Here’s a radio programme about participatory budgeting in the UK. I’m not sure where it went out first (Tiago Peixoto pointed me towards it via Facebook).
It’s quite short and worth listening to just for the note of joy in a council officer’s voice when she says that people were asking for council tax [...]
Filed under: Conversational localities, Deliberative democracy, Participatory budgeting | Tagged: Podcast, Radio programme | 1 Comment »
I want to tell you about Mixed Ink - a really good concept in collaborative authoring that I encountered on my travels a few weeks ago.
I was in Miami (‘ark at me!), touting a democracy project that I’ve been nurturing for years.
The conference I was at was designed to showcase bright ideas in the use [...]
Filed under: Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Web 2.0 and democracy | No Comments »
Time for a look at Chapter three of the Conservative local government green paper, Shift Control.
This chapter is the section of the green paper that focuses on democracy, so there’s a lot to talk about. The chapter says that a Conservative Government would:
provide citizens in all our large cities with the opportunity to choose [...]
Filed under: Conservatives, Council services, Councillors, Deliberative democracy, Direct democracy, Elections, Mayors, Political parties, Unelected agencies | No Comments »
Before
This is a good way of explaining it, isn’t it?
Filed under: Consultations, Conversational localities, Deliberative democracy | No Comments »
Neighbourhoods blogger, Kevin Harris has just introduced me to Hugh of Harringay Online. The most superficially interesting thing about his site is the spelling of Harringay. The actual local authority area is Haringey, and within the area - for reasons that are lost in the mists of time - is a differently named neighbourhood within [...]
Filed under: Conversational localities, Deliberative democracy, Web 2.0 and democracy | Tagged: Haringey, Harringay | 1 Comment »
They say that eavesdroppers never hear good things about themselves. This may be true, but they probably get a more honest appraisal than the more direct forms of feedback can afford.
For me, this raises the question: Should we be asking people what they think about anything?
Or should we be encouraging conversations and finding (non-intrusive!) [...]
Filed under: Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Democratic renewal, Public administration, Web 2.0 and democracy | No Comments »
In a very good edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Analysis’ programme towards the end of last year, the columnist David Aaronovich recounted a programme that he produced in the 1980s featuring the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood.
The Archbishop, as far as I can see, had the kind of views that would appeal to a Guardian [...]
Filed under: Being a politician, Consultations, Conversational localities, Deliberative democracy, Distributed moral wisdom, Pressure groups | Tagged: Certainty, Distributed moral wisdom, Eavesdroppable, Groupthink, Irony, Neutrality, Podcast, Wisdom of Crowds | 2 Comments »
This US post is calling for the data that agencies use to be as available as their conclusions.
“Mindy Finn noted that politicians (typically leery of too much openness) can benefit from transparency in a self-protective “flood the zone” way — since people are coming to expect information about public figures to be available online, someone [...]
Filed under: Conversational localities, Deliberative democracy, Public administration, Transparency | No Comments »
Here’s Suze, musing on the question of how far blogging is having a positive impact on journalism. Suze concludes that it’s too early to tell, but she says a lot of interesting things on the way.
For me, here’s the big question: Does the emergence of a decentralised space with fewer barriers to entry (ahem: Web [...]
Filed under: Being a politician, Conversational localities, Deliberative democracy, Democratic renewal, Web 2.0 and democracy, What makes a good representative? | 5 Comments »
Tiago - who’s blog is well worth bookmarking -has a good post up about how Londoners can decide where to allocate ten grants of up to £400,000 for London’s parks.
Tiago’s conclusions: A bad start to a good idea.
Filed under: Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Web 2.0 and democracy | Tagged: London, Parks, Participatory engineering | No Comments »
Here’s a good post from an Australian blogger on the question: Is adversarial politics damaging to our democracy? (It’s actually an update on a previous post with that title). Here the adversarialism is opposed by a more attractive ‘deliberative’ model of the kind advocated here. The flipside of this argument is put very well by [...]
Filed under: Being a politician, Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Democratic renewal, Neutrality, Pressure groups, Public administration | Tagged: Adversarial politics, Discretion in politics, Independence, Standards Board, Transparency | 2 Comments »
Here’s Kevin Harris on possible (!) legislation that would allow local people to vote on what form of punishment is handed out to convicted criminals in their neighbourhood.
Last year, the Swiss voted on whether individual citizenship applications should be ratified by secret ballots.
Commenting on this at the time, Alex Harrowell noted that referendums are not [...]
Filed under: Deliberative democracy, Direct democracy | 1 Comment »
My friend, former Hansard Society e-democracy watcher Ross Ferguson says:
A local government will fall head-over-heels in love with the promise of eDemocracy and launch into an ambitious project to put digital front-and-centre of its democratic processes and service provision. It will be facilitated with next-generation municipal ICT and it will capture our imaginations but it [...]
Filed under: Being a politician, Consultations, Councillors, Deliberative democracy, Democratic renewal, Obstacles for democrats to overcome, Public administration, Web 2.0 and democracy | No Comments »
Labour-leaning ginger-group Compass is inviting policy proposals to be submitted and debated on this site and at meetings around the country.
The site says that the proposals will then be voted on by the Compass membership - forming the policy priorities for the organisation to campaign on. The successful polices will sit alongside the narrative that [...]
Filed under: Being a politician, Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Pressure groups, Web 2.0 and democracy | Tagged: Compass, The Labour Party, The left | No Comments »
From a really fascinating article, just one gem:
“Intriguingly, different linguistic communities seem to have very different blogospheric topologies. The English-language blogosphere appears as a knotty, fibrous mesh, while Scandinavian and Japanese blogs map as something more closely resembling a blotchy Jackson Pollock painting. Russian blogs, by contrast, seem to be heavily clustered in dispersed and [...]
Filed under: Deliberative democracy, Web 2.0 and democracy | No Comments »
If one argues (and I do) that democracy is at it’s most effective when people who are elected are making decisions, and that those decisions should be made without undue pressure from campaigners and lobbyists, one rapidly finds oneself explaining that this doesn’t mean that the public can have no influence on policy in the [...]
Filed under: Being a politician, Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Pressure groups, Web 2.0 and democracy | Tagged: Point-of-view-shifting, Visualisations | No Comments »
We only develop deeper relationships with a subset of our contacts on Twitter, according to Beth - who has picked it up from here.
Filed under: Deliberative democracy, Web 2.0 and democracy | Tagged: Twitter | No Comments »
The FT has picked up on a couple of social media sites that are intended to bring ‘the wisdom of crowds’ to bear upon the new President’s policymaking. Both Fix This Barack and Whitehouse 2 aim to set priorities for the incoming President. Obama’s team appear to be taking steps to do this themselves by [...]
Filed under: Being a politician, Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Transparency | Tagged: Crowdsourcing, Obama, Policymaking | 1 Comment »
Steph Gray asks a very good question:
“…why aren’t advocates of public participation and engagement more successful in engaging the policymakers who design consultations?“
Filed under: Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Democratic renewal, Obstacles for democrats to overcome | Tagged: Participation | No Comments »
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