Thanks again for all of the feedback on those open data posts recently.

Just to recap, I’m helping to organise an open data project for some school pupils within the a London borough in the new year. One of the big tasks is to flush out all of the data that may be available.

I’m going to be taking subject areas such as crime, health, education/children’s services separately and posting on each of them, using the  links and a few ideas that have come from different directions.

My first subject, though, will be on voluntary/civil society activity in a particular borough – in this case, Barnet.

This is a good example of a data-set that isn’t generally available yet in any standardised form, but one that may be of interest to school pupils in mapping some aspects of their locality.

In terms of drawing down experience of a local voluntary sector and open data, Jo Ivens in Brighton has pointed me to the Data for Neighbourhoods and Regeneration site here – a very good set of signposts – along with her own Databridge site.

I started to try and summarise a few good points from this site but ended up finding all of it worth reading – it will prove to be an incredibly useful resource for everybody involved in this schools project. As a taster, I’m shamelessly pinching this video, but the whole site is worth a visit.

I’ve also had a helpful conversation with Ruth Mulandi, CEO of Community Barnet – the local voluntary sector hub – and this is what I found out.

Firstly, they hold most of the data that may be useful within their website Content Management System (the tool that they use to maintain their website).

This includes their directory of community organisations called InBarnet. They have over 1,000 community organisations registered within the borough – around 850 of which are active.

Being able to download this would be very useful, and I’m told that it’s possible, subject to a few caveats:

• The database includes information that individual groups have submitted to CommunityBarnet, but of it is on a ‘not for publication’ basis (in some cases individual phone numbers, contact details etc) and it is subject to some data protection rules
• CommunityBarnet don’t have the resources to regularly run bespoke dumps from this database at no cost– they have one person managing all of this and it’s not a full-time job by any means so additional data work needs to be resourced somehow
• It is an ongoing project to get all of the info about all of the groups that they ideally want to provide, such as what each group does, where, when, what type of service they provide and how etc etc, and to keep this up-to-date for all of the 800-odd active groups on the borough
• The database on the website is searchable, but obviously not all of the data is there (if groups have not provided it yet)

However, leaving aside some of the data that cannot be fully shared with third parties their website gives the undertaking that…

We can provide more specific reports , including:

Type of service provided: one to one support, counselling, after school clubs, befriending, advocacy, day care services, mentoring, training, and many more groups and individual needs served: children, adults, carers, parents, mental health, learning difficulties, cultural and faith specific and many more

Some of these groups provide specific services (lunch clubs, advice, day-centres, etc).

My contact at Community Barnet has offered me any reasonable amount of help in extracting this information in a useable form, but I’ll have to bear in mind the constraints that they are under in doing this.

So, what else is there?

In this document, we see some results from a 2009 survey in which 25% of the active organisations  on the database provided a response outlining what they do, who they do it for. Again, Ruth tells me that this is all held within that unified database held within the website management system, so it should be very simple.

I suppose my big question is this: How long before some government agency starts to standardise the collection of data about voluntary sector activity for publication? Mapping these services would surely have some use – not least to the local authorities concerned.

With the ‘Big Society’ as such a priority for the current government, it can’t be too far off, can it?

Firstly, a big thank-you to everyone who commented on the previous posting here on local data sources.  Aside from the comments, I’ve been given loads of really useful pointers via email and Twitter, some of which I’ll acknowledge here, and some will come in subsequent posts.

But here’s an overarching question to start with: If we’re planning to ask school pupils to find data, tidy it up and find new ways to visualise it, it’s obviously useful to ask; Who this is intended to benefit? I think that answering this question can, in itself, tell us a lot about how participation works. It can help us understanding the negotiation that is needed to get the right sort of broadly-based participation that democratic processes need.

We may have reasons that we want people to engage, but we only get access to their cognitive surplus if we can incentivise people (in this case, school pupils) to play along.

In the next few posts, I’ll be signposting useful data. But why would school pupils manipulate and visualise it in the first place?

The obvious beneficiaries could be the pupils themselves. Are we asking them to pull together information that is practically useful to them or that tells them something that benefits them? It could be something that they learn from or that has some utility for them, or something where the collection and preparation of the data is particularly rewarding?

A number of my respondents here and elsewhere have been saying that this is an opportunity to promote coding for kids and / or to get some useful tools built that could have a practical use for somebody. Simon Burall pointed me to the Code Academy site that provides an addictive step-by-step introduction and to Emma Mulqueeny’s work at The Guardian, including links to the new Coding For Kids wiki. Alternatively, there’s the fairly self-explanatory Apps for Good project.

We’re talking about visualisation here, so there are plenty of educational opportunities around maths or design/technology.

Or would we get away with asking for a more selfless contribution? Are we appealing to a civic and democratic sensibility by asking them to “tell us something interesting and useful that we don’t know using information that is freely / easily available”? Essentially, providing unsolicited social research to the local council and other bodies? I suppose they’d learn something about citizenship and sociology from that, but…

Perhaps we’re asking them to do something voluntary? There are 850 active local voluntary sector bodies in the London Borough of Barnet, many of whom don’t have the resources to do research, publicise their work effectively or get their work more effectively on the map – avoiding duplication of effort and maximising take-up or funding opportunities. Could school pupils help their local voluntary sector somehow by crunching data?

Alternatively, we could be asking them to provide information. They could develop an app of some sort, or – more simply – gather information in a spreadsheet (mobile smartphone + Google Docs forms anyone?) One suggestion that came my way was something around personal safety matched to geographical locations. Noel Hatch suggested ideas around behaviour change – even looking at information from their own social networks.

Simon Burall (again!) pointed me to this deciphermydata site from Gallomanor – a really nice project to crowdsource information about flu from schools. The pupils learn a lot around collecting and using data, and scientists learn a lot about instances of flu in schools.

We could be asking pupils to manually gather local geographical data, information about services or local features, information about education provision or….

That paragraph could go on for a long time.  I can think of lots of things that seem good ideas to me, but I’d be really interested to hear the much better ideas that everyone else has.

A while ago, I posted here giving reasons why I thought it would be a good idea to start involving school pupils in the processing of public data.

There are strong democratic arguments for doing this – ones that aren’t immediately obvious. There are also good ‘transparency’ arguments (but I’d make my usual point here about transparency and democracy not always pulling in the same direction).

Local Ward Atlas data - click to explore it

There are two other reasons why this is worth doing:

1. It’ll be fun to do. School pupils, doing all kinds of things with data that their older neighbours wouldn’t value just for the hell of it. Anyone watching this will learn a lot and probably have a laugh while doing it
2. It will be a good thought experiment for everyone involved. In my experience, most people who work in or with local authorities don’t really understand the potential to do good things here.

I’ve never seen anyone try to pull together a good index of all of the relevant and interesting data that is available within one local authority area with the aim of giving school pupils something to work with, so over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing exactly that.

In this case, I’ll be looking at what data we can find on the area covered by the London Borough of Barnet (I live there, and the council have expressed an interest in this anyway) from a variety of different sources.

I’ll be writing a short article here on each of them outlining what they have and how it could be used, and hopefully sharing a few of them on the London Data Store blog. I should add here that a lot of what follows has resulted from conversations with friends, too numerous to credit here, but I was give a good initial steer by Emer Coleman at the London Data Store who has a strong local authority background.

I’d really welcome your feedback on any of this.

So, my first question; Are there any obvious omissions from this list of sources (below) that I’m going to go to for data that we can use with school pupils at a data-hack event?

• The council themselves – for demographics, expenditure, service provision and take-up, revenue and other relevant data. There is currently a Maps Facts & Figures page on their site, but I think that there could be more ‘machine readable’ data that we could get from them with a bit of help
• The data behind the police crime-mapping services
• The London Data store - loads of information from a wide variety of different subject areas
• The local Primary Care Trust /NHS
• The local voluntary service council

There’s one further area that has been suggested to me. School pupils are likely to be very interested in Children’s issues anyway, and every local authority commissions some research that doesn’t fit into national frameworks. So I’m going to be having a conversation with the Children’s Services office if I get the chance. In addition, any information I can get on schools will be particularly useful for the same reasons.

If my own children are anything to go by, I suspect that they will want to move quickly beyond the data that we provide them with and start creating their own information. There’s a huge wealth of information that children could provide about their local area – data that could be crowd-sourced with a bit of creative thinking.

We will need to ask them – or even encourage them to do the asking. This is, of course, the holy grail of democratic data-use – participation and co-design. But for now, I’d like to explore the limits of the data that adults have provided. At the moment, many adults don’t really understand that a huge variety of data-types + analysis can be very valuable.

We can walk now. Running comes later.

“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” George Burns

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics.

I say that my local MP quite like Tom. But he’s also not quite the same. Earlier this summer, for instance, Tom attained a status that very few politicians have ever held. He could have walked into a bi-partisan pub and had drinks bought for him from all sides because he behaved in a way that most people think good MPs should.

But was Tom really a one-man force of nature – a campaigning multi-tasking up-all-night political polymath, on top of the details with carefully phrased rapier-like questions?

I yield to no-one in my admiration for him, but I really don’t think he was this superman. I say this because he did something a bit cleverer than that: He rode the network into battle. His 3,225 Facebook friends and 51,984 Twitter followers gave him extra eyes, ears, hands and brains. They allowed him to stretch his Parliamentary Allowance and give him all kinds of resources that he won’t need to claim for on annoying IPSA forms.

Sure – he worked hard and picked his fights well. But his real talent was in finding help – and not just of a material kind.

Where his followers weren’t slipping him data, they were chewing over the evidence, road-testing a few ways of describing developments giving him phrases that were useful when the cameras were on. When they were doing none of those things, he got feedback – encouragement and reassurance.

When you know you’re onto something, it gives you that extra bounce. His self-image here didn’t need to develop that self-loathing edge that sustains fake indignation. A politician as exposed as Tom would never get away with that these days.

By embedding himself in the network, he had little choice but to apply high standards of self-criticism. Either be a genuinely good guy, or act his socks off every day.

Now contrast Tom with Sir Stuart Bell – the unobtainable member for Middlesbrough.

Sir Stuart hasn’t held a constituency surgery for 14 years. He is made even harder to contact by the fact he doesn’t have a constituency office.

According to the paper, his response to questions about this has been to point out that he meets with members of the public by appointment instead, and people can reach him by telephone at any time.

So reporter Neil Macfarlane set about trying to find out how easy or otherwise it was to get in contact with the MP. Over several months, the Gazette rang Sir Stuart’s Westminster office and his home number over 100 times. No-one ever answered. That’s despite claiming staffing costs of £82,896 last year. Contrast that with Teesside’s four other MPs, all of who have their phones answered at the first attempt.

Sir Stuart isn’t on Facebook or Twitter either as far as I can see. And – when we find out what he thinks – I doubt if it’s ever as nuanced or road-tested as Tom’s positions. The contrast in self-awareness as well as political competence will be eye-watering.

So there’s a heirarchy here: On the top, Tom Watson, the go-to example of the networked politician.

Somewhat below him is my MP (no slouch with social media by the way, but as guarded as most MPs) who is in a marginal seat and is accordingly, visibly, busy.

Then, a long way further down, there’s Sir Stuart, who has managed to hide way for 14 years without hosting a surgery because, in Middlesbrough, they’d probably elect a Donkey if was wearing a red rosette (Tory equivalents are undoubtely available folks!).

I’m sorry it’s taken me to get to it, but here’s my question:

If you’re good at networking, are political parties as important to you as they were? Does Tom need to get his cut-and-paste replies from Labour HQ as often? Does he need to rely upon the whips to guide him through issues he doesn’t understand as often? Does he need to scour local committee rooms get find local canvassers who will knock on doors for him at the next election?

And most importantly, Tom has created a situation where he has to behave publically like an honest human being. In being well networked, has he redefined what representation is?

And should we be voting for people on the basis of their personal network more than their party rosette?

Update: More on lazy politicians here.

Through the Political Innovation project, I’m helping to promote a meetup tomorrow evening between people who have experience and interests in gaming, and those of us who are very focussed on political issues.

As I’m one of the hosts, I thought it worth dropping a few conversation-starters in the mix. Issues where politicians seem to have reversed themselves into a cul-de-sac. Issues where a game-change could make a difference.

Like most people, I have prejudices as well as arguments – please take all of these examples (listed in no particular order) in this spirit – I’d like to focus on the gamed nature of politics rather than specific evidence on these issues:

• Sentencing policy: Whatever you think to the way we handle criminal sentencing, it seems to be subject to pressures that don’t have much to do with reducing reoffending. Does the tension between evidence-based approaches, newspaper versions of the problem and electoral horizons and timescales resolve itself well? I don’t think so.
• Immigration policy: A similar problem – moral questions of freedom of movement, economic ones around the flexibility of the economy, sociological ones around social capital and the effect upon communities of the kind of churn that flexible economies bring
• As I was writing this, my friend Tim Davies forwarded this post on gaming and climate change (among other issues) from Duncan Green of Oxfam, so that’s another one to add into the mix.
• Then there’s the related question of participatory budgeting and the potential extensions we can apply to the idea? How can choice-games be used to improve efficiency in public management (a friend working at a local PCT said to me recently that he believed that doctors often find it harder to under-prescribe or under-refer patients to hospitals because of the way their work is structured.

Then I’ve a few personal hobby-horses:

• Participation – how do we strike the balance between getting more people involved in policymaking, but balancing the need to ensure that segments of the population aren’t over/under represented, while ensuring that we get the benefit of expertise, experience, creative thinking and the practical input?
• Representation – how do we incentivise politicians to play their role in a more participative democracy with the public interest as their main focus?
• Journalism – (particularly relevant this week): journalists almost have a constitutional role as well – they refer to themselves as the fourth estate often enough. How do we incentivise them to behave like decent intelligent human beings? How do we strike the balance between the need for diversity and pluralism in the provision of news while recognising the fact that the business model has a lot of uncertainty around it? Good journalism is literally worth billions in terms of the value that it adds to the economy – but no-one’s prepared to pick up the bill.

Also, aside from the potential for positive social change, there’s also the question of education – how far does addressing these problems increase or challenge the legitimacy of the structures that exist to tackle them?

Enough already! Here’s a re-run of a Ted talk that I linked to here a while ago – it makes the case for this approach better than I can.

If you’re coming along tomorrow, please try and think of any games that could be changed?

It’s late on Friday afternoon – here’s some brain-candy to chew on over the weekend.

Here’s Douglas Rushkoff – one of the most established commentators on interactive communcations explaining the cost of transparency. It’s liberating stuff – yet a lot of it seems so straightforward in Rushkoff’s hands. It often reads like the bleedin’ obvious. A lot of it is aimed at the individual, discussing their rights and the way they are manipulated and exploited.

Douglas Rushkoff: The Future of Transparency from Applied Brilliance on Vimeo.

There’s not much in here that seems directly aimed at a local government audience (indeed, nothing expressly) yet I’d suggest that it’s hugely important to grasp the power-relations that effect us all – and Rushkoff is great for that.

One possible lesson though: how important it is to engage all council employees more in engaging with local people.

It’s a good question that tells us a lot about some of the bigger issues in local government.

The London Borough of Havering are doing it, and the argument for this is that it will cut printing costs. The good people at one of my favourite blogs We Love Local Government have done some sums:

“…over that four month period, on average, the Council spent £398.48 per month to provide 17 printed copies of the Cabinet Agenda to the Councillors. This, I think, means that in a year the Council could be spending £4383.28 on Cabinet agendas”

So. For the sake of argument, with no bulk discounts, 17 iPads at £400 a pop (the lowest priced option with only WiFi & no 3G – lets assume that there’s one or two WiFi signals available in the Council chamber!) comes to £6,800. The £500 option (with 3G)? No problem – that’s £8500 for 17.

So assuming they don’t all lose or break them, and assuming they can all actually get them to work in the first place, we’re looking at an idea that will be in the black after six months or so.

This also assumes no productivity savings and no efficiency gains. It assumes that there is going to be no positive cultural shift and that using a new medium will add nothing to the capacity of councillors to use a new medium in new ways – to improve their representative skills. I’ve spent long periods of time working with Councillors on their use of online communications tools and the two biggest obstacles we kept hitting were this utilitarian approach to kit and training, and (or course) the outdated rules on use of communications tools for political purposes.

For me, it’s a slam-dunk. Place the order now! However, WLLG still aren’t totally comfortable with the idea and have four observations at the end of the post:

• These tools should never become a perk of being a Councillor. So to ensure they are tools, a business case for why Councillors need them should be put forward that shows how they can be used as tools to further the Councillor’s work.
• Use some procurement sense. As with a contract, work out your options and find the model that offers value for money for the Council.  So would another tablet Computer be able to do the required job, instead of the fancy and fashionable I-pad?
• If the Councillor breaks it, through misuse by them, then they cover the costs. At the end of the day its the Council’s property not theirs.
• This one is not a rule, more a suggestion/question. I’m not sure it would work but could the Council do a similar thing with I-pads that the Cycle to work scheme does? So the Council buys the I-pad and slowly the Councillor buys off the Council, if they want it.  Though I suppose it wouldn’t be tax-free like the cycle scheme.

I’d suggest that this represents a triumph of a grumpy anti-politics that ultimately diminishes the legitimacy of local government itself. It’s a populist starting point that negates so many other important considerations. It’s almost as though we can’t clear our throats without acknowledging the Tax Payers Alliance agenda.

I’m not blaming the good bloggers at WLLG here – it is, after all, endemic. It’s largely unchallenged by any of the main political parties that all claim ownership of the term ‘localism’.

There’s a two way compact between us voters and Councillors (as with all elected representatives): They strive for the highest standards in terms of civic representation (the stuff this blog bores on about all the time) and, in return, we give them a high social status and reasonable compensation to cover the opportunity cost of being a Councillor.

I don’t think either side of this compact is being met – I’d be interested to see how many councillors would be able to write a half-decent A-Level essay on what good representation entails – but I do think it’s time to put a bit of dignity back into local government. Someone has to make the first move.

Where I live, the council is no longer based in a granite monument to municipal values (the Town Hall), it’s on some campus in a part of the borough that’s awkward to get to without a car. I’m sure there’s an excellent business case for this, but there’s no way you can build a case for political decentralisation on the back of an institution that has a purely utilitarian approach to it’s democratic and administrative functions.

Decentralisation doesn’t happen because of some localism agenda that is dreamed up in the the think-tanks of That London. It happens because the core tensions that diminish the legitimacy of local democracy are being addressed. I see no sign of this happening any time soon.

It’s a regular theme of this blog that transparency and open data – while undoubtedly being good things – can often create situations in which democracy is diminished rather than enhanced.

The other day, for example, I posted my misgivings about guerilla webcasting of council meetings. (Shorter version: can result in selective reporting, poorer press coverage and increased power for small heavy-preference pressure groups – boo!)

Looking at it from the point of view of a local authority (particularly the communications team as well as the councillors) transparency and open data seem to have created a situation where the amount of time spent dealing with the angriest local residents goes up.

That the armchair auditors – far from being constructive partners – are non-neutral political activists [this post makes this case in more detail] who are selectively disrupting the aspects of the local authority’s work that they don’t like.

And this can be a good thing – up to a point – but it fundamentally undermines the duty of a democracy to address the concerns of the whole electorate – and not just those with time on their hands.

You could say that Councils only have themselves to blame for this. If information has to be dragged out of them by FOI requests, then only people with time on their hands will do it. If information isn’t attractive to engage with, then only people who have the time to puzzle it through will do it. [Again, this argument is made in more detail here].

If information isn’t made available in a format that allows other websites and forums to consume it, then the only people who will look at it are the lean-forward activists who can trawl the Council’s website. Good, attractive, easy-to-read, well-presented information can – and will – be linked to from Facebook groups, Mumsnet, Netmums, hyperlocal sites and other relevant local forums.

So this brings me to the suggestion: How can we get a lot more of the key information that Local Authorities provide about themselves into an easy-to-understand, easy-to-engage-with, easy-to-share and easy-to-mashup format quickly and easily?

Here’s how. A local authority could engage with the Design/Technology teachers in their local authority area. They could show all of the useful ways that council data can be presented – from the high-end where data is extracted, cleaned-up and poured into a visualisation tool (this Redbridge local business mapping project is very much the poster-child for this kind of thing as far as I can see).

In addition, they could show good examples of how short YouTubed videos, presentations (slideshared or using Prezi, for example) can make more engaging presentations than raw CSV files or PDFs posted on the council website. It doesn’t even need to be that sophisticated.

Every page on a local authority webste could probably be re-written and presented in a more easy-to-engage with way by a user of the service than by a provider. I mean no disrespect to local government Comms people in saying that their audience can probably explain Council services better than the providers of it can – once that audience understands what the services are.

So how about this? Councils can hold a borough-wide competition – facilitated by local schools – for the pupil (or group of pupils) that takes some information that the local authority is willing/obliged to provide and creates a consumable, re-usable artefact that makes it easier and more attractive for the public to understand and enage with the information.

Talking to a few teachers I know, there are a number of ways that this can fit into the curriculum both in terms of design/technology and citizenship.

And if this is a good idea, then I think local authorities will need the following resources to draw upon:

• An outline of which parts of the curriculum this can enhance – essentially something that helps councils sell the idea to local teachers
• A good set of web-pages to look at that have how-to videos/worksheets/presentations/infographics
• A set of suggestions that councils can give to teachers (e.g. “why not get data about which businesses we deal with and put it on a map to encourage is to source more local suppliers?”)
• Guidance and contacts on how to run a local hack-day (it would be reasonable for a council to pay a few good data-visualisation people to facilitate something like this) to bring expertise into the process
• Advice on the practicalities (CRB checks, how do find a venue and organise a hack-day)
• Suggestions on how the motivation/judging can be done and how they can generally nudge-up the quality of the work provided by the schools and their pupils

I’d be interested in seeing if a few people would be interested in pulling together a set of re-usable resources like this that can help councils do borough-wide schools open-data projects. It will be good for the quality of education and – I beleive – result in a broader and more conversational engagement with local citizens.

Is this a suitable idea for an event like Local Gov Camp on Saturday perhaps?

The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer.

Flip-cams: The sword of transperency or an engine for selective reporting?

My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some good journalistic legwork to conclude that…

“…Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police have simply acted in an altogether hapless, illiberal, and alarming manner. A person, surely, should not be arrested and detained just for filming a public council meeting, and a council should not be able to prevent someone from doing so in this manner. In my opinion, all the councillors, officials, and police officers involved in this sad sequence of events really should be ashamed of themselves.”

I’m in two minds over whether the flip-cam will improve the quality of local democracy, and I think this highlights some of the tension between liberalism and the good practice of liberal democracy.

On the one hand, all of David’s arguments stand – and then some. Surely a good democracy should remove any barriers that stop people from viewing democratic proceedings? Transparency will result in less corruption, better decisions, a greater sense of participation, and so on.

On the other hand, there are a few snags. Firstly, if individuals are doing this selectively – on issues that they care about, we will naturally expect to see a bias towards issues that small groups of individuals care about. These may be (but not always will be) subjects that effect people who have more time/resources on their hands. If this becomes the main way that Council meetings are covered, it can expose councils to more pressure group politics.

This may be at the expense of the decisions that many of us – people with mild preferences and a need to see policy serve the interests of the whole community – would expect to see from local authorities. I know I trot it out a lot, but the example of a more direct democracy provided by California should be a shocking example to us all.

So, is a balanced view of proceedings going to be distributed by citizen journalists? Or will it inevitably result in selective reporting?

Blogger arrested for filming council meeting http://t.co/4CpUfyN MP and public barred http://t.co/wwwR6Gs who do these ppl think they are?

June 12, 2011 12:16 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengoldacre

ben goldacre

Another question: Does this drive up the quality of deliberation (i.e. do Councillors raise their game?) or does it result in either a more guarded approach or, conversely, a more soapboxy style?

We expect councillors to behave in a disinterested way and there must be some parallel here with the jury room: Would juries make better decisions if they were selectively recorded?

Then there’s the question of professional journalism. I know this is a moot point at the moment, given the headlong retreat from half-decent reporting among local newspapers. But we expect pro-journos to cover issues in an even-handed way, catering to mild preferences of a broad audience rather than the narrow views of a deeply interested one.

Will this kind of guerilla coverage drive this kind of reporting out? I posted here a couple of years ago about the negative impact that opening Parliamentary proceedings out had – the conclusion was that newspapers stopped covering it because anyone who was really interested could get the real thing on the radio or (later) TV. Will this apply to local authorities, or are we in a different ballgame with local politics?

In my experience, the answer may be that councils should routinely film all proceedings and index them professionally. This will reduce the scope for selective coverage and allow visitors who follow the links the option to hear all of the points (and the context provided by professional local government officers) to the proceedings. It will also allow people to drop randomly into a council meeting and see a broad range of issues being discussed responsibly (or not).

A firm in Brighton called Public i (declared interest: I’m personally friendly with a few of the team there) have been offering a web-casting service aimed at local authorities for some years – it indexes each speaker which saves you ploughing through whole meetings if you’re only there for a particular reason [random example here].

Surely councils need to pro-actively promote a public awareness of the whole of their work? Given the low interest in local politics, it will make it easier then for local journalists to report procedings and may result in more broad coverage. Unless they do this, we can expect selective reporting to dominate agendas more and more.

April 7^th 2011 was a dark day both for the Coalition government’s commitment to be the ‘greenest government ever’, and for democracy in the UK. That was the day that the government launched its Red Tape Challenge.

The idea of cutting red tape has a long and undistinguished history in the UK; undistinguished in that it is never a job that anyone has said is done.

Under Conservative Prime Minister John Major in the mid-1990s, there was a ‘deregulation unit’. Major memorably described tackling red tape as like trying to wrestle with a greasy pig.

Across governments, the idea of slashing red tape never went out of fashion. Under Tony Blair, New Labour established a ‘red tape task force’. And Gordon Brown claimed to be the ‘enemy of red tape’.Now, with dismal statistics on economic growth, the Coalition government has pushed to the very top of the pendulum’s arc with its Red Tape Challenge.

The Red Tape Challenge is in some respects a successor to Nick Clegg’s failed ‘Your Freedom’ crowd-sourcing experiment; an experiment which folded after the government received more comments than it could cope with on the Your Freedom website. (The website, incidentally, is now partly archived so that it’s impossible to see what everyone said).

Your Freedom’s opening paragraphs included the following words:

“We want to restore Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness, and free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses…. This site gives you the chance to tell us which laws and regulations you think we should get rid of”.

That something remarkably similar should re-emerge so quickly in the form of the Red Tape Challenge is itself surprising (though there are many possible explanations).

Like Your Freedom, the Red Tape Challenge is a web-based (so-called) ‘crowd-sourcing’ initiative.

Economic sector by sector, the Red Tape Challenge invites comments on “which regulations are working and which are not; what should be scrapped, what should be saved and what should be simplified”.

In parallel, the initiative invites comments onsix sets of ‘general regulations’.Among these, the ‘environment’ section of the Red Tape Challenge website  includes 278 separate pieces of environment law.

In the website’s own words: “here’s the most important bit – the default presumption will be that burdensome regulations will go. If Ministers want to keep them, they have to make a very good case for them to stay.” So not only may Ministers have to waste their time, post cutbacks, potentially justifying anything anyone on the site says is burdensome; they also have to overcome a threshold presumption that if it’s considered burdensome by someone – anyone – it’s to be scrapped.

It’s now becoming close to impossible to keep track of what proposals are being made where and which policies, institutions, or laws, are up for incineration. For example, the Equality Act has been put forward for ‘crowd-sourced’ proposals for repeal in the Red Tape Challenge. But regulations made under the Equality Act are included in a separate more conventional consultation exercise –not the Red Tape Challenge. The Climate Change Act is included within the Red Tape Challenge. But it’s not listed under ‘carbon emissions’. Instead, it appears in a section on environmental permitting and information.

I’m no e-democracy expert, but the Red Tape Challenge certainly appears to risk getting ‘crowd-sourcing’ all wrong. An old piece by Will Hutton shows why. Crowds are most ‘wise’, it seems, either when significant numbers of people make informed choices, or when the ‘wisdom’ emerges as a result of proper deliberation.

Simply listing vast numbers of regulations doesn’t make for the sort of quantitative decision-making where wisdom is likely to emerge, either. Discussion about the pros and cons of regulation cannot in any meaningful sense be equated with the ‘guess the number of marbles in the jar’ stall at a summer fete.

There’s a long way to go in working out how to apply the idea of ‘crowdsourcing’ to government decision-making. And gambling almost the entirety of the nation’s body of environment, health and safety, employment and equalities legislation on an experiment is foolhardy in the extreme.

In contrast to the Red Tape Challenge’s fundamental assumption that if regulation is a burden – to anyone – it must go; the history of business innovation for sustainable development is replete with examples of innovation that is nurtured – or sometimes forced – by regulation.

Perhaps the most celebrated example is the phase-out of ozone depleting substances, spurred on by the internationally agreed Montreal Protocol.

One business’s burdensome regulation is another’s signal to innovate. One enterprise’s burden is the source of a green growth for another.

The Red Tape Challenge consummately fails to recognise this, and that alone places it well behind the curve of those parts of the business community that exist to drive and serve the ‘green economy’ that the government has eagerly expresses its wish for.

If you will forgive the repetition in an already-long post: under Caroline Spelman’s stewardship, the greenest government ever, commited to mainstreaming sustainable development across government, has put 278 pieces of primary and secondary environment legislation up for crowd-sourced comment with a presumption that if they’re considered burdensome – possibly if they’re considered burdensome by anyone – they must in principle go.

It may only be accident that some pieces of legislation (the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Act among them) have escaped listing; that it is not the entirety of the body of UK environment law that has been opened up to trading off against the government’s plan for short-term growth.

Over and over again on the environment regulation pages of the Red Tape Challenge website, respondents charge that the Coalition government is guilty of short-termism; that it has failed to take account of future generations; that it is putting short-term profit (and economic growth) before protection of the environment and sustainable development.

Campaign groups have also woken up to the risks. Despite a muddled explanation of what’s proposed, a petition by online campaign group 38 Degrees has gathered more than 50000 signatures. The RSPB invites its members to send a message to Vince Cable under the slogan ‘some cuts never heal’. The Woodland Trust is also among the groups encouraging their members to post messages in support of the existing body of environmental legislation.

Government departments have issued some responses to the initial wave of indignation about the Red Tape Challenge from environmentalists. First up, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) moved on 20^th April to issue the reassuring statement that:

“The Climate Change Act is here to stay and is central to the coalition’s policies to cut emissions and incentivise investment in the green economy….[b]ut given the crucial role business has to play in the low carbon transition it’s only right that the government looks at how this can be done in as business friendly a way as possible and at least cost to consumers and business.”

But refraining from repealing primary legislation in its entirety is no guarantee of continual progress towards the achievement of its goals. The tension in DECC’s carefully-negotiated statement is obvious, three weeks on, from the row that broke out across government departments (and between Lib Dem Ministers) on the adoption of new carbon budgets – ultimately adopted. There were calls for David Cameron to intervene in the face of Vince Cable’s claims that the latest round of proposed carbon budgets recommended by the independent Climate Change Committee, and supported by Chris Huhne at DECC, excessively burden the UK economy.

With DECC’s clarification on the Red Tape Challenge issued, on 24^th April DEFRA published this double-speak statement on its website:

The myth: there have been reports in the media that important environmental regulations in legislation such as the Wildlife and Countryside Act, National Park Act, Clean Air Act and the Climate Change Act could be scrapped as part of the Government’s Red Tape Challenge.

The truth: Defra is committed to enhancing the natural environment and there are no plans to remove important environmental protections. The Red Tape Challenge is about examining and understanding the impact of regulation on the people, businesses, and communities it affects, to ensure that it is proportionate while delivering the desired outcomes.

This reader doesn’t find the ‘myth’ busted at all. DEFRA’s statement – one of 23 on an extraordinary ‘myth-busters’ section of its website – serves principally to sound even deeper alarm bells.

A reminder: the Cabinet Office, home of the Red Tape Challenge, says this: “here’s the most important bit – the default presumption will be that burdensome regulations will go. If Ministers want to keep them, they have to make a very good case for them to stay”.

The devil is in the detail, and here we have it: it’s ‘important environmental protections’ versus ‘burdensome regulations’. Neither DECC nor DEFRA provide any guidance on how trade-offs will be managed when it comes to the inevitable balancing act between competing Ministries.

The Cabinet Office’s ‘default presumption’ is so clearly stated that it is as if government faces no balancing acts.

We now may be seeing the start of sustainable development policy subsidence on a grand scale. We will all be the poorer for it; and so will our democracy.