"politics" in Weblog

Over the last week or so I’ve started pushing a little thought tool/influence experiment I’ve set up called Elect or not? I’m trying to gently nudge people into thinking about why they vote for who they vote for while hopefully gathering some data on the halo effect while I’m at it. I’ll write more about the science behind it when I get some more time.

Out of curiosity I just crunched the numbers for the results I’ve had so far and thought I’d share… Bear in mind that this is people saying who’d they vote for based on looks alone, without knowing who the candidate is, who they represent or what their policies might be…

• 32% Conservative
• 25% Labour
• 24% Liberal Democrat

Compare these results to some of the proper polls… 

YouGov (2010-04-28):

• 34% Conservative
• 27% Labour
• 31% Liberal Democrat

ComRes (2010-04-27):

• 36% Conservative
• 29% Labour
• 26% Liberal Democrat

ICM (2010-04-25):

• 33% Conservatives
• 28% Labour
• 30% Liberal Democrats

Tweetminister (experimental):

• 35% Conservative
• 30% Labour
• 26% Liberal Democrat

It’s a little bit scary but my numbers don’t seem too far removed from these far more sensible and official polls… See the data for yourself on the Elect or not? Parliament page.

After an last minute abort of our Shanghai ticket (I made it all the way to boarding before bailing after Emma’s visa was found to be expired) we found ourselves with an extra few days in Hong Kong. What was going on yesterday? The pro-democracy march. We couldn’t sit around and let that happen without us so we headed down to Wan Chai and joined in. I’m not exactly a protesting veteran so I only have the London anti war marches for comparison but I wanted to write down my impressions (for a visual account I have a Hong Kong Pro-democracy March photo group on Flickr).

From reading the local paper, the self-censoring South China Morning Post, I got the impression that the march was going to be a meager affair. This was compounded by the tiny turnout for the buildup to the march outside the Legco building last weekend. I know that 500,000 people turned out to the last one but I was really worried that this one was going to be a failure, signalling the slow decline of the democratic aspirations of the Hong Kong people.

We had to ask police for directions to the march since we couldn’t find a route on the web and I have to say that I’ve never met more helpful coppers. We talked to 3 or 4 and all of them were incredibly polite and helpful, pointing us in the right direction and telling us where the best place was to intercept the march. Following these directions we hit the procession just outside Pacific Place… And the mass of people stretched back for as far as I could see.

The official count from the government today is set at 63,000 people but I am absolutely certain that this figure is FAR, FAR short of the real turnout. The organisers estimate 250,000 and I think this closer to the truth. The scale of the protest was definitely comparable to the London ones from a few years ago. The crowd was a facinating mix of ages and backgrounds, with whole families turning out. The crowd was remarkably passive, although I did see one woman being carried off by police, with photographers in hot pursuit.

I was quite disappointed to find that the march ended up outside an obscure government building behind Queens Road Central, instead of the Legco building. The government had organised a children’s play day outside their seat of power, which just happened to co-incide with the march and prevent the protesters from coming anywhere near their legislature. I can’t believe that this wasn’t engineered… Instead the marchers were forced to wend their way up Battery Path, behind the HSBC building, taking them away from the center of town.

At the end of the march people tied their ribbons and stuck their stickers onto the railings outside the building to register their presence. We were there early but already they were covered… Will the Chinese government ever agree to free elections in one of their SARs?

I’ve not really been following this, to be honest but this story just doesn’t feel right to me: Yahoo helped jail China writer. The ‘China writer’ has been sentenced to 10 years because ‘he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message’. Christ almighty! That must sit very uneasily with the conciences of those in the Yahoo boardroom.

And they’re not alone. If I remember correctly, Google allows the Chinese government to limit their search results and Microsoft also censor their MSN Spaces blogging service.

I suppose everyone has to decide where to draw the line and for Yahoo it was at the $1 billion mark. I don’t know how much the others cost.

Now, there are a couple of things that spring to mind, beyond the moral issue.

Firstly, I don’t understand how the Chinese government can do all this, technically. The resources they’re pouring in must be enormous.

Secondly, censorship destroys the single greatest (and worst) thing about the internet - there is information for everyone out there, no matter what they’re into. Working at Wordtracker has given me an insight into what people are looking for on the internet, and while most of it is legit, some of it really, deeply disturbing… And I’m quite laissez faire. Still, the internet, at its heart, is about putting folk in touch with other like-minded people. Without that, how much benefit do the Chinese people really get from the digital revolution that has changed the lives of so many?

Anyway, over at Wordtracker we call it ‘online behaviour’ and it’s a facinating step into cyber-sociology. The internet takes up so much of so many peoples’ lives but we know so little about what’s actually going on. I guess the Chinese have realised that and have developed the world’s first cyber-dictatorship.

Being neglected in my Labour safe-seat while the parties campaigned hard in the marginals didn’t stop me from staying up late to watch the election coverage on TV. Sadly I missed the Jeremy Paxman interview with George Gallaway, which was highly entertaining. I fell asleep with the radio on and woke up convinced that the Conservatives had won. Fortunately, I was wrong and on top of that the Lib Dems had managed a fantastic 60 seats. It took the Guardian’s election night photos to cheer me back up again. Read the captions, they’re genius! And make sure you make it to the end - Kilroy about to cry. Props to Serm for sending through the links.

It’s been a while since I last posted a graf link but I’m back with a good one. ni9e. It’s not exactly graffiti-based but there’s plenty in there, and it’s damned clever too. Highlights for me include printing “USPS does not acknowledge the authority of the Bush administration” on USPS cards and putting them back in the post office, and the graf taxonomy images - close-up comparisons of single letters from multiple tags. I’d seen the typographic illustration Flash stuff before but it just doesn’t get boring so go check that out too.

I spent a while last night chatting to Roland at Nykris about the guys behind mySociety, a collection of volunteers who are cornering the market in innovative and USEFUL government websites. Off the back of that I just spent a little while having a look around TheyWorkForYou, another of their projects. It’s a fantastic idea for a website and beautifully executed. What has my MP been up to? How would I ever find out? Well I could go and trawl through parliament records but since they all call each other ‘the honourable gentleman’, that could take a while. And I’d have to leave the comfort of my sofa. TheyWorkForYou allows me to first find my MP and second look at what he’s been up to over the last year. How many parliamentary debates has he been involved with? How often does he vote? How much does he spend on his staff? It’s all right there. myCommunity have done a fantastic job of providing a simple mechanism for getting exactly the information I want, and they’ve executed it very well. And not for profit?! What is the world coming to?

UPDATE 4 June 2009: Apparently Hackney Council have updated their website and there’s now a full list of polling stations available as a PDF.

Right, I’m frustrated. It’s the Mayoral elections tomorrow along with voting for the European parliament and the London Assembly. There’s been a lot of fuss made about postal voting and the polling cards being overly complicated. To be honest, I welcome the opportunity to vote by post - it saves me a queue at least. It does deprive me of the experience of participating in democracy but I’ll get over it. And as for the voting papers themselves, I read the instructions, drew some crosses and that was that. Simple.

But… My housemate is voting in person. He asked me what on the surface appeared to be a simple question: Where’s the nearest polling station? So I hit Google for what I thought was the most sensible query. I then spent 20mins going around the various local authority sites including Hackney Council and London Elects, amongst others, only to be confounded every time. I found loads of information about the mechanics of filling in the forms but nothing about polling stations, save a phone number which will undoubtedly be busy all of tomorrow. I admit that I wasn’t reading particularly carefully but that’s what good site design is all about - allowing users to find information quickly and accurately. The Hackney Council site homepage didn’t even mention the elections and the London Elect site’s ‘How do I vote’ section lead me to a phone number.

I eventually gave up… I can’t remember the last time I couldn’t find something on the internet! It’s an absolute disgrace that this information isn’t readily available considering current voter apathy and limited attention spans. All it takes is a little bit of thought, a splash of planning and some consideration for the user.

Right, I’m back near civilisation again (near enough for there to be an internet cafe anyway). Just got off the boat from Taveuni where we’ve been for the last week. I can’t believe how much travelling we’ve had to do to get around a place that looks so small on the map! Taveuni’s only a couple of hundred miles away but the only way to get there is by ferry and that takes 20 hours Fiji time (anywhere between 20 and 24 hours actual time)… Anyway, Taveuni was absolutely incredible. It’s also exactly the other side of the world from the U.K. as the 180 degree line passes right through it. Technically, while it’s Friday on most of the island, it’s Saturday on some of it. There’s one shop that stays open 7 days a week by having a door on either side of the line so when it’s Sunday on one side it’s Monday on the other!

We spent 4 days diving some of the best sites in the world, saw a bunch of sharks - apparently they were pretty small at 2 meters but I kept a close eye on my limbs, and just chilled in a fantastic little place (Susi’s Plantation) on the south west side of the island. We got invited to play volleyball with the local village (the guys here are all enormous so we figured we’d better accept volleyball before they offered rugby) which was cool too but we were soooooo out-classed. These guys play all day every day and I’d played once in my life. Luckily they’re patient folk. In fact, the people on Taveuni are about the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Everyone says hello and everyone seems genuinely interested in talking to you. London’s gonna be a bit of a shock!

After the diving we headed round to the other side to take a look at the rainforest and some of the waterfalls round that way. The best of the waterfalls was a 4.5 km hike and a short swim away from the village we were staying in so it was a proper mission to get out there! It wasn’t that big (maybe 20m high) with a smaller fall right next to it but the location was awesome. We figured it’d be kinda cool to jump off it so being the idjuts that we are we figured we’d just climb through the jungle, skirt the cliffs and hop off. Um. Well. Rainforest and all. We got bitten and stung by every little critter with a mouth or a tail but we soldiered on and eventually we emerged about an hour later by the smaller of the falls. Encouraged by this we figured that getting up to the high one’d be a doddle. Another hour passed and we emerged back at the lower falls again with added cuts, scrapes, bruises and stings. Doh! We gave up after that and just jumped from where we were… Still very cool but we felt a touch foolish and we did get laughed at by the locals when we told them.

We’d been advised to take some Kava (traditional Fijian drink that tastes very much like dirty dish-water but on the bright side it’s a mild narcotic) for the village chief since we’d be staying on his turf. We got invited to go drink the Kava with him so we spent most of that night drinking this Kava and chatting to a real-life chief while him, his brother and his son chain-smoked ‘Fiji tobacco’ joints (the marijuana industry here is bigger than the sugar industry apparently!) while they lectured us on Fijian politics. Proper Indiana Jones stuff.

Right, we’ve gotta go catch a bus to the ferry to Ovalau (the old colonial capital) but I guess I’ll catch you all pretty soon…

Easy

Mike (still the whitest white-boy in town)

I couldn’t help picturing Bird & Fortune while I read this… Still, this Talking Point is an interesting read.