Local Democracy Notepad

Niccolò Bragg

The Open University has released a series of podcasts on Reading Political Philosophy. This really is an example of The Internet Gift Economy in action!

And on the subject of podcasts, I’d strongly urge anyone who hasn’t already subscribed to the BBC’s ‘In Our Time’ podcast to do so – there have been plenty of good shows recently covering Aristotle’s Politics or The Social Contract, among other subjects. There’s a too-small Facebook group for In Our Time as well, set up by Alan Mills (from which the photoshopping here has been borrowed)

Nigel Warburton hasn’t added to his own podcast recently but they’re a very good primer and well worth a revisit.

Slightly less in the political philosophy vein, but still very good is ‘Undercover Economist’ Tim Harford’s More or Less (iTunes URL) podcast, and the long-standing Radio 4 public policy programme, Analysis (again, an iTunes URL). Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed (iTunes) is also very good on mixing social theory with a chatty late-night format, and it sometimes touches upon issues that readers of this blog may find interesting.

(Hat tip: The Virtual Philosopher)

Neil Williams has a good post up about the need to break some institutions into a more interactive world slowly. The Hansard Society’s Andy Williamson had a similar post up here a while ago:

Innovation fails when the people with the ideas aren’t matched by the ones with the skills and power to make those ideas happen. End-to-end innovation – and, therefore, eDemocracy – takes in the whole of the organisation.

I’d argue that this is a political issue. Or, more to the point, it’s something that requires a political leadership. That can’t happen, however, until we address one of the key problems in promoting innovation in the UK: That the relationship between the permanent bureaucracy and the elected one is not one that promotes innovation of this kind. Read the rest of this entry »

Chewing over Parliamentary reforms, here’s Jenni Russell from the Guardian last week:

“One experienced Commons civil servant is blisteringly critical of the way in which most MPs have accepted the culture in which they now operate. While some committees and chairs are excellent, many MPs can’t be bothered. “They’re just not interested in the core tasks of parliament, scrutinising legislation or working in committee. It’s too much hard work – they’d rather be social workers for constituents. …… They don’t spend three hours in the House of Commons library reading bills or papers themselves; they wait for Greenpeace or Liberty or a lobby group to tell them what to think. That whole culture of thinking, challenging, debating – that’s what’s been discouraged. Because, for them personally, what’s the point?”"

There are a number of conclusions one can draw from this, some of which could be justifiably homicidal. Other trades have a set of professional ethics that would, for instance, preclude them from relying upon lobbyists for information, or coming up with a transparent means by which they conduct their research. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re hanging around Westminster between 7 and 17 July, pop into Westminster Hall to check out what sounds like a fun exhibition. The Royal Institution of British Architects have run a competition for schools to design a new Houses of Parliament. The nine shortlisted entries will be on display in the oldest part of the Parliamentary estate.
Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d offer you a bit of an outline of the PICamp (Political Innovation Camp) strands that are making up part of NESTA’s Reboot Britain event next week. You’ll see that the sessions that are planned reflect a lot of the issues that come up on this blog regularly.

We’re offering these because we believe that innovation doesn’t just affect business and public administration. It often offers the potential to break out of a political stalemate.

Like the stalemate that politicians, journalists and bloggers are in. Like the stalemate between declining local newspapers and local authorities.

Every senior politician says that they want to devolve power down to local government. Local government says that it wants more power devolved from the centre.

But every politician also knows that this will never happen as long as the public blame central government for poor local services. Innovators can help local authorities raise their game, create new communications channels and start to address this problem.

Politicians know that they face obstacles when they want their departments to raise their game. Whether it’s the risk-averse veto groups in middle management or procurement rules that reward box-ticking rather than imagination, they know that the easy answers have all been tried.

These are small administrative hurdles rather than big political ones. Politicians and innovators can tackle these problems together.

Politicians also know that – if they yield to demands for a more participative politics – that they run the real risk of disenfranchising large sections of the population that are prepared to vote in elections, but that don’t have the ability or the confidence to fight their corner as active citizens.

Politicians will need to call for help from politically-aware innovators if they are to meet demands for participation while preserving the universal franchise.

In many cases, it isn’t just innovation, but political innovation that is needed. Politicians can offer the leadership, but they need to know that innovators are focussed upon their problems – and not just commercial and administrative ones.

It’s time for innovators to help get politicians out of the political stalemate that they are stuck in. Most of these issues will not simply be solved by a general election and a change of government.  They involve the kind of game-changing ideas that have altered so many other sectors of public life.

You can book your tickets for Reboot Britain here. If you’re interested in any of these issues, scan the schedule for more information on them, or please visit www.picamp.org and meet some of the session initiators. I’m hoping to encourage them to just flesh out what they are planning to talk about on this site a bit in advance of the event next Monday.

Direct democracy experiment MyFootballClub was featured in recent online movie Us Now. You’ll remember the MyFC website took over Ebbsfleet United (the former Gravesend and Northfleet) and promised its members all the experience of running a real football club, team selections, transfer listing players, and the rest.

According to a piece on the When Saturday Comes blog, the experiment is not doing so well. Apart from a decline in membership, which is having an effect on the club’s already shaky budget, many of the democracy elements of the operation have been junked. The website members no longer pick the team, and now have ceded some power over transfers to the management, which is appointed by the MyFC website owners.

When Saturday Comes opines:

you have to wonder what the future holds for MyFC if the power afforded to members keeps being eroded. With Daish regaining some control of transfer policy, and the headline grabbing – but ridiculous – concept of fans picking the team having long been consigned to the dustbin, there is little incentive to persuade new investors to part with £35 per year, especially as the club look set for another season at the wrong end of the table.

A site commenter makes the best point of all – that an operation like MyFootballClub, started on the Internet without a particular club in mind, was never going to create a common bond strong enough to keep people participating through the bad times:

If it had been a supporters’ trust that bought the club, then perhaps this could have all been avoided. By going from internet-concept first, and THEN casting about for a team after members had been brought onboard, the erosion of support has been swift but not unforeseeable–how is a “member” in California or Australia supposed to feel any sort of bond with this side? After clicking yes/no a few times, how likely would they be to stay engaged? In their world of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, surely the same denizens couldn’t be expected to focus on a mere non-league football team in little old England for too long.

Benchmarking: Missing the point

Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point:

Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers themselves, or those who are not already active participants in public engagement.  So the great ‘achievements’ of technology taskforces are celebrated in one thick and largely unread public report, and the new initiatives sparkle at their sauvignon-blanc launches, but thereafter are populated only by the usual suspects.

Instead of insisting in a specific set of standards, I rather wish government officials would make a habit of putting a spotlight on a new initiative every day. It might be tiring, but it would make more interesting reading than the avalanche of speeches, reports and criteria that usually pour out of these groups, and it would certainly make public engagement more attractive.

When I worked for politicians some years ago, I recall the dread that some of them had when they had to go and tour educational projects designed to get young people involved in the music industry. I’ll never forget the rictus grin of one well-known ex-minister being filmed listening to some banging choons at a FE College. Read the rest of this entry »

Denham: Centraliser or soothsayer?

Over on the LGIU blog, Jonathan Carr-West is not impressed with John Denham’s conditions for the devolution of powers to local government:

“So we find ourselves re-rehearsing the chicken and egg of earned autonomy. Councils need more powers to deliver better services and increased public confidence, but to get more powers they need to deliver better services and increased public confidence.”

He goes on:

Let’s have a public confidence test by all means, but let’s not make it absolute: do you have confidence in local government? Let’s make it relative: who do you have more trust in, local or central government?

Wonder what the result would be…?

I’m not sure I understand Jon’s argument here – and particularly the way it morphs from one about quality of service and public confidence into a slightly opportunistic political one about trust. Read the rest of this entry »

At the risk of loading expectations onto someone, it’s very good news to see that Bill McCluggage has been appointed as Deputy Government CIO in Cabinet Office.

I did some work with Bill over the last eighteen months in Northern Ireland where he was a very powerful advocate for getting local councillors and councils to take web-communications more seriously.

Northern Ireland is a particularly testing place for this to be tried. The politics of Our Occupied Six Counties / OUR wee province* are somewhat sclerotic, highly compromised as they are to ensure a continued functioning democracy of any kind as part of the peace-process.

The quality of local government is plainly very poor because even this hamstrung polity has resolved to reform it (there were 26 councils which are being consolidated into 11 by 2011).

Despite this, within one year, Bill helped me get over 40% of the 582 councillors to take their first steps online. Admittedly, this commitment was often a nominal, rather than active one, but prior to the launch of the project, you could count the councillors that had ever unlocked the ‘write’ potential of the web on the fingers of one hand.

A good few real local government stars have emerged in the process, and Bill has taken the (steadfast) resistance of some influential sections of the bureaucracy on the chin and not taken no for an answer.

That’s good news for those of us who want Whitehall to work a bit more effectively. London’s gain will be Belfast’s loss.

*Delete according to binary sectarian outlook

Readers of this blog could be forgiven for believing that I’m on some sort of commission scheme for Debategraph and MixedInk.

Like the best ideas in this field, these two projects have focused their energy on getting the idea right and the initial project out of the door. That’s a long way of saying that they don’t have an affiliate-scheme and I’m not getting a penny from either of them.

Well, it seems that I’m not alone in rating MixedInk’s approach. The Whitehouse is giving it a try – using it to draft it’s open government standards.

If that isn’t an endorsement, I’ve no idea what is. In giving people a slightly competitive platform to collaboratively shape ideas, MixedInk ticks almost every box in terms of providing a positive way of including people in policy processes. Instead of a spEak You’re bRanes – type ‘race to the bottom’, it urges it’s participants to get stuck into the issues and add value to them in a realistic way.