The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator. Because [...]
Posts under ‘Centralisation’
Transparency – sticking plaster or panacea?
MySociety‘s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned. Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent. “….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly [...]
Political Innovation Camp at Reboot Britain
I thought I’d offer you a bit of an outline of the PICamp (Political Innovation Camp) strands that are making up part of NESTA’s Reboot Britain event next week. You’ll see that the sessions that are planned reflect a lot of the issues that come up on this blog regularly. We’re offering these because we [...]
Denham: Going centralist?
Over on the LGIU blog, Jonathan Carr-West is not impressed with John Denham’s conditions for the devolution of powers to local government: “So we find ourselves re-rehearsing the chicken and egg of earned autonomy. Councils need more powers to deliver better services and increased public confidence, but to get more powers they need to deliver [...]
The politics of interactivity
I’m currently convening a number of sessions at a Nesta conference on the 6th July called ‘Reboot Britain’, running a strand called ‘PICamp’ – Political Innovation Camp. I’m looking for local government communications staff that have had any experience or thoughts about the changing relationships with the local media – and particularly issues around the [...]
More cognitive polyphasia
Responding to the Guardian’s reader-survey about reshaping our democratic settlement, David Blunkett offers a good illustration of the cognitive polyphasia that colours so much public debate of these issues: With one breath we say we want less legislation and more active politics based on a participative political activism and decentralisation; and in the next breath [...]
Reductio ad absurdum
Continuing Brendan O’Neill’s theme about the reduction of politics to the question of how efficiently politicians can tick the ‘democracy’ box, Simon Jenkins picks up on the calls for fewer MPs and councillors: “The difference is that most democracies have many tiers of representation on which voters can vent their rage. The Germans run almost [...]
The straight choice
Richard Pope, Francis Irving and Julian Todd have developed a site – The Straight Choice – that allows you to upload election leaflets as they come through your door – with the intention of promoting consistency and honesty. It’s an interesting idea. And – as you come here partly because you often get unpopular arguments, [...]
Populist policing and speedy decisions
Apologies for the light posting this week. I’ve been in Northern Ireland where I met someone who was studying criminology. Her key concern was the question of local control of policing and populism: Would devolved policing result in a deterioration into populism. Northern Ireland is an interesting case in point, given the historic divides. Unionists, with [...]
The internet is now the primary source of political news
Neighbourhood blogger Kevin Harris has emailed me with a tip about this post over at SmartMobs: According to this Pew survey … Some 74% of internet users-representing 55% of the entire adult population–went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election. This marks the first time [...]