The resumption of the French parliamentary session on 16 September this year coincided with the appearance of a new website, nosdeputes.fr (“ourdeputies”), which aims to “highlight the parliamentary activity of the members of the French National Assembly”. Intended as a mediation platform between citizens and MPs, its purpose is first to summarise lawmakers’ various legislative and governmental control activities, and second to encourage user-citizens to participate and express their views on parliamentary debates “by sharing their expertise whenever they feel it relevant”. Contrary to what one may assume, this website is not a ramification of the Assembly’s Web Service, which put its own alert tool – a service limited to sending email alerts in response to user requests for specific themes or documents – online last July
nosdeputes.fr did not emanate from a desire on the part of the French government to forge stronger links between MPs and citizens; rather, it is the work of a collective known as Regards Citoyens. On the basis of various media interviews, we gather that Regards Citoyens is made up of a group of IT enthusiasts aged between 17 and 30, ardent opponents of the “Internet and Creation” law and members of the free software movement – indeed, one of its spokespersons is the vice-president of the Association pour la Promotion et la Défense du Logiciel Libre (APRIL, Association for the Promotion and Defence of Free Software). It also appears that the website grew from a message posted on a forum devoted to opposing the HADOPI Commission, one of the planks of the “Internet and Creation” law, on Numerama, an online magazine. Some of the members of the collective apparently also helped put together the deputesgodillot.info website, a parody aimed at pointing a finger at the perceived lack of independent thought among government MPs, who blindly toed the party line in preparing and voting for the “Internet and Creation” law.

Banner on the nosdeputes.fr website homepage

Before jumping to hasty conclusions on two symmetrical ideas – antiparliamentarianism on the one hand and spontaneous generation on the other hand – it might be worthwhile to take a closer look at the nosdeputes.fr phenomenon, in order to see how it fits into a broader movement that has emerged over the last ten years and to analyse its very nature, which has it roots in the contributions made by the latest digital technologies – chiefly the Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web – to public life and policy.
It must first be said that we have not yet had the opportunity of meeting the creators of nosdeputes.fr. This article offers a few ideas inspired by our study of the site. Comments about the initiative by its creators were gleaned on the internet. nosdeputes.fr is still in its very early stages, and it is still hard to estimate its life expectancy.

Laws are like codes: they can be hacked

This idea, which may seem surprising, was taken from an interview with one of the people in charge of the eucd.info campaign that we conducted three years ago for issue 21 of Médiamorphoses, entitled« Comment s’écrit la loi ? » (“How are laws written?”). The meeting between computer codes and the law is no novelty; it goes back almost to the dawn of the computer age. Indeed, one of the specific characteristics of IT – as numerous researchers have already said – is that it raises the question of the law, and specifically intellectual property law. For the first time in the history of copyright, or droit d’auteur in French-speaking countries, non-specialists have taken up this question, transforming it into a veritable call for civic and political action. The reason for this is fairly simple: innovation in the computer sciences is virtually synonymous with the circulation of knowledge. It is therefore necessary to guarantee the free circulation of knowledge against those, so it is claimed, who seek to restrict it by means of privatisation, by giving thought to the issue of intellectual property and the implementation of tangible solutions (user licences in particular).
The aim of this article is not to go back over the entire history of this movement, which has already been abundantly documented; rather, we aim to show how activism in favour of free software and, by extension, free culture, has provided the fertile ground in which the nosdeputes.fr website has grown. It must accordingly be borne in mind that the mobilisation of the defenders of free software really dates back to 2001, when thought started being given to the transposition into French law of the EU Directive on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (EUCD). While the debate over copyright and the patentability of software in France and Europe was at that time limited to a fairly small circle, the bill relative to copyright and related rights in the information society (DADVSI) was the catalyst that prompted numerous computer engineers, technicians, activists, internet users and citizens to become directly involved in parliamentary life, in the belief that MPs would not be able to frame a balanced law if they did not have a full grasp of the issues. It is surprising that a milieu dominated by technicians should have been mobilised in response to issues bearing on cultural output. The reason is that the bill’s opponents, who joined forces on the eucd.info initiative, put questions relating to the possible impact of the proposed law on the spread of free software in society and the future of technological innovation in France ahead of those of an intrinsically cultural nature.
In addition to receiving support from vast numbers of individual internet users and companies, the eucd.info campaign undertook a very long process of teaching MPs about the issues at stake, going so far as to take part in writing amendments, making light of the complexities of the law. Primarily targeting parliamentary assistants, often younger and more aware of new technologies than MPs themselves, these activists, occasionally aided by lawyers, took the time to pinpoint the law’s technical, social – and even cultural – implications, highlighting the defects, shortcomings and, where appropriate, the excesses that would later, as we now know, render it inapplicable.
This work with parliamentarians sparked a massive mobilisation among internet users, who took what was occasionally a very close interest in parliamentary issues – sometimes to the point of making comments on the Assembly’s procedural rules. For as long as the debates lasted, and in the aim of counterbalancing the music and film industry lobbies, eucd.info campaign leaders and run-of-the-mill internet users encouraged and sometimes advised MPs via email or discussion lists. The extent of this mobilisation was shown, when parliamentary debates were taking place, by the numbers of hits registered on the Assembly’s website – especially the window allowing visitors to follow debates in streaming format. MPs themselves were quick to catch on: no doubt for the first time in the Assembly’s history, they realised they were being filmed and constantly addressed the tens of thousands of internet users watching them. Some of them – and not exclusively those sitting on the opposition benches – actually claimed this to be the first exercise in participative democracy, there having been so much communication between the “two houses”. The image of the two houses (illustrated by the photo below, showing on one screen the streaming image of a parliamentary debate and on the other screen a chat on these issues between internet users) is particularly interesting. The term “two houses” does not refer to the National Assembly and the Senate, the lower and upper houses of the French parliament, but rather to the National Assembly and the houses in which ordinary citizens live.

François Schnell (CC)

It is important to note that the work carried out by these experts in their respective fields – generally unversed in parliamentary questions – went beyond parliamentary groups and broke through party lines: ardent defenders and equally committed opponents of the DADVSI law were to be found in all parliamentary groups (except perhaps the Greens). The intelligence of these latter-day “lobbyists”, for whom the term “astroturfer” was coined, was demonstrated by the way they played on traditional divisions (government/opposition, right/left, young/old and occasionally even men/women) in order to use the most appropriate argument for individual MPs (freedom of culture for some, access to knowledge and libraries for others, not to mention the pedagogical exception, independence or national security). This explains why the prism that defined the political representations of these activists was not the parliamentary group – and, by extension, the political party – but MPs themselves, who were addressed on very precise questions pertaining to IT and intellectual property.
In some ways, the activism that surrounded the “Internet and Creation” law, which aimed to introduce a “gradual” response against Internet users who illegally download content, grew from this initial experience. The forms of expression used to oppose this law were particularly visible in the participative architectures currently flourishing on the internet, with messages on Twitter and other social-networking sites, remixed videos on YouTube and Dailymotion, and any number of hoaxes (fake websites, fake routers, etc.). This intergenerational activism was spearheaded by the collective La Quadrature du Net, which took over from eucd.info and opted to focus its campaign on the mainstream media rather than MPs themselves. But – and this is not to imply causality – it is clear that power politics replaced the new type of expert testimony ushered in by eucd.info during discussions on the “Internet and Creation” law, with the various players offering caricatures of themselves. The deputesgodillot.info website and the defacing campaign led, to our great surprise, by the ODEBI League are probably the biggest caricatures of the lot.
Nevertheless, despite these contradictions – or rather these excesses, which can occasionally harm the cause they are intended to serve by fuelling a relatively gregarious brand of antiparliamentarianism and fostering a form of populism that has been very much in vogue in French society in recent years – this debate (some might say “these issues”) not only gave a whole generation a good grounding in parliamentary procedure, but also allowed it to understand the law: laws are just codes, and codes can be hacked. The upcoming generation and these new players see entering the political fray in terms of hacking the code – a code that may variously be a law or a computer code. This is obviously a heuristic metaphor that allows them to make a commitment while contributing their own vision of politics.

Civic Hack vs Gov 2.0: the French route to transparency?

The appeal of the nosdeputes.fr website probably lies in the fact that it offers a reflexive view of politics, fuelled by this experience of mobilisation – to a greater extent than the caricatures that have been produced on this matter up till now. The idea is not to “assess” one’s MP, as was claimed on the website of weekly newsmagazine L’Express– offering a reminder of the unfortunate experience of the parlorama.eu website, which allowed voters to gauge MEPs’ attendance until it folded under the pressure of these selfsame MEPs.
Neither is it possible to imagine that this website – which, according to its promoters, includes a database containing the 300,000 speeches made in commission meetings and plenary sessions, the 50,000 written questions and the 30,000 amendments and MPs’ attendance records in the chamber or in session during France’s Thirteenth Parliament – was only put together to demonstrate that the parliamentary activity of various pro-“Creation and Internet” MPs is akin to the brain scan of a dead person, as was claimed by an article in Numerama, an online magazine seen as close to the promoters of the project.¹
If we accept the assumption, corroborated by the site’s creators themselves, that nosdeputes.fr provides a way into the political sphere for a host of players close to the fields of IT and the free software culture – who, on top of everything, learnt the ropes during this veritable battle over copyright in France – we can contend that it reflects a way of “reading” the legal code and “visualising” parliamentary activity through the prism of contemporary tools, namely the free Web, dynamic and semantic, databases, contribution culture, etc.
This way of looking at politics is not very far removed from the interest for – if not popularity of – questions relating to the issue of transparency in the United States, where Barack Obama has made the transparency of public data one of his priorities via his revival of the Freedom of Information Act.
Taking this goal to the letter, a number of very different players, gurus, entrepreneurs and political scientists have given thought to the contribution of information and communication technologies in promoting transparency in political life. This particularly active field of study and practice, which generally goes by the name of Government 2.0 (Gov 2.0) or Open Government, promotes the belief that transparent access to public data can foster better comprehension by the public of the way in which political decisions are made and, in certain cases, provide a catalyst for political involvement. Going even further, the promoters of this conception of Gov 2.0 feel strongly that the processing, aggregation and crossing of indexed and referenced data generated by these emerging socio-technical systems could make it possible to extract new significance and new political options that bypass existing differences. Take for instance the recorery.gov and data.gov websites, which provide a tangible translation of Obama’s policy in favour of the transparency of public data.
This is precisely the novelty of the nosdeputes.fr website, as well as its chief innovation. The various documents “collected” on the National Assembly website were stored, after what one imagines was a truly Herculean effort, in a format that allows them to be processed. Thus, not only does nosdeputes.fr provide public access to all the work undertaken by the National Assembly during the latest Parliament, but it also allows these data to be processed in statistical or semantic terms. We can look at the average amount of work undertaken by MPs over the year or a breakdown of their work by parliamentary group, or consult the various keywords used in the Assembly at any given time (we learn, for instance, that the most widely used term during debates on the “Creation and Internet” law was subscriber rather than artist or hacker, as one may have assumed).
The same processes were also applied to MPs. It is possible to visualise a chart showing the key words favoured by a given MP in his or her oral or written statements, or during his or her presence during parliamentary sessions or commission hearings. To take this work further, the promoters of the website have already announced their intention of making their API public: accordingly, all the data generated and their structure would be made available to anyone wanting to offer new visualisation services, or to apply other forms of cross references or aggregation with data taken from other databases, be they public or commercial.
Does this necessarily mean that nosdeputes.fr is an experiment that builds on the work already done in the United States around the idea of Gov 2.0, as a few commentators were quick to suggest?² ? This policy, inspired by President Obama, is aimed at constructing a mode of governance that reconnects the famous “We the People of the United States” and the government. The architecture of this bottom-up democratic project is based around three socio-technical fields:

• the Web (via its expressive, conversational and informational usages), which allows people to exchange and share their ideas;
• open APIs, which allow all levels of government (local, state, federal) to circulate government data;
• software applications such as SaaS and cloud computing processing capacities due to the savings they generate.

Accordingly, Vivek Kundra, who has responsibility in the White House for translating this policy into reality, says the goal is to “treat the American people as a co-creator of ideas”.³
We must bear in mind that nosdeputes.fr, without being the direct emanation of a campaign, is part of a mobilisation. In the wake of the “copyright battle”, its founders explicitly lay claim to being part of a civic action movement that has its roots in anti-lobby watchdog initiatives such as Change Congress, initiated by Lawrence Lessig and Joe Trippi, or the Sunlight Foundation.
Another point is that we cannot be sure that the promoters of nosdeputes.fr fully assume the reference to the “2.0” notion. While a tactical alliance was very recently formed in France between the promoters of free software and a number of players from the Web 2.0, it must be acknowledged that there is no mention of the “2.0” reference, and that the technologies used by nosdeputes.fr do not include Web 2.0 capabilities (in terms of data storage or visualisation). One may have imagined that the data would be stored on Amazon S3 and processed by OpenCalais, a semantic analysis engine, to cite just these two possibilities. The simple fact that the site contained a list of the technologies, all free and standardised, used to put it together⁴ thus takes on a performative aspect in the strongest sense of the word. This list is a means of displaying a political principle: this website is part of the free software movement and hacker culture (to be brief, developers of free software).
As such, nosdeputes.fr looks more like a “civic hack”than a sustained experiment supported, in a faint-hearted sort of way, by the government as a way of putting a bit of life back into the link between citizens and their representatives.

Députés sous contrôle by latelelibre

Bootstrap political innovation in France to put an end to democracy by heckling

The launch of the nosdeputes.fr website offers a number of lessons with respect to the political innovations made possible by new technologies.
First of all, we must see the relationship to political commitment in the light of the latest relationship-based digital expression and communication technologies. The nosdeputes.fr example is in one sense a continuation of copyright activism in France: for roughly ten years, individuals have been mobilising around specialist copyright issues, thereby bringing them out of the strictly legal arena and into the public sphere, leading to a great variety of media and parliamentary debates. This is tending to blur the lines between militancy and activism, the latter being defined as a temporary affiliation with causes that move into the public sphere due to the involvement of individuals within the framework of one-off responses, without the cause being acknowledged as part of the political sphere in the traditional sense of the term (copyright in this instance, or the fight against Aids with Act Up). Activism in this sense must actually be seen as a way of bringing a problem or an issue into the political sphere, which more generally has a bearing on “biopolitics” (cognition, body, etc.) as defined by Michel Foucault.
Traditional militancy is seen in terms of political organisations, such as parties or trade unions, which defend political projects and use a very specific repertoire of political action (demonstrations, for instance). The distinction with activism can accordingly be summed up as follows: the ideal of “revolution” cherished by card-carrying militants in the 20th century has been replaced by the “hit and retreat” notion of contemporary activism.
For nosdeputes.fr, we note the persistence of a popular cause, a sustainable commitment covering an entire generation and a plurality of forms of response, of which this website is, to say the least, a surprising and unexpected ramification. nosdeputes.fr is not so much an offshoot of technological activism in the field of IT security, promoting methods aimed at allowing internet users to bypass the screening techniques ushered in by the “Creation and Internet” law, as a substantially broader means of achieving democracy by heckling. It is as if, with each successive response, free software activists had grasped the need to engage in a more civic way and to pose questions linked to political life and the relationship between citizens and their representatives, rather than focusing solely on a specific cause such as free software or access to the internet. Granted, responses to the “Creation and Internet” law included various actions relating to IT security (take a look at the wiki created by a young IT engineer at http://free.korben.info, or the #hadopi hashtag on Twitter, each offering technical solutions aimed at stopping unwanted eyes prying into your online activities). But nosdeputes.fr covers a broader ten-year timeframe and actually offers a pedagogical tool that will extend its life by helping people understand and analyse parliamentary procedure and, in that way, giving them the means to address MPs on a wider range of issues.
One may then ask what democratic forms, or what types of democratic life emerge from this experimenting that transmutes laws, transcribed by hand by stenographers in the National Assembly, into .xml files that users can then “rework” as they please. To date, in our view, digital technologies have been used primarily in “democracy by heckling” in France: the first inspiration of the site that intrigued us was action against MPs that toe the party line (députés godillots), who were held up to ridicule by showing how they cast their votes. In its final form, the site is a platform that tracks MPs’ activity. The deliberative dimension of representative democracy ideally involves dialogue, laws emerging from debate between the representatives of the nation in the National Assembly. But nosdeputes.fr puts the emphasis on heckling, by the internet-using public, via the site’s main functionality, namely comments on bills under debate. When people address an MP by posting comments on website, they tend to express their view in very strong terms (more often than not using a nickname), as there is no hope of eliciting a response: there is not as yet any system on the internet allowing for dialogue with MPs, providing for communications between one house (of Parliament) and another (internet users’ homes). In the absence of political will aimed at fostering online dialogue between citizens and their representatives, internet users have taken the initiative of setting up this platform.
It is easier to understand the primacy of the heckling mentality if one takes into account the digital practices of members of the French government, especially those of the minister with responsibility for the digital economy. In a brief interview on France Inter, a 24-hour news radio station, on 28 July 2009, the minister in question, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, defined Twitter as a “heckling tool”: French people use tweets to heckle her, and she responds with appropriately weighted messages. This form of digital democracy, in which the two sides address each other without talking, would leave nostalgic readers of Habermas and Arendt speechless…
On top of that, the minister’s initiatives taken as part of the “ateliers de l’élu 2.0” (MP 2.0 workshops), a sort of teaching ground for MPs in the digital era, are based on privately-owned US web services, Twitter and Facebook. This may come across as a surprising, if not shocking choice, bearing in mind that this makes part of French democracy – and sometimes a ministry’s entire communications – reliant on private companies whose life expectancy cannot be gauged with accuracy, whose policies with respect to the storage and use of personal data inspire considerable suspicion, and which are based in countries with their own privacy legislation. For instance, are the “friends” and “fans” of specific ministers or MPs on Facebook subject to French database laws? The decision to use such tools, even though they may be “practical” and “free” – and, more importantly, cut through a lot of administrative or bureaucratic red tape – raises a number of questions on the meaning users wish to give to political life.
By way of comparison, getting MPs to use social networking websites for their communications is like getting them to meet with their constituents in a Starbucks café: voters would have to sign up before they could enter the premises and they would be subject to the unrelenting onslaught advertising while they were there, etc. Granted, social networking websites attract far more users than any special-purpose networks whose use, longevity and legality would be guaranteed by the government, but no MPs would ever decide to move their office to a Starbucks outlet simply on the grounds that there is more footfall there than in their existing offices.
We can take the comparison with Starbucks even further by looking at the sociology of subscribers to these social networks. While the statistics show that the number of network users is growing constantly, there has been little change in users’ sociological make-up: particularly well-heeled users still dominate. Use of social networking websites could in that way exacerbate the digital divide.
Seeing things in a more upbeat light, it is possible to see the nosdeputes.fr experiment as the first stage in the rollout of contributive platforms, along the lines of America’s experiments with Gov 2.0. In the United States, these laudable efforts are being steered by various grassroots organisations, such as the Sunlight Foundation, which organise contests like Apps for Democracyaimed at fleshing out such policies. The winner of the latest contestwas a website called Datamasher, which generates visualisations of various data that a user may want to cross from several sources – government departments, cities, hospitals, etc. As Datamasher says in the banner on its homepage, “State data. Mash it!” However, some analysts have seen limits in such actions: while they may emanate from the public, it is a public made up of “citizen-IT developers”. The analysts have said that the government should play a role in putting together Gov 2.0 services.⁵.
The use of digital technologies in politics is still in its early stages. It is made up of experiments, trials, errors, real progress and particularly objectionable proposals. Between the grassroots experiments such as nosdeputes.fr and the idea of “good enough”⁶ being given the status of public policy, there is still scope for thought and experimentation. However, it would probably not be an exaggeration to say that the nosdeputes.fr website marks the beginning of work aimed at using expression and communication technologies to enrich French democracy, and that the site, as it stands, is more of an illustration of one possible future form of political life than a lobby or a higher version of democracy. Other initiatives will no doubt spring up quickly, allowing users to civically hack what is still, to too great an extent, just democracy by heckling, in order to bootstrap political innovation in France.

Notes