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 [...]
Posts under ‘Obstacles for democrats to overcome’
How local government and the public sector disincentivise social innovation
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 [...]
The right climate?
Andrew Collinge has a really good post over on the LGIU blog. He’s picking up on an also-good post by Matthew Taylor of the RSA. I don’t have anything to say that engages with it directly, only to add something that I mentioned in a post a while ago over on the Liberal Conspiracy site about [...]
Even Obama gets locked down
My friend Will has e-mailed this from the Washington Post to me – It may cheer Steph up a little to know that he’s not fighting a purely British problem…. “Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering [...]
Social media, civic engagement, and the need for political leadership
There’s a terrific post here, authored by Dave Briggs – brimming with positivity and enthusiasm as ever. It’s a really good round up, and a good introduction to what is possible for users that already have their heads in the right place. I’d add a number of observations to it that I hope make sense. [...]
Systems lockdown – the resistance!
Last week, I posted here on how local councillors are actively discouraged from interacting with the public by the configuration of their office PCs. As I said at the time, this may not be the intention, but it is the outcome. Here, Steph Gray offers a tool that every councillor should run as a diagnostic.
Local authority systems lockdown
If you were to draw a Venn Diagram showing attitudes to the use of ICT tools for interactivity, putting Interactive Evangelists in one circle and local authority ICT managers in the other, I strongly suspect that you would end up with something that looks like a number. This number: 8 When I get time, I’d [...]
'We don't need your stinking checks and balances'
A while back, I noticed a nice short post from Aussie blogger The Mild Colonial Boy quoting De Tocqueville: “It may easily be foreseen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor unceasingly to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to [...]
How to get techies to give you what you want (while Doing The Right Thing at the same time)
Here’s a bit of music made using assistive technology to cheer you up. It was sent to me by my old mate and colleague Amanda – the best usability consultant and website project manager that I’ve ever worked with. [youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuna2AWvqk] What’s this got to do with local democracy? Well, I’ve worked with a large number [...]
Guidelines confetti – a few observations
I’d been planning to do this blog for years, but the thing that finally nudged me to get on with it was this story (my first post) about how an MP’s online allowance was docked by the Parliamentary authorities because he used it in the way that you would expect politicians to use such an [...]