Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Local civility on trial (from Ictsan's Flickr page)

Kevin Harris has blogged about his planned contribution to the Reboot Britain ‘PICamp’ session – over here.

Here’s a flavour:

To my mind, it doesn’t work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished.

So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.

I think that this is really spot-on. It’s a re-run of so many arguments that have cropped up as the internet has burgeoned into different parts of our lives. For instance…

• The internet will not fix your broken processes /putting your processes online will foreground some of the weaknesses and help you to improve them
• If you’re not an interactive organisation, a new website will not change that / developing a website may unlock some undiscovered interactive talent in your organisation

… and so on (I’m sure you have your own version of this)