I first came across the notion of e-petitions at Bristol City Council, when [...]]]> As things sometimes do in e-participation, the e-petitions system set up by the UK Houses of Parliament has found itself in the news of late, and looks set to stay there for sometime, thanks to the tricky issue of Europe.

I first came across the notion of e-petitions at Bristol City Council, when we piloted an e-petition system for the authority as part of the National Project on Local e-Democracy. I must confess, I was skeptical of them at the time, as the system was set up to allow the petition creater to send an email to all the signatories, in effect turning the system from one of democratic engagement into an email harvesting and marketing tool for campaign groups.

So a few years ago, when I was called to the Houses of Parliament and invited to pitch for the job of building an e-petition system for the ‘mother of parliaments’, I offered some advice but politely declined the invitation. After all, why get caught up in a system so open to abuse, especially when Tom Steinberg’s My Society had already created and released a free and open source e-petitioning platform anyone could download and use as they wished.

So then, it’s been interesting to see how the system has panned out for the House so far. As with any government site like this, there’s been no shortage of participation, with hundreds of petitions appearing on a huge range of subjects. At the same time, people are keen to sign petitions as well, with three petitions so far hitting the 100,000 signature target required for them to trigger a debate in parliament, and one nearly hitting a quarter of a million signatures.

As a result, the petitions system is acting in the way that I always thought it would; as a simple ‘suggestion box’ approach to online engagement, providing a potential ‘early warning siren’ for those keeping an eye on it about the issues currently in the public consciousness, and the degree to which they are causing widespread concern.

All well and good, but the eternal problem with e-petitioning has always been one of ‘what next?’. People can sign all the petitions they want, but unless something happens to them once they have closed, the system will cause more harm than good in terms of building public confidence in government accountability.

Well, the parliamentary system, being developed later in the day than some of the original systems, has this issue covered. As the ‘how it works’ page states, petitions receiving over 100,000 signatures could be debated in parliament. There is the problem though that this is a ‘could’, not a ‘will be’, and indeed, as Guido Fawkes has pointed out, there appears to be no easy mechanism in place for taking petitions from the web into the debating chamber itself.

That said, one petition is about to make its way into the chamber in the coming week, the one around the hoary old issue of Britain in Europe. I think it’s here though that another problem is arising, in that what does a debate in parliament actually mean? At worst, it risks reducing the expressed concern of hundreds of thousands of people into a short shouting match between opposition parties which is then quickly forgotten.

I’m not sure there is an ‘at best’ here though to act as a counterpoint to this scenario. For the Britain in Europe petition is essentially asking the debate to decide whether there should be a national referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union, reducing the process of e-participation into what its detractors always feared; a form of direct democracy subverting the established system of representative democracy under which this country has been run for many years.

What else can an e-petition do though? It’s a system that reduces potentially nuanced issues and opinions into something less than a ‘yes/no’ vote, one where the only choice you can make is to say ‘yes’. Turning this then into a debate in Parliament leaves parliamentarians free to decide what the petitioners meant, and at worst hijack the issue to turn it into something else altogether. Guido Fawkes has spotted an attempt to do this with the Europe petition already. Even if the petitioner’s original point remains unchanged, what can parliament do but resort to direct democracy to turn the petition into a measurable outcome, subverting the current system?

I remain unconvinced of the worth of e-petitions to be honest. As a pressure value or early warning siren for issues in the public mind, they could be of some use. There are better systems for this though, such as the Dialogue Platform I used to work on at Delib, which allows both parts of the ‘yes/no’ answer to be recorded, as well as further public discussion on the issues the petition contains.

When Number 10 first got an e-petition system, it caused a few embarrassments for government and did little but increase public cynicism about the degree to which government actually listens, resulting in it being later taken down. I wonder how long the system for Parliament itself will last…