Local Democracy Notepad

Mark Pack has a very good post up on Lib-Dem Voice – advice for budding politicians: ‘30 things every would-be politician should do this summer‘ (he was inspired by a similar post for aspiring journalists elsewhere).

I really don't know if Niccolò would endorse this advice...

Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been working on that I’d like to offer – in beta – that are intended to help people who are already politicians adapt to the way that interactivity has changed the way that public life is conducted.

There are new possibilities, pitfalls and expectations that need to be met. Here are my ten (draft) ground rules for interactive public representation.

Some of them involve a fundamental rethinking of the standard advice that has been offered to young politicians through the ages:

Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Harris has forwarded this article about the role that councillors are obliged to adopt in relation to planning.

Nothing in it will come as a surprise to anyone familliar with the role of a modern councillor, but it’s a nice round up of an issue that will continue to perplex anyone with an interest in local representation. (Shorter version: that councillors have to adopt a jurist role on the question of planning. If it can be demonstrated that they have a predisposition on a particular planning matter, this can disqualify them from deliberating on it).

It reprises a few old posts here asking about whether councils are advocates or jurors. I’m not going to comment on this one in any great detail apart from to observe that councillors now have a potential to convene and conduct conversations quickly and spontaneously in a way that they never used to be. This is what social media can do best: It can allow anyone to invite everyone to dump their evidence in one place.

This ability (when the bulk of councillors become accustomed to having it) hints at yet another role for the councillor to adopt. Not juror or advocate, but as the curator of evidence and opinion on local matters. In offline terms, think of the way that detectives setup an evidence board in the incident room that we’ve all become familliar with in police procedural TV programmes.

Either way, it points to a role where councillors are expected to be more inclusive and conversational and less adversarial.

To illustrate this, I’ve been racking my memory for examples of where someone has used lots of different social media and bookmarking tools to simply gather all of the information on a particular subject in a neutral and even-handed way so that visitors can get a good overview prior to making a decision. I know there are lots of examples, but I just can’t think of one now (help me out, willya?)

Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well.

Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political clone. He looks like he’d fit blend in to the audience of a Slayer gig or a Biker Bar more than a sausage-on-a-stick reception at the civic centre. Even David Cameron has allowed himself to be photographed occassionally without a tie, but somehow I think that even this would be step too far for an ex-member of The Bullingdon Club…. Read the rest of this entry »

Power to the people!

The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator.

Because I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry. Read the rest of this entry »

Benchmarking: Missing the point

Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point:

Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers themselves, or those who are not already active participants in public engagement.  So the great ‘achievements’ of technology taskforces are celebrated in one thick and largely unread public report, and the new initiatives sparkle at their sauvignon-blanc launches, but thereafter are populated only by the usual suspects.

Instead of insisting in a specific set of standards, I rather wish government officials would make a habit of putting a spotlight on a new initiative every day. It might be tiring, but it would make more interesting reading than the avalanche of speeches, reports and criteria that usually pour out of these groups, and it would certainly make public engagement more attractive.

When I worked for politicians some years ago, I recall the dread that some of them had when they had to go and tour educational projects designed to get young people involved in the music industry. I’ll never forget the rictus grin of one well-known ex-minister being filmed listening to some banging choons at a FE College. Read the rest of this entry »

At the risk of loading expectations onto someone, it’s very good news to see that Bill McCluggage has been appointed as Deputy Government CIO in Cabinet Office.

I did some work with Bill over the last eighteen months in Northern Ireland where he was a very powerful advocate for getting local councillors and councils to take web-communications more seriously.

Northern Ireland is a particularly testing place for this to be tried. The politics of Our Occupied Six Counties / OUR wee province* are somewhat sclerotic, highly compromised as they are to ensure a continued functioning democracy of any kind as part of the peace-process.

The quality of local government is plainly very poor because even this hamstrung polity has resolved to reform it (there were 26 councils which are being consolidated into 11 by 2011).

Despite this, within one year, Bill helped me get over 40% of the 582 councillors to take their first steps online. Admittedly, this commitment was often a nominal, rather than active one, but prior to the launch of the project, you could count the councillors that had ever unlocked the ‘write’ potential of the web on the fingers of one hand.

A good few real local government stars have emerged in the process, and Bill has taken the (steadfast) resistance of some influential sections of the bureaucracy on the chin and not taken no for an answer.

That’s good news for those of us who want Whitehall to work a bit more effectively. London’s gain will be Belfast’s loss.

*Delete according to binary sectarian outlook