Archive for October, 2009
Niall Connolly – democracy expert
Niall Connolly appears to regard himself as an expert on democracy.
Wonder if he’ll stand for election?
E-spending
Liz Azyan picks up on some questions about e-petitions that were asked here by Paul a couple of months back. She doesn’t mention the fascinating word cloud that accompanies her article, called “E-petition verbs”.
The biggest words are, on a quick skim, “prevent, save, reimburse, make, oppose, charge and introduce”. With my local government head on, all of those words, except charge, are “spend” words. Save this thing the council want to close, introduce a new service, put more bobbies on the beat to prevent crime.
I don’t have a problem with people saying that they want the council to spend more money – people do that all the time. It’s just very likely that the appeals to spend more money will push for higher and higher spending at a time when there’s less money than ever for doing new things.
Easier petitioning means councils will need to get (even) better at saying no.
Sidebar: Interesting research project for someone: take the most recent 100 petitions on the Number 10 website, and work out the net cost of accepting them.
Does twitter damage the quality of parliamentary debate – or improve it?
Kerry McCarthy MP tweeted last night that she will be going in to bat for tweeting MPs on Radio 5Live later today. Her adversary on the show will be John Pugh MP – and Torcuil Crichton explains the background:
Dr John Pugh, the analogue Lib Dem MP for Southport, has a motion down condemning the growing tendency of hon. members to text, e mail and twitter their way through parliamentary debates. According to his motion “greater interest is shown in e-mails and messages than in the contribution of parliamentary colleagues”, although he admits the practice is “at times quite understandable”.
I suspect that this is more of a topical debate than something Dr Pugh would die-in-the-ditch about, but it’s worth breaking down anyway. Does he have any valid arguments here? Read the rest of this entry »
Does decentralising information offer us good government?
It’s a lengthy endorsement by the BBC’s Bill Thompson for a very good blogger, and it’s thoroughly deserved:
Mr Davies brings Weber, Hayek, Weinberger, Arendt and even Habermas to bear on the question of whether decentralising information through online services like data.gov.uk can offer us good government.
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He concludes that while it may provide transparency and even accountability it can never sustain the legitimacy that a democratic state provides.
He offers a dense, complex argument, written for an audience familiar with the thinkers he refers to.
Davies’ writing is not for everyone, but it should be essential reading for anyone who wants to develop a sound understanding of the implications for society and political structures of the technological change that we seem to have accepted as inevitable.
It is the sort of thinking that we desperately need if we’re to understand the technological future being offered to us by politicians of all major parties – and in all developed countries – as they are seduced by Google, Microsoft and Facebook into thinking that search, social networks and software can help us to solve the world’s many problems.
We don't want to read your website. We want to write it.
A hole in the road. From the Digbeth hyperlocal site. Published on a creative commons licence (click for credit).
So: It’s now official. Local authorities are going to be obliged to promote democracy (and the bill is quite prescriptive about the role that the internet will have to play in this). It should make for an interesting seven months.
There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent some time thinking about social media in some depth, and those who are in the day-to-day trenches of local government communications.
Certainly, most of the conversations I’ve had around how the internet will impact upon democracy have been around the use of the council website, the need to capture emails for mailing lists, increase traffic to the council site, how we can get our councillors to tweet or blog or other, understandable immediate questions.
People have a job to do. They are finding that all of these annoying geeks are making it more difficult for them with their FOI requests, their defamatory blogs, and so on. They feel that they’re in an arms race that they can’t win. They want to recruit some of these tools and methods to work in their favour: The most common question is a telling one: “How do we use Twitter to get our message out?” Read the rest of this entry »
E-petitioning flow diagram
Peter Cruikshank has pulled together a really useful post here, complete with print-off-able pictures – a very useful resource for every local authority to use to find out about e-petitioning (and every local authority will have to know about petitioning shortly).
It’s been done as part of the Europetition project, but most of it is UK-applicable.
I won’t spoil the surprise. It’s over here.
Collective action and participation
From TechPresident:
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“Indiana Univeristy’s Elinor Ostrom focuses her work on how people can go about creating rules for transactions around shared resources, or “commons,” that make collective action rewarding (enough) for everyone involved. And where she added a particularly new way of thinking to economics was to zero in on the economic transactions that take place in ad hoc organizations. Her work is part of a body of knowledge that underlies what people are looking for and considering as they design Gov 2.0 systems of participation and new models for democracy, which makes her of particular interest to those of us interested in thinking through a distributed view of the world.”
Against transparency?
Here’s Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University questioning the benefits of government transparency:
“There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it.”
The whole thing is worth a look though.
Town Hall Meetings
A sketch of anti-healthcare reform protests in the US – from Rolling Stone magazine:
“The threat of violence was thinly veiled: One agitator held aloft a tombstone with the name Doggett. Screaming, “Just say no!” the mob chased Doggett through the parking lot to an aide’s car — roaring with approval as he fled the scene.
Conservatives were quick to insist that the near-riot — the first of many town-hall mobs that would dominate the headlines in August — was completely spontaneous. The protesters didn’t show up “because of some organized group,” Rick Scott, the head of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, told reporters…..
In fact, Scott’s own group had played an integral role in mobilizing the protesters. According to internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights had been working closely for weeks as a “coalition partner” with three other right-wing groups in a plot to unleash irate mobs at town-hall meetings just like Doggett’s. Far from representing a spontaneous upwelling of populist rage, the protests were tightly orchestrated from the top down by corporate-funded front groups as well as top lobbyists for the health care industry.”
Here’s the question that’s being asked over at the Personal Democracy Forum:
Let’s see what answers we get here.
Why bringing politicians and the public closer to each other is important
Here’s Peter Levine on the study of deliberation:
“The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. Again, that could be because they don’t reject deliberation in principle but dislike the official debates that they hear about or watch on TV. People who held those skeptical views were especially impressed by an offer from their real US Representative to deliberate. Individuals were also more likely to accept the offer to deliberate if they were young and if they had low education.
Further, if they showed up to deliberate, their opinions of the experience were very positive. According to the paper, “95% Agreed (72% Strongly Agreed) that such sessions are ‘very valuable to our democracy’ and 96% Agreed (80% Strongly Agreed) that they would be interested in doing similar online sessions for other issues.” These results are consistent with almost all practical deliberative experiments.”
Very boringly, I’d like to cut-and-paste Burke’s speech to the Electors of Bristol yet again (sorry to be repetitive). I’m underlining the bit that I think that everyone focusses upon and emboldening the bit that I think is often ignored.
“…it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.”
Peter’s conclusions are very positive. But isn’t that line – “….dislike the official debates that they hear about or watch on TV…” – it does suggest that politics – and the way that the media report and portray political discourse – is getting in the way of democracy. We seem to have allowed the media to take sole responsibility for a task to which they are very clearly unsuited.