Local Democracy Notepad

April 7^th 2011 was a dark day both for the Coalition government’s commitment to be the ‘greenest government ever’, and for democracy in the UK. That was the day that the government launched its Red Tape Challenge.

The idea of cutting red tape has a long and undistinguished history in the UK; undistinguished in that it is never a job that anyone has said is done.

Under Conservative Prime Minister John Major in the mid-1990s, there was a ‘deregulation unit’. Major memorably described tackling red tape as like trying to wrestle with a greasy pig.

Across governments, the idea of slashing red tape never went out of fashion. Under Tony Blair, New Labour established a ‘red tape task force’. And Gordon Brown claimed to be the ‘enemy of red tape’. Read the rest of this entry »

Necessity, that is. It’s Budget Day and the cuts are in the post. My incredible predictive powers tell me that government spending may be under a bit of pressure shortly.

If you’re not a regular over at William Heath’s Ideal Government blog, this post is a good introduction to his general themes. In his overview of his preoccupations, this one stands out:

We haven’t cheap viagra in uk yet seriously started on co-creation or participative public services where the systems delivered are formally designed successfully to meet a real need, and created, measured and improved with active input from those it’s intended to help

The possibilities (and often, the idealism) of open-source advocacy couched in these terms may offer us a clue to where the value of participation may really be acknowledged in the short term. At any point in the day, the most enraged person in the UK is probably the

one who has had to deal with the sublime idiocy of HMG IT procurement most recently.

As a microcosm of what’s wrong with our democracy, there can be few better examples. It’s substantially driven by insidious pressure groups (suppliers) who have captured departements and are capable of cranking up demand for what they are selling. As my friend Dominic Campbell put it recently, it’s time people start getting fired for buying IBM.

Politicians are particularly exposed here. The level of responsibility that they bear for expensive IT failures or the purchase of White Elephants is roughly at an inverse proportion to their ability to make those decisions. IT procurement is a complex and (deliberately?) mystifying process. Civil servants can often get away with huge mistakes and acts of carelessness that would be difficult to imagine in the Ministry of Defence the NHS.

And while some of us have huge reservations about the potential of citizens to get involved directly shaping schools or local authorities, IT procurment – with the existance of a large, well-networked open-source community (and a bunch of clever FOI-savvy geeks who really hate IT procurement) – may well provide the textbook example of how participative design can result in much better outcomes, better strategy, more bureaucratic accountability and tons of cost-savings.

We’ll see. (Have a look at this Government IT spend infographic that William points to by the way if you want to see how much cash is at stake here).

I’m a bit slow with this one, but just to close a loop that was opened a few weeks ago here, those Civil Service Social Media Guidelines are now public.

Over at Puffbox, Simon seems slightly pleasantly surprised:

“But whilst there’s a requirement to limit ‘civil servants’ participation  in  a professional capacity in social networks’, I don’t necessarily read that as the draconian ban it might have been. So natural viagra pills whilst the government online community’s unanimous decision to go quiet is perfectly understandable, and unquestionably the safest thing to do, I’m not sure the guidance actually demands it.”

My own view is that – even though the guidance doesn’t demand it, the natural risk aversion of British civil servants are fairly well-known for erring on the side of caution on these things.

When I was given an insight into what it could be a few weeks ago, I wrote about it here in unequivocal terms and got a few interested phonecalls from journalists as a result. I was given a bit of a hint that – fearing a bit of teasing, they decided to wait until the election was announced before publishing them. Remind me, how did Jo Moore put it again…?

Maybe this blog played a small part in toning the whole thing down a bit though?

Later this week, a document will be published outlining what civil servants can and can’t do with social media during the election ‘purdah’ period.

I’ve been given an outline of what guidance it includes and I’m here to tell you now that – when you see it, I think you will agree with me – that it is the most spectacularly stupidly moronically pusilanimous bit of thick box-ticking discount viagra pills bureaucrat-ese that you will ever stumble upon.

Think what the most stupid thing that they could say could be. Then times it by ten. It’s more stupid than the result. Unless someone changes their mind in the next few days…..

We’ll see….

For me, this post by Kevin Harris sums up what happened over the past decade, where new Labour’s lightly held good intentions met their managerialst bent and the two cancelled each other out:

“Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of funding without much thought about what was needed in local situations, thus attracting many who were willing to spend it for them without the burden of values or the inconvenience of insights into the nature of exclusion.”

Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the risk accordingly)

Slow-loading screens weed out all but the most determined

So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time? Read the rest of this entry »

Nick at Podnosh has a very interesting post up here – one that ties in with the ‘eavesdropping‘ theme that I’ve been trailing here a while ago:

Listening in: Not always sinister

“…listening with a purpose is exactly what [public sector bodies] should be doing, otherwise they would be wasting public money. It doesn’t follow that this will be a malign purpose.  Listening to the social web can help  the police improve the way they spend public money rather than waste it.”

It does kinda beg the question of what elected representatives are for though. Sure – public sector bodies should be keeping an eye on what people are saying about them – but really, this is the role of the elected representative. Because politicians aren’t stepping up to this particular mark, public authorities put themselves in this place.

Will this continue to be the case? Do politicians understand the options that the social web opens up for them? I’d say that they don’t at the moment, but like everyone else, lots of pennies are dropping for them.

We’ll see….

(Apologies – I’ve just realised that the link to Nick’s site was dropped in my editing process. Dunno how that happened – and fixed now!)

Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.

It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):

For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.

Peter Cruikshank has pulled together a really useful post here, complete with print-off-able pictures – a very useful resource for every local authority to use to find out about e-petitioning (and every local authority will have to know about petitioning shortly).

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It’s been done as part of the Europetition project, but most of it is UK-applicable.

I won’t spoil the surprise. It’s over here.

Ryanair: Business model coming to your town hall soon? (Click for pic credit)

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Nick Clegg has gone on the attack. His target is the London Borough of Barnet’s easyCouncil model of service provision.

There are a number of ways of portraying Barnet’s idea, but I’ve not seen many that appear to be very kind. As a Barnet resident who has to use Ryanair in his line of work, I should probably leave it to others to comment on the politics behind this - I suppose the most neutral one would be to call it a freemium service.

I’ve posted on ‘cognitive polyphasia’ before (broadly, it’s the phenomenon where voters want Scandinavian welfare systems on US tax-rates), and this idea seems to be another attempt by politicians to get the public to believe that they can have the best of all worlds.

Barnet’s approach – like Ryanair’s – appears to be based upon the idea that a service can be packaged as being more attractive than it actually is – hardly a revolutionary concept in politics.

I doubt if Barnet will be as brazen as Michael O’Leary’s outfit are either. Ryanair tell us that you can fly to Perpignan for only £5. But then, once you start buying the ticket, you find that the figure multiplies if you want optional extras. Read the rest of this entry »