Niall Connolly appears to regard himself as an expert on democracy. Wonder if he’ll stand for election?
Posts from ‘October, 2009’
E-spending
Liz Azyan picks up on some questions about e-petitions that were asked here by Paul a couple of months back. She doesn’t mention the fascinating word cloud that accompanies her article, called “E-petition verbs”. The biggest words are, on a quick skim, “prevent, save, reimburse, make, oppose, charge and introduce”. With my local government head [...]
Does twitter damage the quality of parliamentary debate – or improve it?
Kerry McCarthy MP tweeted last night that she will be going in to bat for tweeting MPs on Radio 5Live later today. Her adversary on the show will be John Pugh MP – and Torcuil Crichton explains the background: Dr John Pugh, the analogue Lib Dem MP for Southport, has a motion down condemning the [...]
Does decentralising information offer us good government?
It’s a lengthy endorsement by the BBC’s Bill Thompson for a very good blogger, and it’s thoroughly deserved: Mr Davies brings Weber, Hayek, Weinberger, Arendt and even Habermas to bear on the question of whether decentralising information through online services like data.gov.uk can offer us good government. He concludes that while it may provide transparency [...]
We don’t want to read your website. We want to write it.
So: It’s now official. Local authorities are going to be obliged to promote democracy (and the bill is quite prescriptive about the role that the internet will have to play in this). It should make for an interesting seven months. There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent [...]
E-petitioning flow diagram
Peter Cruikshank has pulled together a really useful post here, complete with print-off-able pictures – a very useful resource for every local authority to use to find out about e-petitioning (and every local authority will have to know about petitioning shortly). It’s been done as part of the Europetition project, but most of it is [...]
Collective action and participation
From TechPresident: “Indiana Univeristy’s Elinor Ostrom focuses her work on how people can go about creating rules for transactions around shared resources, or “commons,” that make collective action rewarding (enough) for everyone involved. And where she added a particularly new way of thinking to economics was to zero in on the economic transactions that take [...]
Against transparency?
Here’s Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University questioning the benefits of government transparency: “There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is [...]
Town Hall Meetings
A sketch of anti-healthcare reform protests in the US – from Rolling Stone magazine: “The threat of violence was thinly veiled: One agitator held aloft a tombstone with the name Doggett. Screaming, “Just say no!” the mob chased Doggett through the parking lot to an aide’s car — roaring with approval as he fled the [...]
Why bringing politicians and the public closer to each other is important
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. [...]
