Local Democracy Notepad

If you will permit me a small plug for some work I’m doing, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Centre for School Design – a project that was launched on Monday evening by the British Council for School Environments (BCSE).

I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now – BCSE grew partly out of an idea called School Works – a project intended to promote a more participative approach to the design of schools.

The basic premise is a simple one: The more progressive architects have worked out that it is a sensible thing to do to involve residents in the design of their own neighbourhoods. Long before anyone had ever heard of Clay Shirky, there was ample evidence that the people outside an organisation have more knowledge on a particular subject than the people inside the organisation that – supposedly – have specialist skills.

The benefits of co-designing an environment with the people who are going to live in it are obvious. As the blurb on this booklet on consensus design puts it, …“it can have an influence on social stability, crime-reduction, personal health and building longevity, all of which in turn have monetary and environmental cost implications.” Ty surmised that similar benefits could come from a more participative approach to the design of schools.

Now The Centre for School Design is not only – or even mainly – about consensus design. It is about raising the profile – or as counter-terrorism experts put it, the ‘chatter level‘ around the question of education, design and the built environment. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been quite enough sensible earnest commentary on how Data.gov.uk will transform policy and help us all join in describing problems.

Here’s the Daily Mash’s alternative take. (via @stevemoore4good)

This is the third in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. In part 2, last week, I described how existing content – the blogosphere, in particular – is currently used, or perhaps abused, by policymakers.

This time, I’m going to cover a range of improvements: how we can make better use of existing content, why we’d want to do so, and I’m going to roughly split these into: (a) technical solutions, and (b) human solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the risk accordingly)

Slow-loading screens weed out all but the most determined

So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time? Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine:

“Some of Britain’s most impressive internet policy experts had long been trying to break down this particular door. Ex-MP Richard Allan. Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson. Internet gurus Tom Steinberg, and Tom Loosemore. Former Number 10 policy advisor William Perrin. All bounced back dazed when they tried shoulder charging the Ordnance Survey’s door, as if tripped up by a canny geographer’s sandal on their run up. So my colleague Tom Chatfield and I decided we that needed to find out exactly how the man who invented the web had managed to reinvent the rules of British data.”

Via Tom Watson MP.

No time to post much here today apart from to point to the new UK government data website – www.data.gov.uk – as described here. There are plenty of data sets that allow you to browse geographical data and find out different information about local schools and other services.

There’s also a good section in which Sir Tim Berners-Lee explains what the semantic web is in fairly straightforward terms.

View it here, by all means, but do visit the site as well if you can?

For me, the most exciting bit is that it allows people to see things in new ways and conceptualise problems differently. Poor policy-making costs us a fortune and results in missed opportunities. I’m not sure that Brian Hoadley fully gets this when he says:

“I’ve been waiting for Joe Bloggs on the street to mention in passing – “Hey, just yesterday I did ‘x’ online” and have it be one of those new ‘Services’ that has been developed from the release of our data. (Note: A Joe Bloggs who is not related to Government or those who encircle Government. A real true independent Citizen.)

It may be a long wait.”

Meantimes, here’s Stuart on Lichfield’s data and what it adds to the knowledge of local authorities about their own area, as well as our knowledge about our local authorities.

If you get a moment, pop over to OpenlyLocal and have a look around, will you?

It’s a very good start – showing how all of the investment in data standards is beginning to find it’s own tipping point.

It is beginning to be possible for more of us to get really useful comparative data on local government. For the non-techies among you, this means that – when information is added to a local authority website, the tool that assembles the site adds a bit of code to it that describes what the website is telling you. For example, if you update a table on your website when a new councillor replaces an old one, it is done in such a way as to allow another website to access yours, ask for a list of councillors, and then import that list into their own site.

It can then also pull across information about that councillor’s role in committees, meetings that they are due to attend, contact details, etc.

These data standards enable a quiet quick exchange of information that has a huge amount of potential to increase efficiency and allow us to crunch information and numbers to tell us things that we didn’t know. At the crudest level, we can find out who the councillors are in lots of different councils by looking at one site, but have a look yourself to see what other insights you can gain.

OpenlyLocal is a neat example of what is possible now that data standards are beginning to be applied more consistently.

Ewan McIntosh has picked another example of augmented reality up:

I was searching reliable online shop for my delicate purchase and here it is! Purchase cialis. If you get a new prescription and need it filled that day, you can walk into a pharmacy and get it taken care of.

“Point your mobile phone at the person speaking at the lectern, the cute person in the bar or that potential recruit and see, hovering around their head, all their social networks, tastes in music and books, and dodgy photos from last night.”

The potential is quite interesting, but it’s also a bit scary. In a post here a while ago, I asked what the upsides and downsides were of forcing politicians to be ostentatious in their displays of personal virtue and openness. But former BBC Newsnight Editor Brian Walker seems to be going a good bit further in raising demands for personal transparency in this post quoting Mo Mowlem’s cancer specialist Mark Glazer over at Slugger O’Toole.

Shorter version: Mo Mowlem had a frontal lobe tumour – a condition that “can cause disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement” at a time in which she played a critical role in fostering the negotiation of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement. This was almost a wartime posting and any errors of judgement could have had serious consequences.

So, disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement then? Sounds familliar:

If you want to argue for mental health tests, then maybe you have to also demand a daily breathalyser? Churchill was thought to have rarely been sober beyond lunchtime during the war and we seemed to do alright in that one, didn’t we?

Senior corporate roles within PLCs have made both physical and mental health a pre-requisite. It’s not just footballers that have to have a medical as part of their job-interview any more. When a friend of mine sought a board-level post on one of the UK’s larger PLCs, I was astonished at the degree of intrusion that she had to agree to -it was not just the bog-standard psychometric testing either. One thing made this process manageable though: She was well advised not to tell anyone in her professional circle that she was applying for the job in the first place – something that she had no problem doing.

If it was public knowledge that she’d gone for the job, and she didn’t get it, then her mental health would have been a matter of public speculation.

Applying this kind of corporate risk-aversion to representative government adds a new layer of bureaucracy that politicians have to be responsible to – one that competes with their primary responsibility to those who elect them.

This isn’t entirely a one way street though, as the Guardian article that Brian points to notes:

“As time has worn on, Glaser has begun to feel that her illness may, oddly, have been a reason for the success of the peace talks, rather than a cause of instability that threatened them. “She was racing against time,” he says.”

Surely this is another argument for distributed authority in which decisions are taken in a collegiate way by a diverse group of individuals rather than they are made currently? And is this insistence upon individual public virtues actually a symptom of a decline in the quality of our democracy?

Perhaps a group of individual drunks, lunatics and hypocrites making collegiate decisions would make produce better policies than a group of buttoned up risk-averse purveyors of public cant with strong individual powers? And, as Brendan O’Neill argued a while ago, isn’t politics and democracy supposed to be about a clash of ideas and principles rather than a game of personal one-upmanship?

If you’re not following this one (do keep up!) the latest buzz among people with funny-shaped heads is Augmented Reality. This is where you use a technology application to tell you more about the locality you are in than your eyes can work out. There are, of course, opportunities for local authorities to ensure that more people know more things about their localities.

Charlie Brooker has an entertaining piece on it here today:

“By 2013, it’ll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.”

More on this – especially what it means for adding data about the people you meet –  later perhaps?

Nick at Podnosh has a very interesting post up here – one that ties in with the ‘eavesdropping‘ theme that I’ve been trailing here a while ago:

Listening in: Not always sinister

“…listening with a purpose is exactly what [public sector bodies] should be doing, otherwise they would be wasting public money. It doesn’t follow that this will be a malign purpose.  Listening to the social web can help  the police improve the way they spend public money rather than waste it.”

It does kinda beg the question of what elected representatives are for though. Sure – public sector bodies should be keeping an eye on what people are saying about them – but really, this is the role of the elected representative. Because politicians aren’t stepping up to this particular mark, public authorities put themselves in this place.

Will this continue to be the case? Do politicians understand the options that the social web opens up for them? I’d say that they don’t at the moment, but like everyone else, lots of pennies are dropping for them.

We’ll see….

(Apologies – I’ve just realised that the link to Nick’s site was dropped in my editing process. Dunno how that happened – and fixed now!)