It's not often that Brighton gets to host interesting net-related talks, so I excitedly wandered up to CommunityBase late yesterday afternoon to attend the VoxPolitics event on e-democracy being held there.

It was interesting: a more civil event than some similar things I've been to, and a wealth of experience in the room: a labour MP, a self-confessed policy wonk (with matching satchel), local community guys, a network bod, an iTV expert, a girl who works for the BBC iCan project, the local papers, and lots of others...

The overwhelming message seemed to be that the Internet has its place, particularly for allowing vocal minorities (such as those based around specific single issues like petrol prices) to self-organise and have an influence disproportionate to their numbers, particularly across geographic boundaries... but that its influence is dwarfed by that of traditional broadcast media, as the Dean campaign found out. It all sounded terribly asymmetric, in the modern sense of the word...

I particularly like Dave's point of "what happens if all this works": if the public do start engaging directly with politicians in large numbers using electronic media, how can they possibly cope? The whole system of representative democracy seems based on the assumption that "I can't decide everything, so I'll nominate someone who I trust to make decisions for me"... but what happens when this assumption ceases to be valid, and representation becomes an inferior way of expressing your wishes for society?

Looking forward to seeing notes from the event, I noticed a few people scribbling down interesting URLs, projects, etc. Update: here are Dave's.

Cheers to Mark @ SCIP and the Vox Politics crowd for organising it - hopefully it won't be the last such event we'll see down here...