Case Summary
In late 2006 the office of the British Prime Minister sought to simplify the process of delivering petitions to Number 10 Downing Street, and allow petitioners to reach a potentially greater audience for their topics. The perceived result is a greater line of communication between citizens and government.
Business Challenge
Begun in November 2006, the Downing Street e-petition website
seeks to enable anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister, as well as sign the petitions of others. The presumed goal is to create more accessibility between citizens and government.
Approach Taken
Unlike common e-petitions which are operated by the petitioners, have no moderation, and often no specific audience for the petition, the Downing Street website is operated by the target audience of the petitions itself. Further unlike the standard e-petition, which is often thrown into the same category as chain letters, successful Downing Street e-petitions are actually seen by their audience and receive authentic responses from that audience. The separation between this case and a standard e-petition is this two-side, nearly dialectical nature.
Results Achieved
As of June 2008 the website hosted over 6300 active petitions, and has seen over 14,000 petitions pass through since its creation. The largest petition to date garnered over 1.8 million signatures and asked for the intervention of a planned vehicle tracking and road pricing scheme.
The real success of this e-petition exchange largely results from the willingness of Downing Street to respond to the petitions. The largest petition mentioned above met a 1200 word response from Prime Minister Tony Blair which both acknowledged the petition's argument and defended the government's position.
Further, government responses to popular petitions are the rule rather than the exception to it, and petitions with as few as 101 signatures have received official responses. This commitment to dialogue legitimized the effort of government to acknowledge the voice of its citizens.
Lessons Learned
The deployment of this technology resulted in increased transparency between government and citizen. In addition however, the open nature of the site means that in addition to the serious and specific petitions which have generally floated to the top, less tangible petitions have also formed (We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop making stupid laws).
Further, one of the most signed petitions even turned out to be wholly inaccurate (We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister abolish plans to build a £100 million mega Mosque). London mayor Ken Livingston who called the plan "entirely untrue," pointing to the fact that city plans are part of the public domain and do not contain plans for a mega Mosque. Also, Livingston acknowledged the Downing Street petition site as a facilitator of the rumor.
The webmaster of the site reported that the petition acceptance policy was tightened as a result of the Mosque case. The site responds that "There are also a good number [of petitions] purely based on newspaper stories or web rumours that have no truth behind them. That is an issue we are still grappling with as we try to reconcile those misconceptions and false allegations with making the creation of petitions easy and accessible, and allowing a wide range of user opinion on the site."
The site also received criticism when its moderators refused to accept petitions to release jailed individuals, though their reasoning was that individual sentences are outside of the scope of the Prime Minister's office.
The Downing Street e-petition site ultimately accepts these realities of open government forums, and succeeds in creating an open dialogue between citizens and the office of the Prime Minister. Finally, it could be argued that the site's intent is not to create actual changes in policy, but that its goal is to allow the pleas of citizens to be heard and addressed in a sort of open press conference between the Prime Minister and the entire public.
