The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator.
Because I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry. Continue reading →
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It’s very hard to disagree with anything in this post:- the whole thing deserves a visit though:
“For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on…”
And this cartoon underlines Kevin Harris’s point about how online interactivity is no substitute for interactivity.
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“….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly “people who looked at this mostly ended up buying that”. Furthermore, every time you log into Amazon it looks at the complete history of everything you’ve bought and suggests totally new books, songs or other items that it has calculated you might like. This is a totally new way of solving the information problem of finding a good song to listen to.
Parliament, and indeed our wider democracy, is full of interesting information problems, all of them untransformed by Amazon-like ingenuity. How do we know that MPs and officials are acting in our interests, rather than other people’s? How do we know they’ve made their decisions based on good evidence? How do we know what issues are coming along next that need dealing with? How do we know what other people are doing to try and influence the political process? How do the sentiments of large numbers of people get fairly and transparently transformed into new laws? How do we even make sure that people know what the proposed laws say in the first place?”
It’s an attractive vision – opening up parliament and applying the experiences of usability experts to make it more intuitive. If you’ve not seen a usability lab in action, this advert gives you an indication of how it works:
Local civility on trial (from Ictsan's Flickr page)
Kevin Harris has blogged about his planned contribution to the Reboot Britain ‘PICamp’ session – over here.
Here’s a flavour:
To my mind, it doesn’t work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished.
So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.
I think that this is really spot-on. It’s a re-run of so many arguments that have cropped up as the internet has burgeoned into different parts of our lives. For instance…
The internet will not fix your broken processes /putting your processes online will foreground some of the weaknesses and help you to improve them
If you’re not an interactive organisation, a new website will not change that / developing a website may unlock some undiscovered interactive talent in your organisation
… and so on (I’m sure you have your own version of this)
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“Councils triumph at MJ awards” blares the headline in this weeks Municipal Journal, which is hardly surprising since only councils are allowed to enter.
Hammersmith & Fulham’s Conservative administration came out top as political team of the year (Waltham Forest were runners-up) and Ealing won best achieving council. It’s notable that there aren’t any awards for engagement, participation, or democracy promotion. Maybe next year…
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The Birmingham News Room – a well-executed information hub managed by Birmingham City Council has been launched and there’s a good write-up from Nick Booth over at Podnosh.
I don’t have much to add to his account of it, and I’d urge to to have a good look around and think about the idea., but the execution is very good.
From a personal point of view, it’s also very timely as I’ll be organising a session at the PICamp strand of Reboot Britain on …
Hyperlocality, active citizenship and disintermediated local newspapers
As local news titles close and community-run websites step into the gap, there is a new way for local government to converse with the public at a grass-roots level? Are community-run websites up to the job? How do these sites help the collective addressing of neighbourhood problems? Do online neighbourhood communities create new excluded groups? Do they improve or diminish democracy?
Introduced by: Kevin Harris, Nick Booth, William Perrin, Edward Walsh (Head of Press, LGA) 12.30-1.30pm, The Faraday Room (capacity – 70) Continue reading →
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If you haven’t seen Socrata yet, it’s really worth a look – it illustrates the quality of data that could be made available to us in the UK.
It shows that – once we get beyond the classic journalistic question of “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – once the data is in the public domain – that this information can be used to model the big questions of our time – turned into interfaces that allow us to explore and model problems.
Take the data, add crowdsourced intelligence, and you may end up with a much better description of the problems that policymakers face.
It also shows why the Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data‘ campaign is so important.
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A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? Picture Credits.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
