I've helped to pioneer an approach to online deliberation that is compatible with, rather than antagonistic to, representative democracy.
A village called Dooyork on the west coast of County Mayo in the Irish Republic. My mother was born there, J.M. Synge set his 'Playboy of the Western World' nearby and I spend a lot of my teens there. I know everyone there and feel my heart-rate fall to a level something close to normal when I visit.
I want to see social media tools being used to crowdsource intelligence and good judgement rather than being used to generate a blunt weight of opinion or electoral threats. I want to see these tools being used to reduce the powers of unelected pressure groups and to help the public to collaboratively create smarter proposals, or to take public data and use it to build the kind of public briefings that politicians can use to improve their policy-making in a way that makes them more accountable and the process more inclusive.
I am a local democracy practitioner with a long track-record of running e-democracy projects at a local level with a particular focus upon the promotion of local representative democracy.
My current projects include a range of local UK e-democracy and co-design projects and the Slugger O’Toole Political Awards in Northern Ireland.
Previously, I helped to establish Poptel Technology Ltd in 2002, and was a director of this successful worker co-op web development company until 2007 having. I was instrumental in establishing the original New Statesman New Media Awards back in 1998. I currently blog at http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk
