Local Democracy Notepad

I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.

I was searching reliable online shop for my delicate purchase and here it is! Buy cialis online! There are a lot of legitimate mail-order pharmacies in this country.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends). Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve spent a lot of time recently banging on about visual representations of policy issues, this post on the GOOD website is something of a feast.

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It’s Christmas. That means that you have to indulge bloggers in their little obsessions.

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Mine is an interest in the way that data can be presented in a way that changes our perception of an issue and clarifies a problem.

This one, for instance from Good Magazine:

You can zoom around and explore it here. (Via Information is Beautiful)

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 »

In preparing for a session at PICamp / Reboot Britain on Policymaking in the future, my friend Logan Wilmot (who I’m attempting to persuade to speak) sent me these YouTubes – examples of how the scale of change can be rammed home to an audience that may not be able to conceptualise what is being talked about.

I don’t know about you, but there were things in there that have changed the way I look at some questions. The ‘exponential world’ one is particularly interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

Any clues welcome about that table.... (pic: Flickr - click for attribution).

One of the nice things about the dynamic way that the internet arranges things is that you sometimes stumble upon artifacts that you don’t understand, but that look fascinating.

This Icelandic blog, for instance, is a complete mystery to me. I found it years ago and visit it once every few months. I’ve no idea what the blogger is saying, but the slightly freaky love of photoshopping is always a laugh.

Call me a democracy-geek, but I find the whole process of balloting is fascinating, and different ballot forms from different countries repay hours of study. On the right hand side of this blog,  I aggregate democracy-related images, where this image (left) came from.

Look closely. The ‘Left Front’ have a party symbol that looks like a fairly ornate 18th Century table. What’s that all about? Wikipedia is silent on the matter at the moment.

Are there any Sri Lankan experts out there that know why this is?

Ink on the finger = an X on a ballot (Pic: Tracy Hunter on Flickr)

Over the next month or so, the worlds biggest democracy will go to the polls. That’s over 700 million voters. 

Here are some photos over on Flickr: Promoting positivity about democracy in Hyderabad. I love the pride with which some of the photographers annotate their pictures – a satisfaction in participation.

Note the marks on the photographer’s finger showing that he had voted.