iCan is a new media and broadcast project to encourage participation in the civic community in the UK. It is focused on a website designed to help people take part in democracy and in their communities.

iCan is a new way of delivering this core purpose of the BBC. In the past, we reflected democratic life through our broadcast programs. In a two-way digital age, we are providing a milieu in which people can change things for themselves—a place where people can network with each other and with the BBC. This is a tangential benefit for our broadcast programs which, by tapping into iCan, can reflect more closely the concerns of their audiences. Users appreciate iCan for reflecting not just more diverse issues but more diverse forms of political activity than they are used to seeing in the mainstream media.

iCan aims to reach people who are dissatisfied with mainstream politics and the coverage of it. The site is geared towards providing answers, taking action, getting results and sharing those successes and failures with the community at large. We found, in all the research we did for this project, that it was outcomes that matter most to people and the lack of them that fuels their disenchantment. We have built the components with these issues in mind.

The technical infrastructure supporting the iCan project was built and is managed by the BBC's own internal development and operations teams. The development phase of the project took approximately six months and involved a process of extending, enhancing and customizing the functionality of the BBC's existing online community management platform called DNA.


Links: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ican

iCan was conceived following a review of the way the BBC covers politics after the last general election. It aims to foster interest in existing legislative and service bodies and to use the internet for collective action. A system was built to address the fundamental barriers to participation: that people think they are alone in caring about an issue and that they don’t know where to start. It is running at the moment as a pilot. The current operation team of iCan involves five database and client side programmers, an editorial team of seven, one designer, a regional team of six and two central managers. The iCan team was brought together in April 2002 and reflects the broad range of skills needed to bring complex internet and broadcast projects together. All these people have been involved, or are still involved, in the development and maintenance of iCan. Access to the project is open to everyone, membership and publishing is open to all UK residents over the age of sixteen. We aim not to characterize our users as it is a firm conviction of iCan that participation in the civic sphere is equally of interest to all people regardless of their demographic characterization. ICan currently has over 5500 registered members contributing to over 1000 articles and 500 campaigns. In February we received 84000 unique visitors a month and membership and contribution are showing significant month on month increases.