The facts about FaxYourMp.com
A few events have coincided to make me want to scribble about faxyourmp.com, not least because those involved never get round to saying it about themselves. The triggers:
- We shall almost certainly deliver our 50,000th fax in the next 48 hours (2003-02-04)
- This week, the grandly-named Parliamentary Communications Directorate imposed obscenity filtering on MPs email (apparently without consulting MPs themselves) and claimed that a tidal wave of almost 1000 obscene messages had been trapped in a week. That’s an average of 1 filthy mail per MP per week, which makes one wonder what the problem was.
- That faxyourmp.com’s submission (WORD, sorry everyone) wasn’t mentioned in the preliminary response report of the e-democracy consultation (PDF, sorry everyone).
Anyway, here’s the story:
Since its launch in November 2000, FaxYourMp.com, has demonstrated that almost all of the claims made about the difficulty of e-government and e-democracy are untrue. Some boasts:
- The service has delivered almost 50,000 faxes from constituents to MPs
- Marketing spend to date: 0 GBP
- Marketing to date: 1 Press Release sent to friends, (December 2000)
- Awards to date: New Statesman Overall Merit 2000, New Media Age Best Use of the Web, endless gratitude and praise from citizens and parliamentarians alike.
- The service has stringent automated checks in place, and we do not ever allow form letters. In this regard we are the most responsible and responsive mechanism by which MPs may be contacted. We have caught and stopped several attempts by companies to abuse the service.
- While we do not respond to every email, we make serious efforts to aid all users who are having difficulty using the service.
- 67% of our users report that they have never contacted their mp before, dispelling the suggestion that we simply lower the barrier to entry for the already politically engaged. We are bringing mostly new participants to the debate.
- We are the first organisation to measure MPs responsiveness and performance in a systematic way, applying the same performance criteria to them as are applied to government departments. Performance: not that good, although some shine.
- If an MP requests it, and can demonstrate that they have a working, responsive email address, we will use that instead of their fax number
- hardware: a couple of old PCs
- budget: less than 3000 GBP and the donated resources of our helpers, which amounts to a few hours a week each.
- abuse rate: we estimate that less than 1% of faxes are abusive or inappropriate, based on the samples we see via feedback or bounces (we don’t read the messages).
But what’s your point, stef?
I believe that Faxyourmp is the leading e-democracy tool in the UK. We demonstrate daily that almost every single one of the excuses and apologies for the slow development of e-democracy in the UK are due to a lack of will, inertia, and inability to take notice of either best practice online, or select appropriate solutions. I don’t blame individuals (as everyone I’ve every encountered in the civil service or parliament has been well-intentioned, dedicated and hard working), but we make it plain that this stuff is trivially doable.
Furthermore, while many MPs will happily tell us what a great job we do, we find that our attempts to offer our service to Parliament, or to contribute to the e-government debate are ignored. Not even rebuffed, just ignored. I am naturally a conspiracy theorist, so I suspect that while no-one wants the bad publicity of shutting us down, only the electorate would be upset if we just went away quietly.
I personally think that Parliament should take on the job of enabling access to a technology that achieved ubiquity in 1982, rather than spending money censoring constituents’ email.
We don’t need money (and don’t accept it from the many citizens who offer), but it is wrong that the delivery of basic democratic services (try explaining why FYMP exists to a citizen of any other western democracy) falls to unpaid geeks. We would offer whatever consultancy was necessary to handover the system, but will only do so when confident that the system will be run to the same high standards that we (ok, Owen) have achieved. It only takes a few hours a week. For a fraction of the cost of some of the current consultation, or another thinktank report, another worse-than-before website redesign, Parliament could have our service.
One of the most heartening aspects of the service has been the letters that constituents write. Almost without exception, the letters they send MPs are reasoned, well thought out, not always perfectly spelled, but often insightful engagements in civic society. Far from the image of a disaffected and disengaged electorate, we see a mass of people who’ve discovered that they can effectively participate in democracy- if artificial and archaic barriers are not put in their way.
I can’t be the only one who sees the irony in the fact that in the week that we celebrate 50K faxes served, the people whose job should be doing what we do for free are still trying (feebly) to raise barriers against the citizenry.
There’s a dramatic mindset change that needs to happen over there, because, if you will not give us greater democracy, we will simply take it from you.
Finally, those numbers from the PCD make some interesting reading:
900 blocked in a week. So the 659 MPs get a torrent of 1 or 2 rude emails per week.
Now, let’s say that MPs email is no more rude than the internet at large (them being representative citizens and all), and make a generous guess that 10% of email is spam.
this would suggest that MPs are drowning under a constituency workload of about 15 emails a week.
So the number of faxes we deliver is of the order of 10% of the total electronic traffic from constituents. Not bad for an unsupported free service run by geeks.
I’d like comments and/or corrections to these numbers. If you’ve got better stats, let’s hear them.