Archive for the ‘Conversational localities’ Category
Moderation, civility, and bipartisanship
Here’s US blogger Peter Levine on the various qualities that we can apply to political discourse:
“I would tend to favor viagra prescription online stronger, bolder policies. I think our actual policies are weak rather than moderate. I welcome a robust debate but I would recommend conducting that debate with basic
rules of civility even if one’s opponents fail to be civil in return.”
The penny drops at last!
It may have happened fifteen years later than it viagra lowest prices needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.
Click for pic credit
That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.
Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.
It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*. Read the rest of this entry »
Frank exchange is better than pussyfooting
The Political Innovation project I’m currently working on (more soon!) is going to be very focussed upon the political aspects of interactivity – with the premise that more, freer, better exchanges of evidence and opinion are a public good – and that not enough is being done politically to facilitate these.
Via Norm, who offers a good summary – here’s Michael Sandel on ‘The Lost Art of Democratic Debate’, making the case against pussyfooting around difficult moral issues. Do watch it all if you can – it
runs to 20 minutes, so maybe put the kettle on first?
Creating informed communities
Apologies for the very obtain viagra without prescription light posting here in recent weeks. When you blog about politics and elections a lot, you probably have the excuse that you are doing rather than blogging during elections, and this is true of some of our contributors. In my case, a tide of work that was only indirectly related to the election hit me about five weeks ago and I’ve been drowning in it ever since.
We have a plan to crank viagra tablets up the volume here, and you’ll hear more about it shortly. But filling our recent silence has been an unprecedented volume of quite excellent blogging on the subject of the election and the constitutional issues that arose from the inconclusive (by UK standards) election result. The 2010 Election Blog has been very good, and I hope the continue it – if they’re looking for a longer-term home for it, modesty forbids me from mentioning the perfect blog for them to do this on.
On the longer finger, Peter Levine has offered this collection of posts that I’m linking to in the right order with his subheadings.
- Creating informed communities (part one)
- Strategy 1: A Civic Information Corps: Using the nation’s “service” infrastructure to generate knowledge
- Creating informed communities (part two)
- Strategy 2: Universities as Community Information Hubs
- Creating informed communities (part three)
- Strategy 3: Invest in Face-to-Face Public Deliberation
- Creating informed communities (part four)
- Strategy 4: Generate Public “Relational” Knowledge
- Creating informed communities (part five)
- Strategy 5: Organize People to Defend the Knowledge Commons
Stay tuned. We’ll be back to our usual posting-rate shortly.
Civic engagement during recessions
Strictly speaking, this post of Peter Levine‘s is more about volunteering than participation in policy making, but it’s worth a look.
“My best guess is that modern civic engagement depends on a funded infrastructure. You can’t tutor kids if the school lays off its literacy coordinator. You can’t read to kids if the library branch is closed. Thus, when the economy really gets bad, even though the need for engagement is high, opportunities suddenly dry up and civic health falls.”
On a tangential note, here’s a post on Boing Boing about Philadelphia’s libraries. Or lack of them (Via Bill Thompson).
“Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker’s bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region’s connection with human culture and knowledge and community.
Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.”
Open minds – the councillor-curator?
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?)
Breaking the monopoly that civil servants have in describing government
Charlie Beckett has yet another good post up – this time, over at OpenDemocracy.
The point of Networked Journalism is that the citizen as an individual and as part of these organisations is now part of the production of news communications. The relationships offered by networked journalism offer the potential for increasing trust in that news communications. By extension it could go some way to restore greater faith in political communications, too, and thus even in politics itself.
If people can participate in something at all parts of the process, then they are more likely to take a responsible and considered stake. If networked communications can offer greater openness, transparency, relevance and control for the citizen then they will be more likely to engage with the substance of the content. They will also be more prepared to support and even invest in that process.
It reminds me of that Norwegian construct on e-democracy that I saw last year (the link has moved so this one will have to do: Public sector information provided by ordinary citizens and the original document is linked to here).
Certainly, the idea of breaking the monopoly that bureaucracies have over the provision of public sector information. The reason that the Slugger O’Toole website is so interesting is that it fosters a mostly well-mannered and constructive conversation about public life in Nothern Ireland. Generally, if you need to elicit any facts about Northern Ireland, you can ask for them in a comments-thread and get them more quickly than any FoI request.
A step in the right direction by local government information providers.
The idea of spinning that off into a wiki called ‘About Northern Ireland’s government’ is an interesting one – I suspect that it would be a better use of public money than actually building the websites themselves and paying civil servants to generate the content. Moving from where we are now to a situation where that could happen is, however, no small feat – but I think that the way that the Birmingham News Room is encouraging and resourcing citizen journalists to write about local issues is a major leap in the right direction.
Football phone-ins v consultation exercises
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 »
Six minutes a month…
Facebook: Stealing our money!!?!??!
Because the average member of staff who has access to a PC is spending six minutes a month on Facebook, Portsmouth City Council have decided to ban access to it.
Predicatably, this has been welcomed by The Taxpayers Alliance:
The Taxpayers’ Alliance said the move would stop the “waste of public cash”.
Mark Wallace, from the group, added: “It is sad that it has reached a point where councils need to ban staff from Facebook.
“But people are employed to work hard for the taxpayer and this is clearly a waste of public money.”
Interestingly, the six-minutes-per-month-on-average figure is further qualified:
The council stressed it was unable to determine whether staff had been accessing Facebook in break times or before or after work, which had been allowed.
No mention of any positive benefit from the use of social networking then? If any organisation if ripe for The Interactive Charter, it’s Portsmouth City Council.
A new easy-to-use set of guidelines for dealing with the Taxpayers Alliance has been created for journalists here.
Local newspapers v council newspapers redux
The Western People - do local newspapers in Ireland illustrate the problems with English local newspapers?
My recent sojourn in the west of Ireland has made me look at this whole newspapers v councils issue in a new light.
Roy Greenslade, it seems to me, is thinking inside a very English box. On the Guardian blog, he accuses Darlington councillor Nick Wallis of disingenuity in his dealings with a local journalist when he says (of the fact that his local authority is publishing it’s own newspaper):
“I’m guessing this hurts the local newspaper industry at a time when advertising revenue is at a premium.”
Greenslade goes on:
But Wallis has the gall to add that “local councils can’t win” because “they’re damned if they have a council magazine with significant costs to the taxpayer, and damned if they try to offset those costs with advertising revenue.”
That misses the point by a mile. Councils are not damned for not publishing at all. Council taxpayers across the country are not demanding that their councils produce mini-Pravdas. They know it’s propaganda and treat it as such.
What those residents don’t realise is that their local newspapers are losing revenue and facing closure because their councils can’t stand proper independent scrutiny.
Barron, one of Britain’s most respected regional editors, runs as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.
I’d suggest that it is Greenslade who is missing an important point here. His loyalty to his own profession is touching, and there is no question that Britain’s journalists aspire to subject local authorities to “proper independent scrutiny”, but the people that own the newspapers (and it is they who count here) simply don’t share this conviction. Mr Greenslade will be familliar enough with books by Nick Davies and John Lloyd to understand this churnalism point, and it’s disingenuous of him to ignore it here.
The last few words in that quote, above, leap out: “…as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.”
Media owners have not, for some time, shown much concern for the quality of their local reporting. The problem, I would suggest, is in the market failure that has impacted upon local newspapers. It runs something like this:
- Local printed media – with it’s high entry costs and strong economies of scale – tends towards monopolies that secure their position by driving down prices
- This results in a market failure whereby the need to secure a monopoly drives out local players who would compete on quality as well as price
In the UK, we have a handful of media groups that offer a fairly low-level of editorial service, selling newspapers cheaply and handing the profits that accrue from their economies of scale over to their shareholders. Our problem is that we have consolidated mega-groups of local newspapers.
It also isn’t the business of a local councillor to ensure that every single industry exists in an ecology that ensures that it will survive – particularly when they have many of the characteristics of a monopoly. Read the rest of this entry »