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.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
