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). Continue reading →
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It’s Friday. And it’s nearly hometime. Let’s just pop over to the Glum Councillors tumblr site to see if there’s anything to look at?
Cllr Doherty is a bit glum
Well, there’s Cllr Doherty (pictured):
“If this corner doesn’t qualify as a dangerous bend, I don’t know what does,” said Cllr Doherty standing at the corner … in the road … with his back to the oncoming traffic.
You’ve probably seen the MyDavidCameron site? Whatever you think to the politics of taking the tiddle out of the Tory leader, I like the quality of the site. They’ve not allowed themselves to be overwhelmed with tedious pointscoring and there are quite a few gentle (or even absurd) little digs.
I’m not quite sure why, but I firmly believe that if politicians were gently teased a lot more, the country would be all the better for it. Continue reading →
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I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.
As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic debates, there is no shortage of name-calling and point-scoring. But if you ask the readers to look at things from a strategic point of view, you may find out something that you didn’t know in the first place.
Mick is no mean political analyst himself, and nor are his regular contributors. But by inviting commenters to look at thing objectively – to spell out what they see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that the DUP face, commenters from all sides of the spectrum could at least agree on where the DUP stand on the political chessboard.
It provides a useful tool in any materialist analysis of ‘what will happen next’ because, for all that some politics is, as Harold Wilson put it, “a crusade or it is nothing”, the last few weeks in Northern Ireland have shown that political parties rarely do anything unless it allows them to make the best of whatever strategic hole they are in.
So, having attracted lots of comments over the course of one day, deleted the ones that sought to introduce pointless whataboutery and pointscoring, Mick was left with a couple of dozen nuggets of information.
Next step? Let’s visualise them – put them in a fun-to-fiddle-with application like Prezi: (be patient – it takes a while to load…..)
Shortly, it will be published on Sluger and the readers will be asked whether we’ve got the sizes of those particular strengths / weaknesses / opportunities / threats right. The presentation will be tweaked accordingly and outcome will be useful in future – if for nothing else apart from settling arguments.
The other parties will be getting their SWOT done for them over the next few weeks.
(Thanks for Tim Davies for introducing me to Prezi – it’s a bit clunky but worthwhile in the end).
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Dave Briggs surpassed himself on Saturday convening a terrific event in Birmingham. I’m hoping to pick up a number of issues that came up in different posts here, but I’d like to start with the session that I helped lead on. I don’t want to detail or argue any of the issues that came up in this post (time enough for that / the archives here touch on a lot of the arguments anyway), but it pulled together what are, I think, four of the most interesting questions:
The one I posed was the old chestnut here:
“Nosey do-gooding interfering unelected self-important fanatical busybodies and how social media loves them.”
This was a flame-baiting conversation starter to smoke out what I’d see as the ‘direct democracy’ problem. Will Perrin responded with an outline of his own local media project along with a profile of a few others:
“Although I acknowledge the value of expertise, we can identify several important general reasons why it is never enough and we always need citizens’ participation to tackle social problems.”
What follows is a list of three reasons why experts shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions on their own. It’s one of the best posts I’ve read on the subject, and rather than spoil it, I’ll urge you to read it all. However, there’s one issue that I’d have near the top of any such list that is missing (to be fair, the post is called Part One, so maybe Part Two is devoted to the question I’m about to raise). It’s this:
Experts explain awkward issues satisfactorily to other experts. Their explanations are less useful to the lay-person
Sometimes the public are given a glimpse of the experts’ explanation. More often, they see it through the dysfunctional prism of newspaper journalism
Politicians – usually generalists - then have to field an unsatisfactory briefing in the context of a bloody awful report in a newspaper – one that has been seized upon and further distorted by a pressure group of some kind.
The politician then has to take the consequences of not taking the decision that the newspaper / pressure group prefers. If s/he does this successfully, they may only be substituting a very bad policy with a quite bad one (i.e. one based upon a partial understanding of the expert’s brief)
And whatever happens, s/he has to bear any consequences of the policy’s failure
However, if more people are able to get at the expert’s advice, mash it around into something that proves to be a more accessible explanation (something that enables to politician to understand what the expert was really saying), then a more participative polity has improved an outcome. It can help to break the hold that newspapers and pressure groups have in describing problems, and this can only be a good thing, surely?
I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now – BCSE grew partly out of an idea called School Works – a project intended to promote a more participative approach to the design of schools.
The basic premise is a simple one: The more progressive architects have worked out that it is a sensible thing to do to involve residents in the design of their own neighbourhoods. Long before anyone had ever heard of Clay Shirky, there was ample evidence that the people outside an organisation have more knowledge on a particular subject than the people inside the organisation that – supposedly – have specialist skills.
The benefits of co-designing an environment with the people who are going to live in it are obvious. As the blurb on this booklet on consensus design puts it, …“it can have an influence on social stability, crime-reduction, personal health and building longevity, all of which in turn have monetary and environmental cost implications.” Ty surmised that similar benefits could come from a more participative approach to the design of schools.
Now The Centre for School Design is not only – or even mainly – about consensus design. It is about raising the profile – or as counter-terrorism experts put it, the ‘chatter level‘ around the question of education, design and the built environment. Continue reading →
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This is the third in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’.In part 2, last week, I described how existing content – the blogosphere, in particular – is currently used, or perhaps abused, by policymakers.
This time, I’m going to cover a range of improvements: how we can make better use of existing content, why we’d want to do so, and I’m going to roughly split these into: (a) technical solutions, and (b) human solutions. Continue reading →
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Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the risk accordingly)
Slow-loading screens weed out all but the most determined
So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.
As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time? Continue reading →
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“Some of Britain’s most impressive internet policy experts had long been trying to break down this particular door. Ex-MP Richard Allan. Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson. Internet gurus Tom Steinberg, and Tom Loosemore. Former Number 10 policy advisor William Perrin. All bounced back dazed when they tried shoulder charging the Ordnance Survey’s door, as if tripped up by a canny geographer’s sandal on their run up. So my colleague Tom Chatfield and I decided we that needed to find out exactly how the man who invented the web had managed to reinvent the rules of British data.”
No time to post much here today apart from to point to the new UK government data website – www.data.gov.uk – as described here. There are plenty of data sets that allow you to browse geographical data and find out different information about local schools and other services.
View it here, by all means, but do visit the site as well if you can?
For me, the most exciting bit is that it allows people to see things in new ways and conceptualise problems differently. Poor policy-making costs us a fortune and results in missed opportunities. I’m not sure that Brian Hoadley fully gets this when he says:
“I’ve been waiting for Joe Bloggs on the street to mention in passing – “Hey, just yesterday I did ‘x’ online” and have it be one of those new ‘Services’ that has been developed from the release of our data. (Note: A Joe Bloggs who is not related to Government or those who encircle Government. A real true independent Citizen.)
It may be a long wait.”
Meantimes, here’s Stuart on Lichfield’s data and what it adds to the knowledge of local authorities about their own area, as well as our knowledge about our local authorities.
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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.
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.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
