Guidelines confetti – a few observations

Subjecting politicians to excessive regulation discourages interactivity.

I’d been planning to do this blog for years, but the thing that finally nudged me to get on with it was this story (my first post) about how an MP’s online allowance was docked by the Parliamentary authorities because he used it in the way that you would expect politicians to use such an allowance.

Meanwhile, the incorporation of social media into bureaucratic priorities gathers apace. A while ago, the Local Government Engagement Online blog has helpfully pulled together a set of guidelines from around the world, ones that can be added to the UK Civil Service Partipation Online guidelines.

Now, I’ve not read these all exhaustively, but I have put a fair bit of time in to scan them.

Given the size of the task, I may have not noticed something that I would suggest should be right at the top of each document – certainly each one that has been drafted by any governmental body.

Here is my suggestion.

• We are a representative democracy. New interactive tools provide our elected representatives with the tools they need to improve the quality of their work as representatives.
• In the past, inflexibilities in communications and knowledge management have meant that these elected representatives have been forced to delegate much of the research and communication that should precede policy-formation to civil servants, political parties and other interest-groups.
• New interactive tools now make it possible for elected representatives to take on more of this work themselves – and this is clearly an opportunity to improve the quality of representative democracy
• It is, therefore, a key priority that elected representatives should receive all possible co-operation, encouragement and – where appropriate – training from every other section of civil society to support their adoption of new interactive tools.
• All regulations and guidelines on the use of social media should acknowledge the primacy of elected representatives, and should do nothing to restrict any expressions by members of our sovereign Parliament or elected local assemblies and do nothing to discourage them from using these tools to improve their capacity to represent.
• Elected representatives have rivals. These rivals – pressure groups, commercial lobbies, bureaucratic interests, media owners and practitioners – are subject to fewer guidelines and demands for transparency than elected representatives. We will strive to change this to ensure that elected representatives (who represent everyone) are not hamstrung by unrepresentative minorities.

In a similar exercise, Tom Steinberg has done a much more wide-ranging set of recommendations. I agree with it all apart from a few reservations about the most interesting bit (to me) – item 4 (which I’ve added to the comments there).

All suggestions and amendments gratefully received!