Mark Sellman reviews the "Virtual Economy" website and Bill Thompson profiles Scott Aikens, Merit Award nominee
About the awards
The New Statesman's New Media Awards were launched last December to promote the effective use of the Internet in public life. The New Statesman is keen to ensure that individuals and organisations that use the Internet to encourage civic participation and public debate, and to provide greater access to public information, should receive the appropriate recognition. With a panel of judges drawn from national and local government, industry and the press, 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. Nominations for the awards have now closed but a complete list of nominations is available on-line at http://www.newstatesman.co.uk.
Mark Sellman reviews the "Virtual economy" website
http://www.bized.ac.uk/virtual/economy
The classic Internet error. You have a great idea for the web. You write, produce and publish. And then it falls flat on its face. This site, produced by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol, fits that model exactly. It's a great idea: basically, "do you want to be the chancellor of the exchequer for a day?"
It has a good captive audience: teachers and students. Its objectives are great: explain the labyrinth of interest rates, taxation, public spending, inflation and unemployment, and the economic theory behind them. It has great resources: case studies, charts, glossaries and factsheets. And best of all it has a toy! You can be the chancellor of the exchequer by changing rates (interest, mortgage), duties (beer, tobacco and so on), benefits (child benefit, income support and so on) and macroeconomic conditions. Then you can click a button and see how your policies affect the nation (I plunged it into deflationary chaos). So where does it go wrong?
The producers forgot an important Internet rule: hit the user between the eyes. The home page is dull and buries the toy too deep to catch attention. Although there is an imaginative attempt to structure the site like the chancellor's Downing Street home, it is neutralised by dry copy and a deep site where you have to burrow to find the nuggets. You can understand the theory of the site structure: explain the basics of the economy and at the end you get to play, but in the strange realm of cyberspace, it should be exactly the other way round.
Mark Sellman is a journalist and lawyer
Bill Thompson profiles Scott Aikens, nominated for the Merit Award
http://www.aikens.org/
The Internet has always been a two-way channel, allowing everyone with access to the technology and the network to have a voice. Yet despite its growing popularity during the early 1990s, few politicians or political groups took advantage of it. In the UK Poptel (www.poptel.net) and its Geonet service were used by the unions, but the main political parties made little or no use of the new technology. It was the same in the US, despite much higher levels of Internet use.
One of the earliest examples of a successful attempt to use the net for formal political debate which directly influenced the "real-world" political process was the Minnesota e-democracy mailing list. This was set up in 1994 to promote debate within this US state and it has continued to lead the way in persuading elected representatives and candidates for office to engage with their constituents or potential constituents on-line.
Scott Aikens was one of the directors of the Minnesota e-democracy project before he moved to Cambridge in 1995 to complete his doctoral research. Combining his research interests with his desire to change the face of politics, he helped to set up and run both UK Citizens Online Democracy (UKCOD, at www.democracy.org) and Nexus (at www.netnexus.org), where he moderated the ground-breaking Third Way e-debate, bringing the expertise he had developed in Minnesota to the UK political scene.
Now working as a project director for the Public Broadcasting Service in Connecticut, he continues to participate in the Nexus project via e-mail from the US and remains a central figure in the development of effective electronic democracy and - a phrase he coined - electronic governance.
Meet the judges
Five of the 16 judges have been nominated by the competition sponsors, bringing their commercial and political expertise to the e-mail debate currently taking place to determine the awards. Mark Damazer, head of political programmes at the BBC, has worked in TV for many years and has seen the BBC develop its news coverage on the Internet as the "third medium".
At EDS Charles Cox is responsible for the company's welfare-to-work group, including its work for the DSS and Employment Service. He also has a lot of experience in electronic commerce. The communications industry, which provides the connectivity on which all new media rely, is represented by John Swingewood of BT, Mac Fox of Nortel and Malcolm Taylor of Telewest Communications. All three have experience of policy development and of multimedia.
John Swingewood is director of BT's Multimedia and Internet Services, with overall responsibility for a wide range of Internet services, including broadband. Malcolm Taylor is responsible for regulatory affairs and public policy at Telewest, putting him at the centre of the ongoing debate about how communications is regulated and managed. Mac Fox of Nortel started work in the communications industry for the GPO, before it was split into post and phones. He is especially interested in interactive government.
Bill Thompson, Nexus
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