Local Democracy Notepad

Since I looked at the calculations from We Love Local Government on Councillors’ iPads the other day, I’ve had a few conversations with people working in democratic services at various local authorities.

Click pic for credit

It seems that the big worry is less that Councillor’s iPads will cost/save money or have any productivity/accountability gains, than that Councillors will spend council meetings futzing with their new toys instead of paying attention to procedings properly.

A few quick thoughts on this:

• Are we worried that tweeting councillors will be interacting with the public when they should be focussing only upon the views of other elected members? And aren’t the more savvy ones doing this already with their phones?
• Is there an upside to Councillors being able to do quick lookups and on-the-hoof research during council meetings? Will the quality of deliberation go up?
• Are there small-c constitutional issues here? An elected councillor has legitimacy that unelected interlopers don’t have. Should it be that the only evidence that could/should be considered at a council meeting should be tabled by – or through – an elected councillor? Do councillors have a quasi-jurist role (not a new suggestion around here)? Read the rest of this entry »

As a prelude to a bit of election-related fun research, I’m compiling a list of the different attributes that we expect to see combined under the bonnet of the perfect MP.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t expect any candidate to fit firmly into any of these categories – I’m going to be looking to see what different attributes we are expecting from them.

Once I’ve finalised the list, I’m going to do a ‘constant value’ survey on this blog – giving you all a fixed number of ‘tokens’ to spread around the different character-types. It would be interesting to see what voters want from their politicians – and I may repeat the exercise with local councillors at a later date.

Please note: This list / descriptions are rich in prejudice (mine). If you can come up with a better list, counter-proposals, better descriptions, etc, let me know in the comments?

Now, are there any that I’ve missed so far?

• The judge – a learned and experienced civic leader, hearing different arguments from constituents, weighing them and reaching a decision that everyone has to accept most of the time. Wouldn’t expect to take sides and would expect to refer constituents to the Citizens Advice Bureau: “It’s my job to make the laws – show me if they’re not fair and I’ll try to change them – but I’m not your social worker”
• The juror – an everyperson who has to be studiously fair-minded. A juror has  to be free of any personal interest in a case and should step aside if this is not the case. They expect evidence to be presented to them, then they then reach a decision based upon their own informal framework of fairness rather than a rigid and mechanistic application of the law. We don’t have high expectations of them as individuals, but in groups, we are reasonably confident of their ability to be wise and fair
• The people’s politician – sticking up for the silent majority – knows what people really think and will always stand up to the self-serving elites. Less interested in what metropolitan elites think and more in tune with the natural wisdom of the people who write to them. A good ear for popular discontent.
• The monk / nun – someone who is a (perhaps) improbable example of virtue to all of us. Hair-shirt types with a fairly inflexible and easy-to-understand morality. You can depend on them though….
• The entrepreneur - lively, adventurous, risk-taker. Careful – but not that careful. Good with figures and tight on spending. Creative and lateral-thinking, win-more-than-they-lose, expect hefty remuneration and like to be in charge.
• The entertainer – clever, witty, not over-ideological but a good conversationalist – likely to be generally even-handed and able to bring the best out in people. Trusted, mostly….
• Beacon of virtue – a successful high-profile individual who stands up against corruption rather than getting involved in ideological debates. Using their wealth and success in the public interest
• The includer – someone who goes out of their way to make sure that everyone has the chance to have their say – outgoing, open-minded and non-doctrinaire and terribly earnest
• The social worker – takes up cases of the less fortunate people who visit their surgeries. Lots of time spent on casework and letter-writing. Spends more time solving constituents problems than attending to high-flown matters of state up at Westminster.
• ‘Our scoundrel’ – on the logic that ‘if they don’t know how to look after themselves, they won’t be able to look out for us either’. This MP pulls the odd flanker to get a bigger budget for a local project and probably awards a few of the contracts to a few associates. But so what ? We got an a better MRI Scanner for our hospital than the jobsworth who represents the constituency up the road, didn’t we?
• Tub-thumper – not necessarily conventional views, but always worth listening to. Strong views – often controversial and provocative. Good at getting people talking and starting a debate. Fairly fixed in their views and hard to budge when they think they’re right
• Youth Club Manager – works long hours, keeps any eye out for the more vulnerable kids on the estate. Firm, fair and pragmatic. Probably  not a genius but not overly dogmatic either. This MP cares about others so that we don’t have to.
• Senior-serious-smart – a combination of the old-fashioned head teacher / bank manager /mandarin. A good chess /poker player. Knows how things are done and how to organise a department. Makes their own decisions because they know things that you don’t. Know that you don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
• The party activist knows that there is no ‘i’ in team and understands the need for consistency. Accepts collective decisions and sticks to them. Used to think that politics is about a clash of big ideas (and still does sometimes) but also knows it’s about striking a balance between principle and electability – after all, if you lose elections, all of your moral posturing is for the birds.
• The gamer – a problem solver. Very creative and lateral thinking. Doesn’t need paying much but a bit of social status would be nice. Takes lots of risks, fails a lot with serious consequences for all. But a good gamer can make a massive impact on a problem in the end by looking at things the way that others wouldn’t
• Think tank director – funny-shaped head and really irritating little square glasses. High level thinker, politically astute and business-savvy. Knows what works and is able to sell ideas. Knows how to create strategic paths to bring make gamechanging policies work.
• Community activist- someone who knows how to get things done at a street level. A bit nimby-ish but very keen on the local environment. Nose-in-everything, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer, personal-hygiene-not-a-priority, writing-a-bloody-letter-to-The Guardian, member of Greenpeace, heart-in-the-right-place-though and we’re glad there are a few like them around…
• Community warden – someone who goes around making sure that bureaucrats do their job. Finding examples of things that should be done but aren’t. This MP makes sure everyone knows their entitlements and responsibilities and a gallery of these can be seen on Glum Councillors.

If you click around the categories and tags (below) you’ll find more articles on this general subject ….. (it’s not a new one here)

Ewan McIntosh has picked another example of augmented reality up:

I was searching reliable online shop for my delicate purchase and here it is! Purchase cialis. If you get a new prescription and need it filled that day, you can walk into a pharmacy and get it taken care of.

“Point your mobile phone at the person speaking at the lectern, the cute person in the bar or that potential recruit and see, hovering around their head, all their social networks, tastes in music and books, and dodgy photos from last night.”

The potential is quite interesting, but it’s also a bit scary. In a post here a while ago, I asked what the upsides and downsides were of forcing politicians to be ostentatious in their displays of personal virtue and openness. But former BBC Newsnight Editor Brian Walker seems to be going a good bit further in raising demands for personal transparency in this post quoting Mo Mowlem’s cancer specialist Mark Glazer over at Slugger O’Toole.

Shorter version: Mo Mowlem had a frontal lobe tumour – a condition that “can cause disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement” at a time in which she played a critical role in fostering the negotiation of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement. This was almost a wartime posting and any errors of judgement could have had serious consequences.

So, disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement then? Sounds familliar:

If you want to argue for mental health tests, then maybe you have to also demand a daily breathalyser? Churchill was thought to have rarely been sober beyond lunchtime during the war and we seemed to do alright in that one, didn’t we?

Senior corporate roles within PLCs have made both physical and mental health a pre-requisite. It’s not just footballers that have to have a medical as part of their job-interview any more. When a friend of mine sought a board-level post on one of the UK’s larger PLCs, I was astonished at the degree of intrusion that she had to agree to -it was not just the bog-standard psychometric testing either. One thing made this process manageable though: She was well advised not to tell anyone in her professional circle that she was applying for the job in the first place – something that she had no problem doing.

If it was public knowledge that she’d gone for the job, and she didn’t get it, then her mental health would have been a matter of public speculation.

Applying this kind of corporate risk-aversion to representative government adds a new layer of bureaucracy that politicians have to be responsible to – one that competes with their primary responsibility to those who elect them.

This isn’t entirely a one way street though, as the Guardian article that Brian points to notes:

“As time has worn on, Glaser has begun to feel that her illness may, oddly, have been a reason for the success of the peace talks, rather than a cause of instability that threatened them. “She was racing against time,” he says.”

Surely this is another argument for distributed authority in which decisions are taken in a collegiate way by a diverse group of individuals rather than they are made currently? And is this insistence upon individual public virtues actually a symptom of a decline in the quality of our democracy?

Perhaps a group of individual drunks, lunatics and hypocrites making collegiate decisions would make produce better policies than a group of buttoned up risk-averse purveyors of public cant with strong individual powers? And, as Brendan O’Neill argued a while ago, isn’t politics and democracy supposed to be about a clash of ideas and principles rather than a game of personal one-upmanship?

Just a quick signpost to this post on the ReadWriteWeb blog about. I think that this observation has implications for the nature of representation – and even for leadership.

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“Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a permanent public record of what you do or say?” Hsieh argues that Twitter adds a public broadcast element that reminds him to be more positive, thankful and empathetic. He writes that those same values trickle down to the corporate culture of Zappos.”

And political representatives really do need a bit of that positivity at the moment. It does beg the question: Does the use of these interactive tools – always staying in the peripheral vision of friends, journalists, colleagues, rivals, constituents and peers – make us more empathetic or attractive? And if so, is it possible that these tools could be the saviour – rather than the undertaker – of representative democracy?

The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’.

It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, we can have referendums about everything all the time!) captures the mood and raises the question of how some of it ever slips by an editor in the first place.

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But there’s also one that is well worth a look: The idea of publishing all laws in beta format. For those of you who aren’t techie-inclined, this means that laws could be released in the way that software is. Most software – in it’s early versions – isn’t actually that good. It’s often released cheaply or free of charge and feedback loops are established and monitored carefully. The best software often starts off clunky and full of holes. Perhaps good laws could follow a similar trajectory?

There is another post about the need to encourage failure – again taking the paradigm of technical innovation and applying it to civil society.

I mention these because they represent potentially innovative approaches. But they would also involve a huge reassessment of politicians. It would require a more consultative personality and a recasting of the notion of ‘leadership’. It would need the lust for certainty to be understood as a sin again. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim McGarry at the Slugger Awards

Tonight in Belfast, we’re running the second in what I hope will become the annual ‘Slugger Awards‘.

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These awards – previewed here on the Amnesty blog – are something of a departure for political weblogs. It would be fair to say that politicians are – for the most part – less than thrilled by the way that blogs have transformed politics.

The Slugger Awards are something of an attempt to redress the balance. Slugger is unusually visible in Northern Ireland’s politics. It has over 34,000 unique visitors per month and Stratagem/ComRes polling shows that 96% of NI Assembly Members read it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Peter Levine on the study of deliberation:

“The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. Again, that could be because they don’t reject deliberation in principle but dislike the official debates that they hear about or watch on TV. People who held those skeptical views were especially impressed by an offer from their real US Representative to deliberate. Individuals were also more likely to accept the offer to deliberate if they were young and if they had low education.

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Further, if they showed up to deliberate, their opinions of the experience were very positive. According to the paper, “95% Agreed (72% Strongly Agreed) that such sessions are ‘very valuable to our democracy’ and 96% Agreed (80% Strongly Agreed) that they would be interested in doing similar online sessions for other issues.” These results are consistent with almost all practical deliberative experiments.”

Very boringly, I’d like to cut-and-paste Burke’s speech to the Electors of Bristol yet again (sorry to be repetitive). I’m underlining the bit that I think that everyone focusses upon and emboldening the bit that I think is often ignored.

“…it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.”

Peter’s conclusions are very positive. But isn’t that line – “….dislike the official debates that they hear about or watch on TV…” – it does suggest that politics – and the way that the media report and portray political discourse – is getting in the way of democracy. We seem to have allowed the media to take sole responsibility for a task to which they are very clearly unsuited.

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?)

Councillor Stamp. Our August pin-up.

As the silly season draws to a close (it is Friday as well), those nice people over at the internet have brought the ultimate in municipal-porn-meets-pavement-politics: the Glum Councillors.

For some time, I’ve thought that the LGA could prove it’s worth to the nation by doing a Calender Girls type fundraising exercise for charity featuring photos of some of our most nationally recognised and charismatic councillors – pictured as God intended.

The one problem is this; what is ‘the classic councillor pose’? Glum Councillors may have finally answered this question for us.

If you see any more of these, the site urges you to tweet them to @glumcouncillors

(Hat tip to Ivan for this one).

Chewing over Parliamentary reforms, here’s Jenni Russell from the Guardian last week:

“One experienced Commons civil servant is blisteringly critical of the way in which most MPs have accepted the culture in which they now operate. While some committees and chairs are excellent, many MPs can’t be bothered. “They’re just not interested in the core tasks of parliament, scrutinising legislation or working in committee. It’s too much hard work – they’d rather be social workers for constituents. …… They don’t spend three hours in the House of Commons library reading bills or papers themselves; they wait for Greenpeace or Liberty or a lobby group to tell them what to think. That whole culture of thinking, challenging, debating – that’s what’s been discouraged. Because, for them personally, what’s the point?”"

There are a number of conclusions one can draw from this, some of which could be justifiably homicidal. Other trades have a set of professional ethics that would, for instance, preclude them from relying upon lobbyists for information, or coming up with a transparent means by which they conduct their research. Read the rest of this entry »