Local Democracy Notepad

I generally dislike the airy way cynicism is worn like a badge of pride around political conversations. When people say “that’s a typical politician’s answer”, the phrase ‘you get the politicians you deserve’ springs to mind.

But in recent years, politicians seem to have jumped the fence. Instead of sticking to their story – that their job is to deliberate and act in the public interest – the vast majority appear to be happy to temporarily adopt the line that they are there to do whatever the public want them to do.

So in 2008, the previous Labour government announced an obligation on local authorities to encourage local petitions coupled with an obligation to respond to them in a clearly defined way.

Now, there’s a more precise way of interpreting that, but seeing as few local authorities know what it is, and seeing as I heard a rumour somewhere that the Coalition has modified this obligation (or something), I really can’t be bothered to look any further. Read the rest of this entry »

Liz Azyan picks up on some questions about e-petitions that were asked here by Paul a couple of months back. She doesn’t mention the fascinating word cloud that accompanies her article, called “E-petition verbs”.

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The biggest words are, on a quick skim, “prevent, save, reimburse, make, oppose, charge and introduce”. With my local government head on, all of those words, except charge, are “spend” words. Save this thing the council want to close, introduce a new service, put more bobbies on the beat to prevent crime.

I don’t have a problem with people saying that they want the council to spend more money – people do that all the time. It’s just very likely that the appeals to spend more money will push for higher and higher spending at a time when there’s less money than ever for doing new things.

Easier petitioning means councils will need to get (even) better at saying no.

Sidebar: Interesting research project for someone: take the most recent 100 petitions on the Number 10 website, and work out the net cost of accepting them.

Alan Turing

Last week, the a 10 Downing St petition resulted in Alan Turing receiving the apology and recognition that he has long deserved. And petitions are likely to become a much more prominent fixture of public life in the next year or so.

My sources in Westminster tell me that the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent at some point in the autumn and will come into force in May 2010 with guidance potentially in place as early as February 2010.

That’s not as far away as you think, and looking through the bill, the team here at LD (Anthony and I, at any rate) think that there are quite a few issues that councils need to deal with as a matter of some urgency.

In some cases, this will involve a tweak to the existing procedures that allow for the consideration of e-petitions. In others, it may almost be a start from scratch. Either way, I’ve been trying to look at the bill and turn it into a decision flow-chart, but there are still quite a few questions that will need to be answered before spring 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes – I’m new here – I think Paul asked me as we have been having a falling out about Petitions over on my blog and he likes an argument.

You can find out more about me there obviously but probably the most relevant fact is that I am currently researching for a PHD around the question of whether or not we can use informal social participation online to increase formal participation in the democratic process – specifically in local democracy as I think this is where the heart of the community should be.

To this end I have for some time now been struggling with the idea of Twitter. At first I was worried that this was a sign of aging and I had reached my personal limit in terms of new innovations but thankfully I am still filled with excitement about the idea of the new Palm Pre and the possibility of a Google OS netbook – I have also managed to form my Twitter objections into a coherent argument rather than a short grumble so all is not lost. Twitter had troubled me on two main fronts:

• Its yet more noise. I (like many people) spend a lot of energy trying to make my life quieter and simpler and the idea that everyone I know could be giving me constant updates on what they were up to fills me with horror – it just feels like noise. Now, obviously all the people I know would only tweet with great profundity but even so – that’s a lot of information I don’t think I actually need
• I am not sure that anything important can be said in only 140 characters.

That being said there have been some striking examples of Twitter being used – in particular around real time news and this move to real time web is perhaps the crux of what is interesting about Twitter. It speaks to the idea of pervasive technology and a confirmation of the underlying assumption of constant connectivity.  Have a read of this as its another take on this thought.

But as ever I wonder what the use is for Local Government – how can we use it – and I think Twitter should be thought about in terms of listening and not in terms of talking and this makes things make much more sense as I am not sure anyone really wants to here tweets from a council as its really a tool for individual voices.

The most accessible description of Twitter I had was in relation to the way in which flocks of birds communicate – one cheep at a time!! If we can develop ways to listen to these cheeps and tweets, and to select the right ones to listen to then we can can listen and learn to the public. Search companies are already trying this with big global topics like swine flu but if Twitter, or other real time web tools, continue to grow then it should start to be true on a local level as well.

Interesting…..so now onwards to research semantic search and analysis tools!!!

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 “people who looked at this mostly ended up buying that”. Furthermore, every time you log into Amazon it looks at the complete history of everything you’ve bought and suggests totally new books, songs or other items that it has calculated you might like. This is a totally new way of solving the information problem of finding a good song to listen to.

Parliament, and indeed our wider democracy, is full of interesting information problems, all of them untransformed by Amazon-like ingenuity. How do we know that MPs and officials are acting in our interests, rather than other people’s? How do we know they’ve made their decisions based on good evidence? How do we know what issues are coming along next that need dealing with? How do we know what other people are doing to try and influence the political process? How do the sentiments of large numbers of people get fairly and transparently transformed into new laws? How do we even make sure that people know what the proposed laws say in the first place?”

It’s an attractive vision – opening up parliament and applying the experiences of usability experts to make it more intuitive. If you’ve not seen a usability lab in action, this advert gives you an indication of how it works:

Read the rest of this entry »

Subjecting politicians to excessive regulation discourages interactivity.

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 allowance.

Meanwhile, the incorporation of social media into bureaucratic priorities gathers apace. A while ago, the Local Government Engagement Online blog has helpfully pulled together a set of guidelines from around the world, ones that can be added to the UK Civil Service Partipation Online guidelines.

Now, I’ve not read these all exhaustively, but I have put a fair bit of time in to scan them.

Given the size of the task, I may have not noticed something that I would suggest should be right at the top of each document – certainly each one that has been drafted by any governmental body. Read the rest of this entry »

Firstly, this is a lovely idea about how design can be used to improve the quality of communication at a local level. Here’s the original site, and here’s an image to whet your whistle:

And secondly, totally unrelated, here’s a list of the petitions that have gone before the EU petittions committee.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, visitors to this blog will routinely get ‘ignore petitions / discrourage petitions’ posts on a fairly regular basis.

Well, we knew it was coming – here:

“New proposals to make it easier to get local leaders to hold a referendum on their leadership structure, putting communities firmly in control of their town and council, has been published for consultation by Communities Secretary Hazel Blears.”

It is particularly interesting that these votes will be on the chosen structure of local government. It appears to be an extension of the idea that ‘constitutional change’ is a suitable subject for referendums.

(Oh, one other thing: I know I should know this, but can someone give me a final ruling? I’ve never been certain – is the plural of ‘referendum’ really ‘referenda’?)