Local Democracy Notepad

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 »

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.

The Rt Hon. David Laws MP. Click pic for credit

There was an interesting review of a study around politically connected firms on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed programme recently asking how far different countries find their governance effected by the relationships politicians have with previous (or current!) employers.

The early coalition-casualty, David Laws – for example – is a former Vice President osd Morgan and Alan Duncan used to work for Royal Dutch Shell.

The programme quotes a recent article from Mara Faccio, a US-based Italian economist whose work on politically-connected firms (lots of links from her homepage here) is, in part, er…. inspired … by a desire to understand Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian state.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a direct correlation between press freedom and low levels of corruption. In the UK, 150 firms have connections to MPs – the highest level of interpenetration anywhere in the world. It’s quite a surprising statistic initially, but in the UK, politicians are offered opportunities to join boards rather than the other way around – where businesses put their people into politics (the strong contrast with Italy). As a result, the benefits to the firms were, according to Faccio, negligible.

It does put all of the recent expenses scandal into perspective though, doesn’t it?

Listen to the whole thing though if you can?

Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved where to buy viagra pills authority.

The TPA: Corporate shills?

A great deal of our time as bloggers is thus spent exposing the same old partisan front groups – the left are interested in the TaxPayer’s Alliance, – corporate shills, and organisations that exist purely and simply for the promotion of a particular set of views. Right-wing bloggers hunted down a significant scalp last year, taking out the earlier incarnation of Labour List – a site that appeared to simply be a political attack dog, and one that wasn’t embedded in the better instincts of the blogsophere.

While individuals can always change their mind on an issue, interest groups cannot, and will not. Moreover, their neatly packaged set of proposals can be tempting for governments running short of ideas, and short of friends. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Levine says…

“Although I acknowledge the value of expertise, we can identify several important general reasons why it is never enough and we always need citizens’ participation to tackle social problems.”

What follows is a list of three reasons why experts shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions on their own. It’s one of the best posts I’ve read on the subject, and rather than spoil it, I’ll urge you to read it all. However, there’s one issue that I’d have near the top of any such list that is missing (to be fair, the post is called Part One, so maybe Part Two is devoted to the question I’m about to raise). It’s this:

• Experts explain awkward issues satisfactorily to other experts. Their explanations are less useful to the lay-person
• Sometimes the public are given a glimpse of the experts’ explanation. More often, they see it through the dysfunctional prism of newspaper journalism
• Politicians – usually generalists -  then have to field an unsatisfactory briefing in the context of a bloody awful report in a newspaper – one that has been seized upon and further distorted by a pressure group of some kind.
• The politician then has to take the consequences of not taking the decision that the newspaper / pressure group prefers. If s/he does this successfully, they may only be substituting a very bad policy with a quite bad one (i.e. one based upon a partial understanding of the expert’s brief)
• And whatever happens, s/he has to bear any consequences of the policy’s failure

However, if more people are able to get at the expert’s advice, mash it around into something that proves to be a more accessible explanation (something that enables to politician to understand what the expert was really saying), then a more participative polity has improved an outcome. It can help to break the hold that newspapers and pressure groups have in describing problems, and this can only be a good thing, surely?

As an aside, Chris Dillow is often very good at dismissing experts in his own inimitable fashion.

Update: Before posting this, I saw that Peter has published part two of his critique of expertise. And he’s interviewed here on blogtalk radio.

Further to my previous post on why visualisation of data matters – and what the potential abuses are in the hands of pressure groups.

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I’ve just seen this video by an American pollster and data visualiser @alexlundry – he covers the deceptive use of visualisations and the way that lobbies use them.

He covers the reasons why this is a much more powerful way of presenting information.

He also covers …. oh, just watch the whole thing. It’s only a coupla minutes and it’s very good.

(via Tom, Tom and Russell).

I draw one hefty conclusion from it. We need to find a way to increase public awareness of how this data can be abused, manipulated and misrepresented using the devices that Alex has outlined here. This is an important bit of civil literacy that could counteract many of the threats that I outlined in my previous post here.

Perhaps a Tumblr-type website where any mashups that anyone sees are submitted, then people who know about it (or are prepared to read a few of the books in this presentation) give the mashup points based upon the provenance and honesty of the data and it’s use?

If only all decisions were made by jurors, right....? (Click image for credit)

Like a minority of people who have watched what will surely be 2009′s official leitmotif - the demand for full disclosure from MPs – play out,  I’ve wondered when similar demands will be applied to those who rival MPs for power.

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This phrase of Larry Elliot’s – explaining the roots of the current economic crisis – underline the problem here:

“But there is a motley band of discontents for whom business as usual, in whatever form, means that another crisis will erupt before too long. They argue that the exiguous nature of current reform proposals is explained by the institutional capture of governments by the investment banks, the world’s most powerful lobbying groups.”

Certainly, politicians have been teed up so that they can be whacked squarely whenever they get ideas above their station. Right now, it would be hard to make the case that MPs are the right people to take on Tom Wolfe’s over-powerful Masters of the Universe.

In the same way that the Ross-Brand affair was used to tee the BBC up by politicians who don’t wish the corporation well, there’s an argument that demands for transparency rarely come from an organisation’s friends.

Much of this has been led squarely from the political right. The Taxpayers Alliance and a range of right-wing anti-BBC bloggers have worked in tandem with media owners that have been frustrated with what they see as the BBC’s anti-competitive influence on the media landscape. Certainly, at this moment, the libertarian right is the key mover behind the UK’s anti-politics campaigns on MPs expenses for reasons that have more to do with a pro-direct democracy position than more short term party political advantages. The current scandal has, after all, hurt the Conservative Party as well as Labour.

It’s hard to seperate this question from the differing political attitudes to the decline of newpapers. In no less a place than The Washington Post, we see this:

“For the first time in American history, we are nearing a point where we will no longer have more than minimal resources (relative to the nation’s size) dedicated to reporting the news. The prospect that this “information age” could be characterized by unchecked spin and propaganda, where the best-financed voice almost always wins, and cynicism, ignorance and demoralization reach pandemic levels, is real. So, too, is the threat to the American experiment.”

From the left, there appears to be an emerging response. The first is to harass the newspapers, those who use the libel laws to suppress inconvenient truths and other pedlars of perverted science. Jan Moir, Trafigura, and the British Chiropractic Association have all felt the sharp end of this kind of crowdsourced hostility in recent months. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University questioning the benefits of government transparency:

“There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it.”

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The whole thing is worth a look though.

An old gentleman writes....

Apparently 13.1% of FoI requests to ‘Departments of State’ are now made through MySociety’s ‘What do they know?’ website. How on earth did they find out such a statistic I wonder?

Meanwhile, as it’s Friday, it’s time to enjoy how FoI requests are, occasionally, handled in the US. From the Martin Rosenbaum on the BBC FoI blog:

“You’re a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn’t know you and believe that you’re more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don’t bother.”

As Martin points out, the Information Commissioner would have something to say about this response if it was supplied in the UK. I’m not a great advocate of copying US custom and practice in all things, but it should be entirely up to elected politicians how they respond to requests like this, surely?

Following the Daily Mail’s crusade against council employees using Facebook, Sunny, here, (in the comments) thinks it’s time for everyone to write to their local authority to find out how long council employees are spending on the Daily Mail website.

This is what FoI requests are for, isn’t it?

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