The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties. It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in [...]
Posts under ‘Consultations’
Creating informed communities
Apologies for the very light posting here in recent weeks. When you blog about politics and elections a lot, you probably have the excuse that you are doing rather than blogging during elections, and this is true of some of our contributors. In my case, a tide of work that was only indirectly related to [...]
Conservative local government proposals
The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut. It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today. Shift Delete Command backspace SysRq F12 Home PgDn Escape [...]
Listening with a purpose
Nick at Podnosh has a very interesting post up here – one that ties in with the ‘eavesdropping‘ theme that I’ve been trailing here a while ago: “…listening with a purpose is exactly what [public sector bodies] should be doing, otherwise they would be wasting public money. It doesn’t follow that this will be a [...]
What’s missing from this picture?
Via Spartakan, I’ve just seen this outline of how local debate could be / is structured. And, initially, it looks fairly complete as long is it is covering only debate, as opposed to policy-making. I think it’s a useful diagram, and I don’t have the time to do this properly – graphic design is a [...]
Going to extremes. ‘Whataboutery’: polarisation v ‘the hive mind’
I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein’s ‘Going to Extremes‘ lately – it’s worth a look. Sunstein’s conclusion – that when we are filtered into like-minded groups that we reinforce each other’s prejudices and tend to reach more extreme conclusions than we would if we were on our own – is not a particularly startling one in [...]
A few words on governance
Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils. It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of [...]
The myth of easy engagement: Evans’ Law?
Just a quick response to Tim Davies’ verygood post about ‘The Myth of Easy Engagement’. There is one argument that supports his general position that, I think, he misses. I’m sure that sooner or later, some will come up with a frivolous law (like ‘Godwin’s Law‘ or ‘Muphry’s Law‘) but if they don’t, let me [...]
Designing your environment
Just a short observation, in the light of Matthew Taylor’s post about the RSA’s work in Chelmsford that is being launched today. “….a vision for the town centre must be based on a rich understanding of how people see and use the area and how they might be willing to change that view if 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? 
