I was very sad to hear – via Slugger – of the passing of ‘Horseman’ – one of the better (anonymous) bloggers that I have in my RSS feed.

Being busy, I missed his last posting on his Ulster’s Doomed! blog – a terrifically good one at that.

Writing about our image of politicians, Horseman points to one country that stands out – Sweden.

“In Sweden 43.8% of people have a ‘rather favourable’ opinion of their politicians, compared with an EU average of 12.4%. And only 18.4% of Swedes have a ‘rather unfavourable’ opinion, against the EU average of 55.4%.

Swedes are not foolish people, and are no more likely to be fooled by their politicians than anyone else, so what these results show is that Swedish politicians are simply better than any others. If their voters have a positive opinion of them it must be because they are more honest, more diligent, more representative and more efficient than any others.

And, of course, good politicians lead to good politics and good governance – and these lead, almost inevitably, to a more responsive state in which the needs of the people are served better than elsewhere. No wonder Sweden is close to the top of the list in almost every international comparison, whether it is looking at freedom, affluence, education, development or happiness.

Whatever it is that Swedish politicians are doing, they are doing it well, and their voters are happy with them. We need to learn from them.”

We may all have our explanations for this. My own suspicion is that there is a more entrenched culture of inclusion and an awareness of (and strategy for neutralising) the damaging disruption that unrepresentative pressure groups and media interests bring to bear on public life.

But back to Horseman, briefly. He was a very good blogger – quite a number cruncher and one with an idiosyncratic standpoint (as all of the best bloggers have). His main story was a belief that the nationalist electorate would overtake the unionist one in Northern Ireland at some point in the middle-future. It wasn’t one that I bought wholesale, given the relative lack of actual hardcore nationalist sentiment among Northern Ireland catholics. But that’s for another day.

My sympathies are with his family and friends for whom he must be a huge loss.

This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online

People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is the time to be having the conversations which can build towards that covenant. Local websites provide a great forum for them.

So, starting in February, at Harringay Online we’ve been building up our stock of information on the local elections, from how they work to what we can find out about the candidates. I don’t want the elections to completely dominate the site, since by no means everyone is interested, but I do want to offer people, perhaps for the first time ever, an opportunity to find out who the local candidates are and what they might do if elected.

I’ve pretty much always voted in the local elections, out of a sense of civic duty as much as anything else. I imagine that’s not unusual. By covering the local elections, I hope we’re filling in some gaps for people like me and perhaps encouraging those who’ve not bothered to vote in the past to get involved, if for just one day out of every 1,460.

There are three wards which fall partly or entirely within our neighbourhood. That’s 29 candidates. To start with we’re trying to build up online portfolios on each of them. So far we have basic information on most of them, including bios. We’re also digging around, and lifting the curtain, seeing what else we can find out, mainly through a Google-based search.

We’re adding short video interviews with as many candidates as we can as well as the leaders of the main party groupings. Quite a novelty to see video of your local candidates in your living room, if you think about it.

Finally, we’ve taken a leaf out of the Democracy Club‘s book and we’re uploading copies of all local election leaflets

We’re still hoping to organise a hustings, but a number of logistical problems mean that we’re cutting it fine. Our plan is to use a “real-world” venue and also use Cover-it-Live to take the event into people’s homes.

As well as giving local people a better sense of who’s who and what they think, we hope that this indelible record will go some way towards holding our elected officials to account in the years to come.

The initial reaction of the candidates was mixed as was their willingness to be involved. Some were enthusiastic; others were extremely cautious. They’re coming round. Trust seems to be building as they recognise that we’re trying to be scrupulously fair.

In my naivety, I assumed that the politicians would be our biggest challenge. As things are turning out it may well be that the biggest issues will be thrown up the heartfelt passions of some HoL contributors. Curating discussions fuelled by those passions whilst successfully riding out accusations of being in the politicians’ pockets is proving to be a wild ride at times.

However, as long as members continue to add posts like this, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing:

I think this kind of scrutiny is superb I wasn’t going to vote in the Euro elections but did so because of Harringay Online putting the link to working out how individuals views tally with which party. Perhaps I’m rather superficial but that little exercise fired me up not only did I vote but told friends and neighbours who aren’t a part of HOL and they all did the online quiz thing. This created great discussion and at least four other people who weren’t going to vote did so. So, the citizen power of HOL stretches beyond just its members!!

Many of us can’t be bothered with politics and HOL has made me think about voting and invite the neighbours in – the elderly, those for whom English is a second language – for a cup of tea or a sherry and a pakora to discuss the message on the video.

There is nothing that annoys politicians more than people who just don’t get around to voting. For months, the parties are knocking doors and getting pledges. In a tight fight, every vote will be counted on, and a well-resourced team will manage to knock on doors a half-dozen times until the name is ticked off the Reading Pads [remember them?].

Click for picture credit

By 10pm on election day, politicians and their agents are often fuming at the bastards who had promised to turn out but arrived home a few minutes before the polls closed saying they can’t be bovvered to go out again. If MPs could enact one snap piece of legislation the day after a general election, it would undoubtedly be compulsory voting.

Listening to James Crabtree on last Monday’s Start the Week (Radio 4 – 35 mins in) I’m reminded of the speculation about how the election is really decided by a tiny number of votes in a tiny number of seats that are almost exclusively targeted by the parties. As James puts it …

“they ignore almost everyone in the country and spend a gigantic amount of time trying to find that small number of people who might change their minds…”

Now this can only surely be a bad thing? A phenomenon that cries out for a change in our electoral system? I’m inclined to agree, but I’ve got one major doubt:

Leaving aside the impact that this narrowcasting has on our national conversation, should we be worried by the fact that the most undecided, irresolute, shilly-shallying ideologically footloose, unprincipled, impulsive flibbertigibbets get to decide who our government is?

Surely those who spend hours discussing, arguing, campaigning, knocking on doors, and – dammit – BLOGGING – should be the ones who get a more weighted vote? We’re the ones who care! We’re the ones that might have an idea which way up the country should be?

Why are the Electoral Commission even bothering about the nudniks who can’t navigate their way onto the electoral roll in the first place? Why are they forever wondering aloud about how they can extend voting to Saturdays, get us to Tweet or txt our choice of govt in, or vote on … like … uh.. Facebook, or something? Or somehow get Ms Dynamitee-he to organise a rave in the polling booth to attract yoof?

Surely the election shouldn’t be decided by people who only turn out if there isn’t anything worth watching on the telly? Or the ones who change their mind as their pencil hovers over the ballot paper? And don’t get me started on whether people who would be better off being removed from the gene pool entirely should have a vote equal to that of a brain surgeon.

We’re not talking about sullen stay-aways here, by the way. These aren’t principled abstainers – angry ‘none-of-the-above’ voters. These are the ones who forgot it was on Fursday. The ones who don’t read the papers that have obsessed about elections for the last … eternity. The ones who’ve spent tuning out any discussion of their future during the all encompassing campaign or looking at politicians hair instead of weighing their arguments.

In every other area of our lives, we use trade-offs. We stay out of the shops that don’t sell things we’re interested in, hoarding our cash to spend in the places we care about. Shouldn’t people be offered the option to trade their vote in elections for something they care about – a heavily weighted vote in The X Factor or a lowering of their car-taxes or something like that? Why not incentivise people not to vote with small-ish bribes? Shouldn’t voting be something you positively want to do?

I’ve posted here before about how the lust for certainty could be a sin. How important diversity is in the context of the wisdom of crowds argument. I’ve argued about how light preferences and the need to make trade-offs is the magic ingredient that makes representative government work and how active citizens can be a menace to a good democracy. I’d urge you to read this funny post about how obnoxious people with the halo effect are.

“Cyclists, not content with having lanes painted everywhere to accommodate their perversion, routinely feel free to jump lights or board the pavement whenever tedious interventions like the Highway Code interfere with their path of righteousness. My own view is that the lycra-wearing freaks should either pay road tax or face being hosed off the streets.”

So, for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think that the indecisive should be discouraged from voting – quite the opposite. I’d almost argue that their votes deserve some sort of weighting for them to count more heavily than people who read broadsheets and shout at the telly.

However, it does cut across a general metropolitan liberal prejudice that I hold: Like Brendan O’Neill, I think that politics should be a clash of ideas – a forum where big ishoos are thrashed out and decisions are not based on an appeal to the touchy-feely dumbed-down focus-grouped puddle of public sentiment. It is the ‘don’t knows’, after all, that this kind of politics is designed to appeal.

The belief that they should be banned from the ballots is implicit in a lot of the arguments that I hear favouring alternative versions of democracy where people choose policies rather than the quality of representation. I’d love to hear some lively loudmouth make the argument with a bit of passion so that it could be challenged.

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.

It is possible that the Tories are regretting using pics of David Cameron to front their 2010 launch?

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 journalism and policy advice. This is a slightly different issue from the long-standing, Weberian concern with professionalisation of politics. A professional politician is one who is expert at campaigning and winning elections, but has no experience or life outside of this. New Labour was more about the scientisation of politics (sorry if that’s not a word), in which expertise in economics and public affairs became a precondition of political authority.” (emphasis mine)

Potlatch (Will Davies) seemed to see a deepening of the trend towards a more professional political elite – one in which a rare combination of skills was a pre-condition to success. It does have echoes of the almost caste-based Enarque phenomonon in France in which a professional supporting bureaucracy grows up around political parties, consisting of the children of other Enarques.

The second was on Political Betting – a site that convenes genuinely valuable political data* (most political blogs attract opinion – what we would like to happen. PB is specifically about identifying what is actually going to happen) in which Councillors were offered as an underestimated political force.

Political centralisation is widely seen as a consequence of the way that carefully managed branding around charismatic individuals has supplanted the more earthy questions of local representatives, lively public debate and a more engaged electorate. My own Labour Party experience features countless examples of MPs being warned – in a roundabout way – that the only reason they are in Parliament is because of the party logo – and that any individualism on their part is unwarranted arrogance.

If you ask most political pundits, they may be keen to tell you that the election will be decided by a battle of the brands. That Lord Ashcroft is in a position to finance a Tory victory and that local issues are largely irrelevant.

I think that this is becoming contestable. I don’t think that anyone expects Labour to fight a ‘presidential campaign’ with Gordon Brown as the sole focus for the voters. But even the Tories are concious of the way that social media activists are capable of damaging the brand value of a leader – and they are stepping back from hanging the campaign on David Cameron. As Guido Fawkes reported recently, they have also dropped the tag of ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ (and I hope its not seen as a partisan point when I say ‘thank god for that!’)

If it’s true that – in a more peer-to-peer polity – one of the deciding issues is the number of local councillors that you have, perhaps this presents those councillors with an opportunity to reverse the trend that has continued as long as the mass media has dominated the political space?

Is it time for Councillors to demand powers that are commensurate with their ability to win elections?

* Let me just add this: Political betting is a really great political blog. Really good. Subscribe to it if you can?

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

I saw this press release yesterday and it’s had a bit of take-up from the press. Sadly, none of the coverage that I’ve seen has addressed what seems to me to be a serious and interesting – though problematic – proposal.

Jeremy Hunt MP

I’ll be writing something myself over the next few days, but in the meantime, here is the actual press release in full.

The most interesting bit – the ‘notes to editors’ – hasn’t been published online anywhere as far as I know and it’s really worth a look.

I’d be interested to see what you make of it:

Hunt: Solving problems together: Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds

The Conservatives are today announcing a competition, with a £1million prize, for the best new technology platform that helps people come together to solve the problems that matter to them – whether that’s tackling government waste, designing a local planning strategy, finding the best school or avoiding roadworks.

This online platform will then be used by a future Conservative government to throw open the policy making process to the public, and harness the wisdom of the crowd so that the public can collaborate to improve government policy. For example, a Conservative government would publish all government Green Papers on this platform, so that everyone can have their say on government policies, and feed in their ideas to make them better.

This is in addition to our existing radical commitment to introduce a Public Reading Stage for legislation so that the public can comment on draft bills, and highlight drafting errors or potential improvements.

Launching the competition, Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said:

“Conservatives believe that the collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts. And new technology now allows us to harness that wisdom like never before. So at this time of year, when families and friends are getting together, we’re announcing a new idea to help the British people get together to help solve the problems that matter to them.

“There are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by Government – this prize is a good and cost-effective way of getting one.

“Too often policy has been ill thought through with disastrous consequences. When formulating and implementing policy why should we not listen to the hundreds of thousands of experts out there?”

ENDS

Notes to Editors

In the bureaucratic age, decisions in government, business and other organisations were typically made by a small, closed group of experts. In the post-bureaucratic age, new technologies enable us to reject this top-down approach to decision-making. These new technologies allow us to harness the wisdom of the crowd, take advantage of the power of mass collaboration and make use of the information and ideas dispersed amongst large groups of people. Evidence from around the world has shown that this post-bureaucratic approach can result in more efficient and effective decision-making and problem solving than relying on small groups of experts.

Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd in this way is a fundamentally Conservative approach, based on the insight that using dispersed information, such as that contained within a market, often leads to better outcomes than centralised and closed systems.

The Conservative Party has already used crowd sourcing to develop new policies, for example through our ‘Stand Up Speak Up’ initiative. To make sure that we make best use of this approach, a Conservative government will offer an unprecedented £1 million prize for any individual or team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies.

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds – case studies

Innocentive
Innocentive is a website used by leading companies such as Proctor and Gamble and charities such as the Rockefeller Foundation, to tap into the wisdom of the crowd and get answers to otherwise intractable research problems. There are over 160,000 scientists and other experts in the Innocentive network, and they are incentivised to take part through cash prizes for solving problems.

Improving the Netflix algorithm
Netflix, a US-based DVD rental company, wanted to improve the algorithm it uses to recommend films to users. Instead of hiring a research team itself, it threw open its dataset, and offered a $1m prize for anyone who could improve its algorithm by 10% or more. This approach yielded a solution far more cheaply and quickly than relying on an internal team of researchers.

Peer-to-patent
Peer-to-Patent uses the wisdom of the crowd to improve the patent process, and has been trialled by the US Patent Office. Under this approach, patent applications are posted online, so that instead of relying on a small group of bureaucrats, anyone in the world can check whether the application is valid. This approach seems to be much faster and more efficient than the traditional closed approach to appraising patent applications.

Solving maths problems
In January 2009, Timothy Gowers, professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and a holder of the Fields Medal, posted a hitherto intractable maths challenge on his blog, and invited readers from across the world to collaborate and solve the problem. The resulting comment thread spanned hundreds of thousands of words and drew in dozens of contributors. Six weeks later, the theorem was proved.

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in policy making
In the post-bureaucratic age, opening up the policy making process can help us to design better policy and transfer more control to individuals and communities. The Conservative Party is committed to harnessing the wisdom of crowds in a number of ways:

• We will introduce a Public Reading Stage for legislation, so that the public can help to spot errors in legislation, and feed in their comments during the legislative process.
• We will set government data free, enabling the public to collaborate and develop new social and commercial applications.
• We are publishing online, and in real time, the expense claims of our Shadow Cabinet, enabling full and instant scrutiny.
• We have published online a leaked version of the Government’s IT strategy, so that people can post their suggestions on how to develop a better set of policies.

A Conservative government would seek to make extensive use of this approach. However, there are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by government.

We are today announcing that a Conservative government will offer a £1 million prize for any individual or team that develops an online platform that enables large scale collaboration and meets the specifications that we will be publishing alongside the official opening of the competition following the election. This platform will then be used by a future Conservative government to throw open the policy making process to the public, and harness the wisdom of the crowd. For example, a Conservative government will publish all government Green Papers on this innovative and open platform.

The source code of the platform will be made openly available, so that it can be used by local councils, social enterprises and other organisations free of charge.

While leading institutions such as the Gates Foundation, Google and Netflix have successfully made use of procurement prizes, this £1 million prize will be the largest prize ever offered by a British government in the modern era.

(With thanks to Craig Elder for supplying the original)

I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services.

The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet Office, and Christian Bason from the Danish reform institute Mind Lab, set out a vision that I might crudely summarise as:

• We need to understand that public service goes wider than the things funded or provided by the state – in other words, the hospice movement is part of the health service, even if it isn’t part of the National Health Service
• We need to combine greater user empowerment, productivity drives and a better understanding of user pathways to identify waste in the system
• Future services will be provided in a radically decentralised way – well below town hall level
• Citizen/citizen and citizen/state relationships are the most important element of this new mode of public service

There’s a lot to like in this vision of decentralised, democratic public service, particularly if it brings about the alchemical “better services at lower cost” that we’re all hunting around for.

I don’t think it’s a simple or risk-free transformation, though. The questions that occurred to me were:

• Public service delivery is something that goes wider than taxpayer funding, but it is also something that is fundamentally political. How can decentralised local organisations be made accountable and representative to their users and those who pay any taxes that fund them?
• Are we acknowledging the problems of Whitehall managerialism only to create them over again at local level?
• How do we create the active and informed citizens needed to co-create and co-produce these services? It feels like the change needed – though a good change – is either a years-long cultural transformation programme, or devolution to a group of super-engaged people running local services.

I don’t have any easy answers. I want to see more democratic and less managerial service delivery – which is what both Ben and Christian were describing. I want fair and comprehensive public services. I buy the vision and the potential. My only nagging worry is that in a world where we’re living with the consequences of the efficient markets fallacy, we should be wary of stumbling into an efficient citizen fallacy.

Local democracy: Not being pitched very hard on council websites

It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago)

Measuring usability may also be the key to ensuring that a big opportunity on the horizon is taken seriously.

As I mentioned the other day, the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent in the not-too-distant. I covered the question of petitions the other day (and I’ll come back to this element briefly in a moment), but there is a bigger – even more interesting question about how far local authorities may thwart this obligation by a resort to box-ticking.

In summary, councils have to promote an understanding of…

• the functions of the authority and other local authority bodies that are connected to it
• the democratic arrangements that govern it
• how members of the public can take part in those democratic arrangements and what is involved in taking part
• how to become a councillor
• what members of the principal local authority do
• what support is available for councillors
• the functions of authorities which are connected with the principal local

It’s something of an indicator of the level of self-confidence within local government that such a role should be mandated by central government, and I suspect that – when we look back on how these obligations have been implemented in a few years time, we may see just how enthusiastically local authorities actually embrace this opportunity.

As every civil servant knows, you can either give your political masters what they want, or what they say they want. You can understand their aims and seek to meet them, or you can tick the boxes that they put in front of you.

A glance at many local authority websites will give you some idea of this. Here’s a way of looking at it:

Give some schoolkids a look at their local council website. Then ask them to do a comprehension on it – and see how enthusiastic they are about getting involved in local democracy at any level.

OK. This is a big ask. But I’m certain that some council websites would get much better results than others – so to check this hunch, I had a look at a few:

Here’s the first three I looked at – purely randomly (I picked the local council of the last three people I spoke to on the phone – choose your own method and pick three of your own?)

Colchester Council: ‘There’s a council meetings and decisions’ occupying one of the less prominent parts of the website. If you click on it you’re offered a range of unstructured unprioritised pages in alphabetical order. If you know what you’re looking for, you may click on the Your Council link, but even then, there’s no attempt to offer any structure, any narrative or to persuade visitors that there is a worthwhile democratic process in place. Information on Councillors is poorly laid out and hard to navigate. If there is a postcode search that allows you to find out who your councillor is if you don’t know the name of your ward, I can’t find it. If you click on the ‘how to become a local councillor’ page, the result can best be described at regulation-speak. 3/10

Broxtowe Council: If anything, it’s a good deal worse. None of the language matched what I would expect to look for if I was trying to find out about my council decision-making processes. The front page has a link to ‘Cabinet and Committees’ but you have to dig around in the ‘About Us’ section to find any reference to councillors. The information provided is sparse and grudging (I suppose that the small amount of info is as good as Colchester’s site which offers more info, but renders it almost useless by it’s structurelessness) 2/10

Camden Council: Much better. There’s a ‘Council and Democracy’ link in the main menu and it takes you through to a not-bad set of information that has plainly been written for purpose, rather than patched together in a document-management-system-to-content-management-system way (information techies will know what I mean here, and what shortcoming I’m alluding to. Once you’re in, there’s a big webcasting link that shows you how to view council meetings and reasonably well-written content on how decisions are made. It could offer more of a sales-pitch, but the intent is there. You are left with the definite impression that Camden wants to promote it’s democratic practices and that the forthcoming bill may even get them to raise their game further. 8/10

These are, admittedly, snap audits. But in many cases, perhaps there is a case for the provision of this content – the information – it’s structure, layout and language – to be taken out of the hands of permanent officials at local authorities. I don’t want to re-open the question of whether it is in the interests of council officers to do anything that increases the prestige of elected members, but…. maybe it could be done better by schoolkids who have looked at Camden’s site than the people who were paid to write content for Broxtowe?

Finally, on the question of petitions: The take-up of these e-petitions (and the measurements of how many people arrived on the ‘petitions’ page and how many completed the process), will provide us with metrics. Comparative metrics. We will be able to see which councils have used all of the resources at their disposal to drive up interest in local democracy. I wonder if anyone will pull this information together?

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 centre itself changed. We need to explore what could the town centre’s identity could be, and from that answer to develop ideas for embedding this identity in the physical and social fabric.”

It’s interesting that democracy is often understood to mean an engagement in party / pressure-group politics, or the clash of ideas and opinions. Local authorities will shortly have a statutory obligation to ‘promote democracy’ – which we are expected to understand as voting in elections. It means a promotion of the work of councillors and our right to participate in their decisions (and sometimes, our ability to force things onto the agenda with petitions).

We are told that we have a right to be consulted more often in more creative and professional ways. In other spheres, we see decentralisation and even the very word ‘democracy‘ conflated with the promotion of local councils. The democratic innovations are often around ‘citizens juries’ or ‘participatory budgeting.’

Most of this is, of course, a good thing. But it seems to me that the most valuable expression of democracy is our ability to shape our immediate environment. Our streets, housing, hospitals, schools and so on. The one where every one of us has something valid to say, and has experiences of having done so. Where the process of shaping our surroundings has created conversational networks that we can return to in order to solve new problems. Where there is less of a legitimacy gap between the general public and the professional or the expert practitioner.

It’s the one area where we can be guaranteed to know things that the experts don’t. Where we can bring them great ideas that they would never dream of, and that we can add the caring dimension that – with the best will in the world – town planners and architects will never have.

There’s my argument in a nutshell: Town Planners. Architects. See what I mean?

The RSA are looking for a number of other local areas to work with them in this way – it’s a great idea, and one that I hope will shape the whole question of ‘democratic renewal’ more than it does currently.

Much of the comment about the new Pew Internet and Civic Engagement Survey has been around its finding that wealthy and well-networked people are the most likely to participate in civic activities online. The already-engaged, in other words, are the beneficiaries of much engagement work.

I don’t think we should worry too much about that. That isn’t because I think poor people don’t matter, or that the politically disengaged deserve to stay disengaged. I think that the demographics of online engagement will solve themselves if we get democratisation right.

After all, the same middle-class bias is seen in voter turnout in the offline world. Voters are older, richer and more middle-class than the non-voters and since online civic engagement is designed by and for the politically-active, it is hardly surprising that those engaged online are old, rich and middle-class too.

The rewards of political engagement online also accrue mostly to those who already have strong views. The man ranting about privatisation on Comment is Free and the libertarian on Free Republic share the misperception that the great mass of the people are behind them. In fact, the great mass of the people don’t know what to think and aren’t particularly bothered about it. What use do they have for a discussion forum, however elegantly designed?

Fixing the class bias in politics without expanding the political class is impossible – and expansion of the political class has to come as a consequence of wider and deeper political engagement both online and off.

To do that, governments need to nurture political spaces with their attention, so civic participation has results beyond a warm fuzzy feeling. The civic engineers need to create spaces in such a way that people aren’t just reciting political cliches, but are really discussing and developing ideas in possession of the facts.

Most importantly, though, the people themselves need to be brought to realise, through advertising or through campaigning, that political engagement is more than a hobby for old rich people, it’s a vital part of the duty we have to our world. This last point sounds like moralising – and it is. Democratic transformation in politics can only come through citizens, and an engaged and dutiful citizen can’t be created by a well-designed website.