Local Democracy Notepad

Through the Political Innovation project, I’m helping to promote a meetup tomorrow evening between people who have experience and interests in gaming, and those of us who are very focussed on political issues.

As I’m one of the hosts, I thought it worth dropping a few conversation-starters in the mix. Issues where politicians seem to have reversed themselves into a cul-de-sac. Issues where a game-change could make a difference.

Like most people, I have prejudices as well as arguments – please take all of these examples (listed in no particular order) in this spirit – I’d like to focus on the gamed nature of politics rather than specific evidence on these issues:

• Sentencing policy: Whatever you think to the way we handle criminal sentencing, it seems to be subject to pressures that don’t have much to do with reducing reoffending. Does the tension between evidence-based approaches, newspaper versions of the problem and electoral horizons and timescales resolve itself well? I don’t think so.
• Immigration policy: A similar problem – moral questions of freedom of movement, economic ones around the flexibility of the economy, sociological ones around social capital and the effect upon communities of the kind of churn that flexible economies bring
• As I was writing this, my friend Tim Davies forwarded this post on gaming and climate change (among other issues) from Duncan Green of Oxfam, so that’s another one to add into the mix.
• Then there’s the related question of participatory budgeting and the potential extensions we can apply to the idea? How can choice-games be used to improve efficiency in public management (a friend working at a local PCT said to me recently that he believed that doctors often find it harder to under-prescribe or under-refer patients to hospitals because of the way their work is structured.

Then I’ve a few personal hobby-horses:

• Participation – how do we strike the balance between getting more people involved in policymaking, but balancing the need to ensure that segments of the population aren’t over/under represented, while ensuring that we get the benefit of expertise, experience, creative thinking and the practical input?
• Representation – how do we incentivise politicians to play their role in a more participative democracy with the public interest as their main focus?
• Journalism – (particularly relevant this week): journalists almost have a constitutional role as well – they refer to themselves as the fourth estate often enough. How do we incentivise them to behave like decent intelligent human beings? How do we strike the balance between the need for diversity and pluralism in the provision of news while recognising the fact that the business model has a lot of uncertainty around it? Good journalism is literally worth billions in terms of the value that it adds to the economy – but no-one’s prepared to pick up the bill.

Also, aside from the potential for positive social change, there’s also the question of education – how far does addressing these problems increase or challenge the legitimacy of the structures that exist to tackle them?

Enough already! Here’s a re-run of a Ted talk that I linked to here a while ago – it makes the case for this approach better than I can.

If you’re coming along tomorrow, please try and think of any games that could be changed?

Since I looked at the calculations from We Love Local Government on Councillors’ iPads the other day, I’ve had a few conversations with people working in democratic services at various local authorities.

Click pic for credit

It seems that the big worry is less that Councillor’s iPads will cost/save money or have any productivity/accountability gains, than that Councillors will spend council meetings futzing with their new toys instead of paying attention to procedings properly.

A few quick thoughts on this:

• Are we worried that tweeting councillors will be interacting with the public when they should be focussing only upon the views of other elected members? And aren’t the more savvy ones doing this already with their phones?
• Is there an upside to Councillors being able to do quick lookups and on-the-hoof research during council meetings? Will the quality of deliberation go up?
• Are there small-c constitutional issues here? An elected councillor has legitimacy that unelected interlopers don’t have. Should it be that the only evidence that could/should be considered at a council meeting should be tabled by – or through – an elected councillor? Do councillors have a quasi-jurist role (not a new suggestion around here)? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s late on Friday afternoon – here’s some brain-candy to chew on over the weekend.

Here’s Douglas Rushkoff – one of the most established commentators on interactive communcations explaining the cost of transparency. It’s liberating stuff – yet a lot of it seems so straightforward in Rushkoff’s hands. It often reads like the bleedin’ obvious. A lot of it is aimed at the individual, discussing their rights and the way they are manipulated and exploited.

Douglas Rushkoff: The Future of Transparency from Applied Brilliance on Vimeo.

There’s not much in here that seems directly aimed

at a local government audience (indeed, nothing expressly) yet I’d suggest that it’s hugely important to grasp the power-relations that effect us all – and Rushkoff is great for that.

One possible lesson though: how important it is to engage all council employees more in engaging with local people.