Nominations for the New Statesman's New Media Awards closed on 1 June. Sean French and Thom Cooper review two of the nominated sites, upmystreet.com and CrisisWeb, while Bill Thompson profiles Eva Pascoe, competition judge and e-commerce advocate.
About the Awards
The New Statesman's New Media Awards were launched last December to promote the effective use of the Internet in government, the private sector and related organisations as a tool for enhancing democratic and social inclusion. With the recent rapid growth in Internet usage, the New Statesman is keen to ensure that individuals and organisations using the Internet to encourage civic participation and public debate, and to provide greater access to public information, should receive the appropriate recognition. The New Statesman plans to highlight - and reward - the best current work in new media, and to explain the role of new media within the political process.
Of the seven competition categories, the essay award - 2,000 words on the theme of "The People's Technology" - requires contributors to address technological issues in a direct and accessible way. The new advocacy award, is concerned with websites that attempt to lobby corporations or elected representatives using e-mail and the web. The local democracy award will be presented to the most innovative website or new media project run by a local authority or local government agency and the public policy award aims to highlight recent attempts at electronic policy formation and electronic consultation. The new representative award and the merit award will be awarded to those individuals who have employed new technology in the public interest in the most effective way.
The awards provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the real effectiveness of what is happening on-line today, with a group of judges drawn from national and local government, industry and the press. Nominations for the awards have now closed but a complete list of nominations, together with biographies of all award judges and related new media articles, are available on-line at http://www.newstatesman.co.uk. A discussion of the competition criteria and related aims is also being held on-line until the presentation of the awards in July 1999.
Sean French - www.upmystreet.com
Isn't it amazing what they can do nowadays? The upmystreet.com website is a sort of Domesday Book for the concerned citizen. You type in your postcode and you can see a graph of the trend in your area for all those things you worry about. What's happening to property prices? What are the school results like? Are the police doing their job? How quickly will a local ambulance get you to hospital? Not only that, but the information can be provided in different ways. You can compare the results with those of almost any other postcode in Britain or against a national average. The resulting graphs look very snazzy. It reminds you that Bill Gates has been predicting that our lives are going to be transformed by the access to information that digital technology will bring us. It also reminds you that Bill Gates talks an awful lot of crap.
The upmystreet.com site is a remarkable suggestion of what may happen in the future, but for the moment it's more fun to hear about than to use. Of course, as with most websites I've visited, there is the maddening slowness. At times it felt like trying to use the reference section of my local library while wading through treacle and wearing giant fur mittens.
This website certainly makes you think, but part of what it makes you think about is the problem with information and with juxtaposing things that are too different to be relevant. Assessing the academic results of a school is complicated enough, but of a whole postcode area? Somerset happens to have one of the slowest ambulance rates. Is that poor funding, incompetent management or just narrow lanes and small villages?
Thom Cooper - www.crisisweb.org
The web crosses boundaries and makes it possible to deliver information to anyone who needs it as long as they have access. Tim Berners Lee, who invented the web, has said that he will consider it all worthwhile if those who use the Internet learn enough about their neighbours to avoid ever wanting to fight with them. We may be some way from achieving that goal, but one thing the web can do is enable good ideas to spread more widely. CrisisWeb, the on-line information system of the International Crisis Group, is an excellent example of this principle in operation.
ICG is a private organisation that funds field research in countries at risk of conflict and then publishes detailed reports. Its board is currently chaired by Senator George Mitchell. And it sees the web as a way of breaking down barriers to the flow of information and keeping the international community better informed.
The site is heavily used: they claim 250,000 page views per week to tens of thousands of international relations specialists. And it is important, because the difficulty governments have in restricting access to the net means that their reports can reach parts of the world where this sort of objective evaluation is otherwise unavailable.
The site is clean and easy to use, which is vital if it is to reach people whose first language is not English or who are working with slow browsers. It also has an e-mail subscription form, something that no advocacy site can do without. The brutal fact is that nobody is going to remember to revisit your website for updates every week or month, so unless you get their e-mail address and send them updates, you might as well forget it. Overall this is a good resource, and one that makes excellent use of the web.
Meet the judges: Eva Pascoe
Any debate about the use of the Internet as a political tool inevitably stalls on the problem of access: unless everybody has straightforward and affordable access to a computer and the network, then the net inevitably fails as an instrument of democracy.
Cybercafes - public spaces that provide Internet access in a social setting - are one way around the problem for those who have money but don't own the necessary technology. Low-cost or free access from libraries and other public spaces is another. Eva Pascoe knows a lot about cybercafes, since she set up and ran Cyberia, the UK's first permanent on-line cafe, in 1994.
With a background as an academic researcher in human computer interaction, Pascoe was not an obvious Internet entrepreneur, but the early 90s was a time when many people found that the net gave them a space to experiment with new possibilities. Since leaving Cyberia she has continued to explore the net's potential, developing an e-commerce strategy for Arcadia Group, where she is currently e-commerce director, and writing regularly for the Independent.
Bill Thompson
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