Collecting data about the local voluntary sector

Dec 5th, 2011
by Paul Evans

Thanks again for all of the feedback on those open data posts recently.

Just to recap, I’m helping to organise an open data project for some school pupils within the a London borough in the new year. One of the big tasks is to flush out all of the data that may be available.

I’m going to be taking subject areas such as crime, health, education/children’s services separately and posting on each of them, using the  links and a few ideas that have come from different directions.

My first subject, though, will be on voluntary/civil society activity in a particular borough – in this case, Barnet.

This is a good example of a data-set that isn’t generally available yet in any standardised form, but one that may be of interest to school pupils in mapping some aspects of their locality.

In terms of drawing down experience of a local voluntary sector and open data, Jo Ivens in Brighton has pointed me to the Data for Neighbourhoods and Regeneration site here – a very good set of signposts – along with her own Databridge site.

I started to try and summarise a few good points from this site but ended up finding all of it worth reading – it will prove to be an incredibly useful resource for everybody involved in this schools project. As a taster, I’m shamelessly pinching this video, but the whole site is worth a visit.

Continue reading →

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Posted in: Democratic renewal, Political innovation, Transparency
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Why would school pupils want to mix data up?

Nov 23rd, 2011
by Paul Evans

Firstly, a big thank-you to everyone who commented on the previous posting here on local data sources.  Aside from the comments, I’ve been given loads of really useful pointers via email and Twitter, some of which I’ll acknowledge here, and some will come in subsequent posts.

But here’s an overarching question to start with: If we’re planning to ask school pupils to find data, tidy it up and find new ways to visualise it, it’s obviously useful to ask; Who this is intended to benefit? I think that answering this question can, in itself, tell us a lot about how participation works. It can help us understanding the negotiation that is needed to get the right sort of broadly-based participation that democratic processes need. Continue reading →

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Posted in: Democratic renewal, Web 2.0 and democracy
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Finding all of the interesting data within one local authority area

Nov 7th, 2011
by Paul Evans

A while ago, I posted here giving reasons why I thought it would be a good idea to start involving school pupils in the processing of public data.

There are strong democratic arguments for doing this – ones that aren’t immediately obvious. There are also good ‘transparency’ arguments (but I’d make my usual point here about transparency and democracy not always pulling in the same direction).

Local Ward Atlas data - click to explore it

There are two other reasons why this is worth doing:

  1. It’ll be fun to do. School pupils, doing all kinds of things with data that their older neighbours wouldn’t value just for the hell of it. Anyone watching this will learn a lot and probably have a laugh while doing it
  2. It will be a good thought experiment for everyone involved. In my experience, most people who work in or with local authorities don’t really understand the potential to do good things here.

I’ve never seen anyone try to pull together a good index of all of the relevant and interesting data that is available within one local authority area with the aim of giving school pupils something to work with, so over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing exactly that.

In this case, I’ll be looking at what data we can find on the area covered by the London Borough of Barnet (I live there, and the council have expressed an interest in this anyway) from a variety of different sources.

I’ll be writing a short article here on each of them outlining what they have and how it could be used, and hopefully sharing a few of them on the London Data Store blog. I should add here that a lot of what follows has resulted from conversations with friends, too numerous to credit here, but I was give a good initial steer by Emer Coleman at the London Data Store who has a strong local authority background.

I’d really welcome your feedback on any of this.

So, my first question; Are there any obvious omissions from this list of sources (below) that I’m going to go to for data that we can use with school pupils at a data-hack event?

There’s one further area that has been suggested to me. School pupils are likely to be very interested in Children’s issues anyway, and every local authority commissions some research that doesn’t fit into national frameworks. So I’m going to be having a conversation with the Children’s Services office if I get the chance. In addition, any information I can get on schools will be particularly useful for the same reasons.

If my own children are anything to go by, I suspect that they will want to move quickly beyond the data that we provide them with and start creating their own information. There’s a huge wealth of information that children could provide about their local area – data that could be crowd-sourced with a bit of creative thinking.

We will need to ask them – or even encourage them to do the asking. This is, of course, the holy grail of democratic data-use – participation and co-design. But for now, I’d like to explore the limits of the data that adults have provided. At the moment, many adults don’t really understand that a huge variety of data-types + analysis can be very valuable.

We can walk now. Running comes later.

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Posted in: Democratic renewal, Transparency, Web 2.0 and democracy
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Digging out the old stuff from the archive:
Should prisoners be allowed to vote?

Apr 6th, 2009
by Paul Evans

Erwin James, writing in The Guardian, thinks so, and it doing so, makes an important wider argument about why democracy matters – and how important inclusivity is.

“The lives of the people we imprison are usually unstable and dysfunctional, so much so that that few have ever experienced being involved in the democratic process. The consequent sense of being detached from society is often a cause of much offending. Prison is meant to be physically detaching, the loss of liberty is the penalty perpetrators pay – the loss of freedom, of movement, of choice. But psychological detachment, the sense that prisoners do not belong, do not count and have no value in society – is dangerous when exacerbated by the prison experience. While people are in prison they need to be encouraged to feel that they are still a part of society.”

Voting as an element of personal orderliness. When politics is a battle for a narrow section of the electorate – either the most active citizens, or a particular demographic (in 1997, Labour pinned all of their hopes on winning over Gloucester Woman), the consequences for wider society are potentially damaging.

I saw this clip (below) a while ago, and for me, the most striking thing about it (and admittedly, I’m drawing conclusions from implications, so I’d be happy to be corrected on this) was that only a minority of prisoners were prepared to attend a meeting on voter registration in one of the two US states that allow inmates to vote – and only a minority of those attending decided to actually register. The demand for voting among prisoners appears not to be huge though….

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Posted in: Elections, Universal rights
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The 99% and the False Consensus Effect

Oct 18th, 2011
by Paul Evans

Apologies for the light posting here. I’m mid-project on a few issues that I’d normally blog about here, so blogging will be a bit uneven for the time being.

In the meantime, here’s a quick stop-gap while IA while ago, I posted something here on the common misconception that many of us have about consensuses (consensii?).

I think that this is important for democracy, as one of the harshest charges that politicians face is that they are out of touch or that they don’t listen to us.

Now, in a week where the ‘We are the 99%’ meme is doing the rounds, here’s a nice post about the False Consensus Effect….

“which states that individuals view their own preferences, behaviours and judgements as being typical, normal and common within a broader context; it also suggests we find alternative characteristics as being more deviant and atypical than they actually are.”

Worth bearing in mind.

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Posted in: Democratic thought, Popular biases
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Will networked representation reduce the power of political parties?

Sep 8th, 2011
by Paul Evans

“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” George Burns

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics. Continue reading →

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Posted in: Being a politician, Democratic renewal, Leadership, Political parties, Populism, Representation, What makes a good representative?
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Democracy & the healthy society: The chicken and the egg.

Aug 1st, 2011
by Paul Evans

Chad. High disease prevalence and not much democracy

Amartya Sen has powerfully made the case that democracy brings with it guarantees of social justice.

Summarising for speed, Sen has argued that democracies don’t have famines, that they provide regulatory minimum standards that ensure that earthquakes don’t result in huge death-tolls as poorly-built structures collapse, and so on.

In a democracy, we are very likely to have better, universal services compared to non-democracies.

It’s a familliar argument, but one that was recently subject to a fascinating twist. In a recent New Scientist [£] article, evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill makes the case that democracy only emerges in societies in which there is a relative absense of infectious disease.

In summary, societies with a high prevalence of infectious diseases tend to an understandable level of xenophobia. Epidemics, after all, are often the consequence of population movements, therefore, outsiders are treated with a good deal more suspicion. Continue reading →

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Posted in: Democratic thought
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Politicos meeting gamers – a few preliminary thoughts

Jul 20th, 2011
by Paul Evans

Through the Political Innovation project, I’m helping to promote a meetup tomorrow evening between people who have experience and interests in gaming, and those of us who are very focussed on political issues.

As I’m one of the hosts, I thought it worth dropping a few conversation-starters in the mix. Issues where politicians seem to have reversed themselves into a cul-de-sac. Issues where a game-change could make a difference.

 

Like most people, I have prejudices as well as arguments – please take all of these examples (listed in no particular order) in this spirit – I’d like to focus on the gamed nature of politics rather than specific evidence on these issues:

  • Sentencing policy: Whatever you think to the way we handle criminal sentencing, it seems to be subject to pressures that don’t have much to do with reducing reoffending. Does the tension between evidence-based approaches, newspaper versions of the problem and electoral horizons and timescales resolve itself well? I don’t think so.
  • Immigration policy: A similar problem – moral questions of freedom of movement, economic ones around the flexibility of the economy, sociological ones around social capital and the effect upon communities of the kind of churn that flexible economies bring
  • As I was writing this, my friend Tim Davies forwarded this post on gaming and climate change (among other issues) from Duncan Green of Oxfam, so that’s another one to add into the mix.
  • Then there’s the related question of participatory budgeting and the potential extensions we can apply to the idea? How can choice-games be used to improve efficiency in public management (a friend working at a local PCT said to me recently that he believed that doctors often find it harder to under-prescribe or under-refer patients to hospitals because of the way their work is structured.

Then I’ve a few personal hobby-horses:

  • Participation – how do we strike the balance between getting more people involved in policymaking, but balancing the need to ensure that segments of the population aren’t over/under represented, while ensuring that we get the benefit of expertise, experience, creative thinking and the practical input?
  • Representation – how do we incentivise politicians to play their role in a more participative democracy with the public interest as their main focus?
  • Journalism – (particularly relevant this week): journalists almost have a constitutional role as well – they refer to themselves as the fourth estate often enough. How do we incentivise them to behave like decent intelligent human beings? How do we strike the balance between the need for diversity and pluralism in the provision of news while recognising the fact that the business model has a lot of uncertainty around it? Good journalism is literally worth billions in terms of the value that it adds to the economy – but no-one’s prepared to pick up the bill.

Also, aside from the potential for positive social change, there’s also the question of education – how far does addressing these problems increase or challenge the legitimacy of the structures that exist to tackle them?

Enough already! Here’s a re-run of a Ted talk that I linked to here a while ago – it makes the case for this approach better than I can.

 

If you’re coming along tomorrow, please try and think of any games that could be changed?

 

 

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Posted in: Being a politician, Democratic renewal, Political innovation, Web 2.0 and democracy
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Butterfly-minded representation

Jul 4th, 2011
by Paul Evans

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)? Continue reading →
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Posted in: Being a politician, Jurors as representatives, What makes a good representative?
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Douglas Rushkoff on transparency

Jul 1st, 2011
by Paul Evans

It’s late on Friday afternoon – here’s some brain-candy to chew on over the weekend.

Here’s Douglas Rushkoff – one of the most established commentators on interactive communcations explaining the cost of transparency. It’s liberating stuff – yet a lot of it seems so straightforward in Rushkoff’s hands. It often reads like the bleedin’ obvious. A lot of it is aimed at the individual, discussing their rights and the way they are manipulated and exploited.

Douglas Rushkoff: The Future of Transparency from Applied Brilliance on Vimeo.

There’s not much in here that seems directly aimed at a local government audience (indeed, nothing expressly) yet I’d suggest that it’s hugely important to grasp the power-relations that effect us all – and Rushkoff is great for that.

One possible lesson though: how important it is to engage all council employees more in engaging with local people.

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Posted in: Democratic renewal, Transparency
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Should local Councillors be given iPads?

Jun 24th, 2011
by Paul Evans

It’s a good question that tells us a lot about some of the bigger issues in local government.

The London Borough of Havering are doing it, and the argument for this is that it will cut printing costs. The good people at one of my favourite blogs We Love Local Government have done some sums:

“…over that four month period, on average, the Council spent £398.48 per month to provide 17 printed copies of the Cabinet Agenda to the Councillors. This, I think, means that in a year the Council could be spending £4383.28 on Cabinet agendas”

So. For the sake of argument, with no bulk discounts, 17 iPads at £400 a pop (the lowest priced option with only WiFi & no 3G – lets assume that there’s one or two WiFi signals available in the Council chamber!) comes to £6,800. The £500 option (with 3G)? No problem – that’s £8500 for 17.

So assuming they don’t all lose or break them, and assuming they can all actually get them to work in the first place, we’re looking at an idea that will be in the black after six months or so.

This also assumes no productivity savings and no efficiency gains. It assumes that there is going to be no positive cultural shift and that using a new medium will add nothing to the capacity of councillors to use a new medium in new ways – to improve their representative skills. I’ve spent long periods of time working with Councillors on their use of online communications tools and the two biggest obstacles we kept hitting were this utilitarian approach to kit and training, and (or course) the outdated rules on use of communications tools for political purposes.

For me, it’s a slam-dunk. Place the order now! However, WLLG still aren’t totally comfortable with the idea and have four observations at the end of the post: Continue reading →

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Posted in: Being a politician, Centralisation, Constitutional issues, Democratic renewal, Populism, Web 2.0 and democracy, What makes a good representative?
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