Local Democracy Notepad

If you’re not following this one (do keep up!) the latest buzz among people with funny-shaped heads is Augmented Reality. This is where you use a technology application to tell you more about the locality you are in than your eyes can work out. There are, of course, opportunities for local authorities to ensure that more people know more things about their localities.

Charlie Brooker has an entertaining piece on it here today:

“By 2013, it’ll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.”

More on this – especially what it means for adding data about the people you meet –  later perhaps?

Tell councillors what RSS means, willya?

Apologies for the light posting here lately – even bloggers go on holiday, y’know?

I’ve not collected my thoughts for any original posts yet, though the ‘Duty to Promote Democracy’ and the obligation to offer petitions will be on the statute book shortly providing plenty of new material in the coming weeks.

For now, Dave Briggs has an interesting guest post up – ‘Ten Top Internet Tips for Councillors‘ – written by Mark Pack.

I’d argue that there is a real cultural problem around the way that local authorities manage their relationship with councillors. Councils could offer leadership to their councillors – saying that they believe that they have a duty to encourage councillors to be more effective people. In my experience, this approach is the exception rather than the norm, with too much handwringing about providing ‘political’ support to councillors.

In the absence of such support, if I were offering a short course to councillors, I’d start with those lovely Commoncraft videos. As Mark Pack says in that post on Dave’s blog, feed readers are very useful productivity tools.

But my hottest tip to councillors would be to challenge the attitude that local authorities adopt towards councillor development. One argument that I found to be briefly successful ran like this:

q: But surely, if we use council resources to help councillors become more effective communicators using the internet, we’d be giving the incumbent an advantage, damaging democracy, and breaking all sorts of local government codes of conduct?

a: Do you really think that you are providing every one of your councillors an advantage by giving them greater exposure to the voters? Would greater exposure to voters result in more councillors retaining their seats at election time? Or less?

I’d argue that this invisibility of individual councillors actually contributes to the way that political parties dominate local politics at the expense of strong individual representatives.

Promoting a use of social media at a local authority-wide level could be a good laugh – something that councillors would enjoy. I wonder if Commoncraft could come up with a video that would show councils how to do that?

I’ve been out and about again this week and speaking to Council’s about their social web strategies. Its interesting (to me at least!) to note a couple of the ideas which seem to have the greatest resonance as it would be good to know if these are themes which are emerging anywhere else:

• Government should not be building social networking platforms when this is already done so successfully – no-one wants to be friends with a council and trying to recreate FaceBook is an expensive waste of time as councils try to act corporately in a space which is designed for individuals
• Council years are slower than internet years – which are faster than normal time. To accommodate these differential you need to build a permanent online civic space which will outlast the next big fad
• You need to find ways to connect to people in the wider social web and invite them to the civic space – you can’t expect them to move their conversations there and you can’t expect them to turn up spontaneously
• You need to focus around the citizen is the same way as transactional service are focused around the customer in the one stop shop

Anyway – this is starting to sound like a manifesto but would like to know what you think. Am I stating the obvious or barking up the wrong tree?

PS  Once again I tried to think of a picture to go with this – but I just can’t – sorry to those of you that like something to liven things up – next time I can always add one of the dog if I get stuck I promise!

Does the sceptical journalist solve the problems that we thought they did?

As local newspapers retreat from providing anything like a good quality of news coverage, local authorities are wondering what their response should be.

On the one hand, there’s the model that Birmingham City Council have taken – providing a much more user-friendly information gateway that is designed to provide resources to citizen-journalists and bloggers.

Other options include beefing up the council’s information department with a view to turning the fairly skimpy info circulars into fully-fledged newspapers or being more in tune with hyperlocal sites of the kind that Will Perrin is promoting at the moment.

It’s a question that raises a number of important philosophical questions about the role of the state and the bureaucracy in providing information about itself. Stripping bureaucracies of the monopoly position that they have in describing their own services is a potentially game-changing idea that could, in some ways, redefine the state as we know it.

But what about the idea of ‘public service journalism’? The Press Association have a slightly opportunistic proposal to position themselves as the hub for ‘public service journalism’ – as far as I can see, the BBC do it with an efficiency that other media players can only dream of. Read the rest of this entry »

Ross Ferguson’s blog with it’s bold new eye-catching design has a post with the sort of data that I suspect will form the basis of a good many plagarists’ powerpoint presentations over the coming months.

Here’s my standout stat:

“38% of professionals believe the internet makes them more productive (OxIS 2009)”

I don’t know how the rest of the options break down, but one of the big challenges for The Interactive Charter is to make the case that interactive tools aid productivity. For me, it’s almost an article of faith, though I would also say that there seems to currently be a daily increase in amount of time I spend waiting for my various applications, operating system, virus definitions, etc to upgrade.

As a freelancer, I have clients that insist that I run some Microsoft applications that will only run on an MS operating system.

I’m beginning to wonder if those clients are worth keeping….

(Only kidding guys…love you really….)