Local Democracy Notepad

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here). Read the rest of this entry »

Power to the people!

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 I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry. Read the rest of this entry »

• For twitterers: There’s a science to getting retweeted, you know?
• Trying to explain something? No need to reinvent the wheel.
• A bit of politics to spice up the end of a hot week: Are social liberals so open-minded about the BNP that their brains have fallen out? (I’m guessing you’ve heard the ‘British Eggs for British Nazis’ yoke joke, have you?

If you haven’t seen Socrata yet, it’s really worth a look – it illustrates the quality of data that could be made available to us in the UK.

It shows that – once we get beyond the classic journalistic question of “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – once the data is in the public domain – that this information can be used to model the big questions of our time – turned into interfaces that allow us to explore and model problems.

Take the data, add crowdsourced intelligence, and you may end up with a much better description of the problems that policymakers face.

It also shows why the Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data‘ campaign is so important.

Neil Williams has a good post up about the need to break some institutions into a more interactive world slowly. The Hansard Society’s Andy Williamson had a similar post up here a while ago:

Innovation fails when the people with the ideas aren’t matched by the ones with the skills and power to make those ideas happen. End-to-end innovation – and, therefore, eDemocracy – takes in the whole of the organisation.

I’d argue that this is a political issue. Or, more to the point, it’s something that requires a political leadership. That can’t happen, however, until we address one of the key problems in promoting innovation in the UK: That the relationship between the permanent bureaucracy and the elected one is not one that promotes innovation of this kind. Read the rest of this entry »

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 believe that innovation doesn’t just affect business and public administration. It often offers the potential to break out of a political stalemate.

Like the stalemate that politicians, journalists and bloggers are in. Like the stalemate between declining local newspapers and local authorities.

Every senior politician says that they want to devolve power down to local government. Local government says that it wants more power devolved from the centre.

But every politician also knows that this will never happen as long as the public blame central government for poor local services. Innovators can help local authorities raise their game, create new communications channels and start to address this problem.

Politicians know that they face obstacles when they want their departments to raise their game. Whether it’s the risk-averse veto groups in middle management or procurement rules that reward box-ticking rather than imagination, they know that the easy answers have all been tried.

These are small administrative hurdles rather than big political ones. Politicians and innovators can tackle these problems together.

Politicians also know that – if they yield to demands for a more participative politics – that they run the real risk of disenfranchising large sections of the population that are prepared to vote in elections, but that don’t have the ability or the confidence to fight their corner as active citizens.

Politicians will need to call for help from politically-aware innovators if they are to meet demands for participation while preserving the universal franchise.

In many cases, it isn’t just innovation, but political innovation that is needed. Politicians can offer the leadership, but they need to know that innovators are focussed upon their problems – and not just commercial and administrative ones.

It’s time for innovators to help get politicians out of the political stalemate that they are stuck in. Most of these issues will not simply be solved by a general election and a change of government.  They involve the kind of game-changing ideas that have altered so many other sectors of public life.

You can book your tickets for Reboot Britain here. If you’re interested in any of these issues, scan the schedule for more information on them, or please visit www.picamp.org and meet some of the session initiators. I’m hoping to encourage them to just flesh out what they are planning to talk about on this site a bit in advance of the event next Monday.

An Elephant yesterday. Best eaten a bit at a time. (Image: Wikimedia Commons - click for credit)

Shorter version: Often, the minor technical obstacles mask a wider small-p political obstructionism to the promotion of a more interactive form of government.

Having written this post about the small obstacles to open e-gov a few weeks ago, Tim Davies got such a comprehensive response in his comments thread that he’s rolled them out into a wiki.

The idea that there are ’50 small hurdles’ is a very powerful one – it enables those who want to move small mountains to understand that it can be done in the same way that an Elephant can be eaten: A bit at a time.

I think that Tim has missed an important one out, but I’m reluctant to break the symmetry and tidiness of the ’50′ number. It’s an important one though, and probably a bit less straightforward than the obstacles that Tim has identified, so the omission is understandable:

Promoting interactivity between local government and citizens is a thorny one. It presents a huge amount of potential for disruption. Nominally, under our political settlement, elected councillors are the ones that formally do policy. Read the rest of this entry »

Obama: Has the attention of the internet. Can councillors match this at a local level?

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 that a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey has found that more than half of the voting-age population used the internet to get involved in the political process during an election year.

So what does this mean for local democracy? Here are my two hasty conclusions on what are, I think, the key opportunities that this presents:

1. Because the costs (both financial, and in terms of expertise) of web publishing and interaction have fallen dramatically, this could lead to a weaker political centre and the emergence of a new more personalised local politics
2. Because more people can publish and interact, the signal to noise ratio has changed – there appears to be a noiser-than-ever focus upon the activities of the political centre, and a marked frigidity at a local level in using new media tools

I have my own explanations for this frigidity, but I’d be interested to hear yours…..

Irish elections: generally more posters than in the UK

So much is changing so quickly. Newspapers and broadcasters are changing. Governments now communicate using radically different means to the ones that were practiced a decade ago. Here’s Exhibit A.

We now have free interactive tools that enable us to hold huge multilateral conversations based upon collaborative filtering and reputation management. We can find useful strangers easily – and I don’t just mean with dating websites.

Of course, these changes throw up hazards. New doors have opened for budding demagogues, busy-bodies, lobbyists, snoopers and quacks. But it also throws up huge opportunities.

For me, the glittering prize – from a democratic point of view – is the potential to promote decentralisation of power. Putting the levers of power in a place that is geographically closer. Breaking down the rigidities that made participation impossible.

In the same way that the DIY ethic of blogging and social media has helped millions to somehow dilute the alienation of modern living, it has allowed many of us the chance to test our voice, contribute and to take some responsibility for public discourse – often for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

Tenuous blogpost illustrations: Lemons from the market.

The reason that there is such a wide-ranging debate about what democracy is, and how it is likely to change in the coming years, is in no small part, down to the fact that technology is making new things possible. The technical infrastructure available to us is changing, and creative minds are being applied to find new ways to adapt it to solve old problems.

Those creative minds – the key to any success in this area – need incentivising to do their job properly. Or lets put it another way: They need to be able to earn a living doing it or they will turn their attention elsewhere.

A couple of years ago, Geoff Mulgan of The Young Foundation summed up the problems that ‘social innovators’ face.

“Although more policy ideas are now piloted than in the past, there are very few institutions devoted to social innovation, no widely accepted methods for doing it, no serious academic works analysing it and no widely used metrics for measuring it. Worse, there are strong disincentives to innovate in both the public and voluntary sectors. It is well known that the penalties for failed innovations are often high while the rewards for successful ones are slim…..”

And…

“… all new ideas threaten existing vested interests. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that ineffective models survive far longer than they should – for instance, in fields as various as criminal justice (where recidivism rates remain ridiculously high) and education (where levels of truancy and the number of people not currently in employment, education or training have remained stubbornly high for a decade or more).”

I’d add another brake on social innovation: Anyone that comes up with a good idea, and finds a way of making it commercially sustainable faces the following hurdles: Read the rest of this entry »