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 »

Just a quick response to Tim Davies’ verygood post about ‘The Myth of Easy Engagement’.

There is one argument that supports his general position that, I think, he misses. I’m sure that sooner or later, some will come up with a frivolous law (like ‘Godwin’s Law‘ or ‘Muphry’s Law‘) but if they don’t, let me dibs it:

Evans’ Law

The value of anyone’s opinion is in inverse proportion to their willingness, ability and opportunity to express it effectively.

I think that I’ve outlined this argument here, here, here and here already so I won’t bore you with it again. Chris Dillow has covered it nicely here as well.

From TechPresident:

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“Indiana Univeristy’s Elinor Ostrom focuses her work on how people can go about creating rules for transactions around shared resources, or “commons,” that make collective action rewarding (enough) for everyone involved. And where she added a particularly new way of thinking to economics was to zero in on the economic transactions that take place in ad hoc organizations. Her work is part of a body of knowledge that underlies what people are looking for and considering as they design Gov 2.0 systems of participation and new models for democracy, which makes her of particular interest to those of us interested in thinking through a distributed view of the world.”

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here). Read the rest of this entry »

Dr Ben Goldacre

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse.

The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have conducted against politicians and the very idea that government should tax (“steal from”) people and spend (“burn”) their money. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Direct democracy experiment MyFootballClub was featured in recent online movie Us Now. You’ll remember the MyFC website took over Ebbsfleet United (the former Gravesend and Northfleet) and promised its members all the experience of running a real football club, team selections, transfer listing players, and the rest.

According to a piece on the When Saturday Comes blog, the experiment is not doing so well. Apart from a decline in membership, which is having an effect on the club’s already shaky budget, many of the democracy elements of the operation have been junked. The website members no longer pick the team, and now have ceded some power over transfers to the management, which is appointed by the MyFC website owners.

When Saturday Comes opines:

you have to wonder what the future holds for MyFC if the power afforded to members keeps being eroded. With Daish regaining some control of transfer policy, and the headline grabbing – but ridiculous – concept of fans picking the team having long been consigned to the dustbin, there is little incentive to persuade new investors to part with £35 per year, especially as the club look set for another season at the wrong end of the table.

A site commenter makes the best point of all – that an operation like MyFootballClub, started on the Internet without a particular club in mind, was never going to create a common bond strong enough to keep people participating through the bad times:

If it had been a supporters’ trust that bought the club, then perhaps this could have all been avoided. By going from internet-concept first, and THEN casting about for a team after members had been brought onboard, the erosion of support has been swift but not unforeseeable–how is a “member” in California or Australia supposed to feel any sort of bond with this side? After clicking yes/no a few times, how likely would they be to stay engaged? In their world of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, surely the same denizens couldn’t be expected to focus on a mere non-league football team in little old England for too long.

Readers of this blog could be forgiven for believing that I’m on some sort of commission scheme for Debategraph and MixedInk.

Like the best ideas in this field, these two projects have focused their energy on getting the idea right and the initial project out of the door. That’s a long way of saying that they don’t have an affiliate-scheme and I’m not getting a penny from either of them.

Well, it seems that I’m not alone in rating MixedInk’s approach. The Whitehouse is giving it a try – using it to draft it’s open government standards.

If that isn’t an endorsement, I’ve no idea what is. In giving people a slightly competitive platform to collaboratively shape ideas, MixedInk ticks almost every box in terms of providing a positive way of including people in policy processes. Instead of a spEak You’re bRanes – type ‘race to the bottom’, it urges it’s participants to get stuck into the issues and add value to them in a realistic way.

Reboot Britain

We can learn things from the way they elect Popes – and the way they used to.

Chris Dillow reprises his ‘extremist not a fanatic’ theme – that it is rational not to care too much about politics – and that politics benefits from our indifference.

And finally ‘Reboot Britain’ will be worth keeping an eye on – it will have a significant strand covering democratic renewal.

I’m hoping that it will provide another run-out for the PICamp project that started very successfully in Belfast last month.

Albert Camus

Here’s a really good broadcast by Clive James on how liberal democracy works the transcript is here (and, while I don’t know how long this will be available under the BBC’s ‘Listen Again’ terms of use, if you subscribe to the podcast, you should be able to get all of the series).

It’s worth listening to all the way through, and particularly to consider Karl Popper’s notion of “changing the government at the peoples’ whim” - he says it like it’s a good thing, and when you think about it, it is less of a bad thing than all of the other options on offer.

James also quotes Albert Camus on Democracy:

“…the form of society devised and maintained by those who know that they don’t know everything.” Read the rest of this entry »