Local Democracy Notepad

This blog, as you can see, has ground to a halt. Nothing in over 18 months.

I’ve also noted that I’ve had a malware attack and there are lots of links urging you to buy tablets that help to stiffen the sinews.

I’ll slowly delete these as I find them. In the meantime, I’d like to pull together some round-up posts on the subject of ‘democratic perfection as a political method’.

More later.

Thanks again for all of the feedback on those open data posts recently.

Just to recap, I’m helping to organise an open data project for some school pupils within the a London borough in the new year. One of the big tasks is to flush out all of the data that may be available.

I’m going to be taking subject areas such as crime, health, education/children’s services separately and posting on each of them, using the  links and a few ideas that have come from different directions.

My first subject, though, will be on voluntary/civil society activity in a particular borough – in this case, Barnet.

This is a good example of a data-set that isn’t generally available yet in any standardised form, but one that may be of interest to school pupils in mapping some aspects of their locality.

In terms of drawing down experience of a local voluntary sector and open data, Jo Ivens in Brighton has pointed me to the Data for Neighbourhoods and Regeneration site here – a very good set of signposts – along with her own Databridge site.

I started to try and summarise a few good points from this site but ended up finding all of it worth reading – it will prove to be an incredibly useful resource for everybody involved in this schools project. As a taster, I’m shamelessly pinching this video, but the whole site is worth a visit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies for the light posting here. I’m mid-project on a few issues that I’d normally blog about here, so blogging will be a bit uneven for the time being.

In the meantime, here’s a quick stop-gap while IA while ago, I posted something here on the common misconception that many of us have about consensuses (consensii?).

I think that this is important for democracy, as one of the harshest charges that politicians face is that they are out of touch or that they don’t listen to us.

Now, in a week where the ‘We are the 99%’ meme is doing the rounds, here’s a nice post about the False Consensus Effect….

“which states that individuals view their own preferences, behaviours and judgements as being typical, normal and common within a broader context; it also suggests we find alternative characteristics as being more deviant and atypical than they actually are.”

Worth bearing in mind.

Chad. High disease prevalence and not much democracy

Amartya Sen has powerfully made the case that democracy brings with it guarantees of social justice.

Summarising for speed, Sen has argued that democracies don’t have famines, that they provide regulatory minimum standards that ensure that earthquakes don’t result in huge death-tolls as poorly-built structures collapse, and so on.

In a democracy, we are very likely to have better, universal services compared to non-democracies.

It’s a familliar argument, but one that was recently subject to a fascinating twist. In a recent New Scientist [£] article, evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill makes the case that democracy only emerges in societies in which there is a relative absense of infectious disease.

In summary, societies with a high prevalence of infectious diseases tend to an understandable level of xenophobia. Epidemics, after all, are often the consequence of population movements, therefore, outsiders are treated with a good deal more suspicion. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s late on Friday afternoon – here’s some brain-candy to chew on over the weekend.

Here’s Douglas Rushkoff – one of the most established commentators on interactive communcations explaining the cost of transparency. It’s liberating stuff – yet a lot of it seems so straightforward in Rushkoff’s hands. It often reads like the bleedin’ obvious. A lot of it is aimed at the individual, discussing their rights and the way they are manipulated and exploited.

Douglas Rushkoff: The Future of Transparency from Applied Brilliance on Vimeo.

There’s not much in here that seems directly aimed

at a local government audience (indeed, nothing expressly) yet I’d suggest that it’s hugely important to grasp the power-relations that effect us all – and Rushkoff is great for that.

One possible lesson though: how important it is to engage all council employees more in engaging with local people.

I started to write a second follow-up post on the Local Gov Camp data-visualisation session (I’ll probably finish it later today) when I stumbled on this post on conversational politics (in a very wide sense of the term) from my favourite US blogger – it made the point I was inching towards better than I could:

“It turns out (from a study of ethics rather than our topic, politics) that people “have a hard time offering an account of their moral reasoning that contains consistent substantive content.” They are “largely incapable of articulating their moral decision-making process in substantive, propositional terms.” Often, their responses to open-ended questions are rationalizations of what they have done, not reasons that will guide what they do.”

A couple of weeks ago, I posted here on some of the thinking that casts doubt on the suitability of voters to …. er … vote – a sort of briefing for a ‘devil’s advocate’ – and I’ve been looking for way of articulating any of the powerful reasons why the political process matters.

Do read the whole post because it’s very interesting on the way we respond to multiple choice questions and how easy it is to predict our conclusions. But something else occurs to me.

Peter concludes:

“We ought to give good reasons to justify (or criticize) our own actions. We should be interested in other people’s reasons and their reactions to ours. The act of interpreting the public thoughts of working-class urban youth thus has a moral motivation, even if those reasons are not strongly influential in their own lives. I don’t think that current psychological research precludes the hope that good arguments can change people’s implicit stances or premises, which then affect their behaviors.

In short, we should strive to understand other people’s arguments in case they are right and to decide how to respond effectively if they are not.”

Surely there’s a bigger opportunity than understanding how people articulate and assert their political preferences? I’m really interested in the way that people go beyond this and collectively describe the problems that they face – particularly ones that aren’t well-trodden arguments that have gone mainstream.  It’s one step further away from the politics that Peter is writing about – but currently one that is monopolised by the small number of social forces that shape our perceptions and define our options so effectively.

Can’t think of a word for that collective entity – can I just refer to it as Babylon seeing as I’ve got Bob Marley playing in the next room at the moment?

This is a bit of a rehearsal of the ‘what is a good government – and is it democratic? question. It’s also more of a set of bookmarks than a proper post, but I hope someone finds it useful.

Click pic for credit

I think we would all like to find ourselves in a situation where the public – by voting – get a government that delivers The General Will – and that, by this, we understand that it does it efficiently as well.

If someone could demonstrate that we could have this without votes or public participation, we’d have to face a tough question: Do we actually want a democracy at all?

So, for example, take the notion of The General Will.  As an example, lets take something that the public have a settled preference on. For example, lets say (for the sake of argument) that we want everybody to be able to have access to, and the ability participate in, a particular activity – no matter what their social or ethnic status may be. This will not just require rules to prevent discrimination – it will also require society to be organised in such a way as to make it possible for someone to provide such a service.

The example that springs to mind is that of a golf club.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you, but I find the outcome of the AV referendum less interesting than the fact that we’re being asked about voting systems at all.

Like everyone else, I’ve got my own prejudices here – I particularly dislike the fact that it’s a question that is subject to a referendum in the first place – a strong enough reason to resist the change itself, perhaps?

I don’t know whether to vote Yes, No or just say ‘meh‘ and stay indoors. But I think that there are some bigger important questions lurking in a squabble over a minor change, and I’d like to help pull together a catalogue of the various arguments to see if that will help the undecideds to make their mind up. Read the rest of this entry »

Pic from 'recycled scissors (click for original)

… so to speak. According to the Huffington Post,

California’s direct democracy fetish is stepping into new areas viagra tablets including the practice of infant circumcision for religious purposes.

It brings up a number of interesting issues. On the one hand, it raises questions for libertarians – often the most vocal advocates of more direct democracy. The Huffington Post quotes one Heather Wisnicky saying:

It’s your choice, it’s your child…government can’t rule us on everything we do,”

So there’s the oppression of minorities argument for starters. It also addresses some wider issues around family law – the secularist argument that our children must choose their religion for themselves. On balance, I’d probably agree with that one, but we have to ask where it will end. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies again for the light posting.

I’ve female viagra cream written an extensive round-up of the main arguments (that I can think

of) against referendums.

The full post is over on Slugger O’Toole and a slightly edited (shorter) version is on Liberal Conspiracy. Both were published yesterday.