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 [...]
Posts under ‘Centralisation’
Three signposts off
Copenhagen Climate Summit widens rift between local and global approaches
I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.
I work for the [...]
On the long finger
Just a quick one to round the week off. I missed this post yesterday on Paul Waugh’s site.
I won’t accuse George Osborne of cowardice for saying this because he’s hardly unique in this respect:
But he left the best til last. When asked if there was any chance of following up this localist agenda by giving [...]
Who will cover the cost of ’scrutiny’?
Anthony has beat me to a response to the new Green Paper today, so I thought I’d develop his scepticism about the appetite for ’scrutiny’.
For me, the interesting question is – as ever – around the whole notion of representation.
Town Hall Matters has lighted on this question and that post returns to a theme that [...]
To the barricades!
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 [...]
Transparency – sticking plaster or panacea?
MySociety’s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned.
Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent.
“….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly “people who [...]
Political Innovation Camp at Reboot Britain
I thought I’d offer you a bit of an outline of the PICamp (Political Innovation Camp) strands that are making up part of NESTA’s Reboot Britain event next week. You’ll see that the sessions that are planned reflect a lot of the issues that come up on this blog regularly.
We’re offering these because we believe [...]
Denham: Going centralist?
Over on the LGIU blog, Jonathan Carr-West is not impressed with John Denham’s conditions for the devolution of powers to local government:
“So we find ourselves re-rehearsing the chicken and egg of earned autonomy. Councils need more powers to deliver better services and increased public confidence, but to get more powers they need to deliver better [...]
The politics of interactivity
I’m currently convening a number of sessions at a Nesta conference on the 6th July called ‘Reboot Britain’, running a strand called ‘PICamp’ – Political Innovation Camp.
I’m looking for local government communications staff that have had any experience or thoughts about the changing relationships with the local media – and particularly issues around the politics [...]
More cognitive polyphasia
Responding to the Guardian’s reader-survey about reshaping our democratic settlement, David Blunkett offers a good illustration of the cognitive polyphasia that colours so much public debate of these issues:
With one breath we say we want less legislation and more active politics based on a participative political activism and decentralisation; and in the next breath we [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
