the attention of government (most notably with regard to anger over road tax plans).

Then there are tools for getting to the bottom of an issue. Whereas WhatDoTheyKnow makes it easier to submit Freedom of Information requests, Help Me Investigate encourages people to collaborate in finding answers. Someone will pose a question - such as ‘Does the Job Centre check out employers when it advertises vacancies?‘ - and other people can help to find the answer, adding information they already know or have uncovered specially.

Even if you don’t have the time or inclination to use these tools, you can still use the internet to make your voice heard. Increasingly, MPs, councillors, civil servants and other public workers are using social media to listen to what is being said about them. After all, it is arguably in everybody’s interest that they listen, engage and act upon what they find.

For example, a number of MPs and local councillors are listening and responding on Twitter. And for the subversive among you: Audioboo lets you upload audio tagged with your location, which can be used to leave useful information for people; likewise, Foursquare enables users to share thoughts and opinions about a place. I’ve blogged elsewhere about how Foursquare could empower people to break commercial advantage; although strictly speaking this may not be civic engagement, it does illustrate the potential of such tools for enabling citizens to take a bit more control of their society.

And of course you don’t necessarily need a computer: you can now access services from many mobile phones.

Even if decision-makers are not listening to you, somebody will be: and so your message starts gaining momentum. Therefore simply using popular tools to voice opinions, make a noise and suggest solutions is, these days, not a bad place to start.

However, at the Citizenship Foundation we believe that effective civic engagement - or more specifically, effective citizenship - requires critical reflection by all involved; not simply the release and management of data by one party and the voicing of opinions by another.

The tools mentioned here are themselves not enough. They do exactly what they are intended to do, and usually do it very well. It’s just that in order for them to be part of an arsenal for effective, informed and responsible citizenship, they need extra layers of context.

Mashing together government data may provide some new insights but it also results in a whole load of new questions. For example, Mapumental promises to be a great tool for finding areas to live based on your salary. But it’s not its job to then encourage you to think about other social and ethical concerns, such as ‘if we all move to the nicest parts we can afford, what impact will that have on other places?’. And indeed it shouldn’t be its job to do that: imagine how unwieldy a tool it would become if it tried to address all the potential social issues stemming from its presentation of data.

So if it’s not up to Mapumental and other tools to prompt that sort of questioning, whose job is it? And whose job is it to encourage users of the tools listed above to engage critically, rather than just use them to assert their rights, hold people to account, or provide excuses for not addressing an issue?

Unfortunately it’s not as easy as allocating ‘the job’ to someone or to a group of someones. It’s rather down to all of us using those tools - members of the public and decision-makers alike - to do so with a keenness for rigorous, informed and effective debate.

At the Citizenship Foundation we are grappling with the question of how to encourage that. How do we affect this type of social change? Certainly schools and teachers can - and do - play a significant part: especially when they put effort into teaching citizenship education, by helping young people develop the skills they need to be confident, critical citizens. But schools can’t do it all.

Recently there has been heightened interest in online civic engagement: in addition to data.gov.uk the government has released its vision for a ‘Digital Britain‘, and Twitter keeps cropping up in news stories for its effectiveness to enable influential uprisings (such as to force Trafigura into abonding their injunction against The Guardian). The climate is currently ideal for exploring the potential of the internet for civic dialogue, and we should be making the most of it.

We’ll probably never be able to get every person online and using these tools to extend their engagement beyond self-interest. But by seeking to meet this challenge we hope to encourage more people to use the tools as a starting point for meaningful civic engagement.

This post was commissioned by BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) for their Savvy Citizens website.

There has been a lot of noise lately calling on local authorities to embrace social media. Clearly this is only useful if it’s an effective way to engage with citizens, and if the authority learns from it to improve that engagement. A number of tools can be used to measure this, but now there’s one that does it for them.

Council Monitor (currently in beta) scours the internet to find what people are saying about your local authority. It shows at a glance the topics that those people are discussing and how positive or negative those discussions are, making it easier to monitor and compare the reputation of councils online.

This is an interesting tool because it allows anyone to see this information for free, and for a fee the councils themselves can fine-tune the data to strengthen the quality of the feedback they are receiving.

So the information is at once transparent (councils can’t hide behind rhetoric quite so easily and are encouraged to engage better) and useful (councils are given valuable data on which to build their engagement strategies).

According to new research, most young people aged 14-25 would be likely to vote in an election and would be more likely to if they could do so online. However, they don’t see social networking as particularly useful for furthering a cause, favouring instead an email to their Member of Parliament.

A recent YouGov poll for the Citizenship Foundation interviewed almost 4,000 14-25 year-olds about their attitudes to political participation, politicians and power in the United Kingdom.

• The majority of respondents said they would be likely to vote, with 59 per cent seeing voting as the most useful way of participating in local or national politics.
• 32 per cent said they were knowledgeable about “the way that local and national government works”; of those, 71 per cent said the internet was a source of their news.
• 85 per cent had never joined a campaigning group in their local community (fairly consistent across the age ranges), and 50 per cent thought doing so would make no difference to the issues the tackle (also fairly consistent).
• 51 per cent had never joined a campaigning group on a social networking site, but 42 per cent had; however 65 per cent thought doing so would make no difference.
• 54 per cent said they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online. Interestingly, 78 per cent said they had never contacted a TV or radio show (by phone, text or email) to express their views.
• Email was seen as the most effective tool for making a political difference online. This doubles at the top end of the age bracket. Twitter scores very low and only increases fractionally with older respondents; although interestingly there is a significant spike among 16 year-olds (almost treble the score of younger age groups).

Further information

The research was commissioned to mark the Citizenship Foundation’s 20th year.

• Press releases
• Download the survey results summary (pdf)
• Download the full survey results (pdf)

Extra!