Let's give e-Petitions a chance to mature

The Observer. Just because you don’t agree with the petitions posted on there doesn’t mean the site is a failure. Let’s just put some perspective around the problems that we’re seeing with e-petitions. First of all, performance. It’s standard practice with web projects to estimate the typical load, the maximum load and the extreme load that might happen once in a blue moon. And then to get it complete wrong by a factor of ten. The servers were overloaded on day one. And that’s a surprise? The surprise for me was how much coverage e-Petitions got, but I guess it is recess and news-wise things were fairly quiet. Would they have got the same coverage this morning, the day after a weekend of rioting in North London, do you think? The load issue isn’t a big problem, if it turns out to be consistently higher than expected extra capacity is easy and relatively cheap to add. This will balance out fairly quickly. Next is the ‘problem’ of the petitions themselves. I’m no fan of many of the petitions that have gone up but like them or not they represent a view held by a lot of people and, frankly, they’re no surprise. People in the UK feel alienated from politics and feel that they have no voice. Arguing that we elect MPs to do our bidding ignores the reality of the democratic deficit in this country. I do believe that petitions are an on-ramp for democracy. They can get us back into taking part in democratic life. But opening up a new system like this is always going to attract the kinds of petitions we are seeing now. Give it six or twelve months and these knee-jerk populist petitions will be flushed through the system and what we will hopefully start to focus on are the sensible ones, like the one that’s there already calling for improved diagnostic pathways for Autism Spectrum Disorder. Germany, with its culture of petitions finds them a valuable barometer of political and public feeling, it’s my hope that in a couple of years we start to feel that way here. But don’t expect our new system to be perfect on day one and don’t write it off because it isn’t. That’s just naïve. And if, over time, we can’t take small steps like this that improve our democracy and public engagement with it then maybe that’s more of an indictment of us than the tools.]]>