Later this week, a document will be published outlining what civil servants can and can’t do with social media during the election ‘purdah’ period.
I’ve been given an outline of what guidance it includes and I’m here to tell you now that – when you see it, I think you will agree with me – that [...]
Posts under ‘Constitutional issues’
Civil service social media use during election ‘purdah’
Election expenses & ’swiftboating’ – still relevant?
Apologies for the light posting here – I’ve been a bit busy with other things lately. This post will be some way off being a detailed bit of innovative research as well – more an observation to fill the gap.
Every candidate at the next general election will be subjected to a set of rules to [...]
‘Empowerment’
For me, this post by Kevin Harris sums up what happened over the past decade, where new Labour’s lightly held good intentions met their managerialst bent and the two cancelled each other out:
“Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of funding [...]
JFDI: tactics, transparency and interactivity
Dave Briggs has a good post up about how organisations introduce technology. He contrasts the ‘JFDI’ approach (which stands for Just Do It) and a more boring sustainable approach.
I’ve met Dave and he has very sensible views on Football. Our mutual friend Brian Clough could have contributed to this whole discussion. As he put it [...]
Centralisation: A turning point?
For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend.
The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics:
“Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – ticks both [...]
Elsewhere
I’ve just had this article published by The Telegraph. Sometimes, it’s only when you read yourself elsewhere that you see that you buried your more important point under less significant ones.
“Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are social [...]
Three signposts off
I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.
Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists [...]
How to increase the ‘chatter’ level on a policy area you care about
If you will permit me a small plug for some work I’m doing, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Centre for School Design – a project that was launched on Monday evening by the British Council for School Environments (BCSE).
I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now – [...]
A way of involving the ‘hard-to-reach’ groups and the expense of the ‘hard-to-avoids’
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 [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
