One of the advances that the long tail of the blogosphere has brought us is that some social work gets reported properly. Not the way that newspapers often report them, in their need for sensationalism. And, of course, they do it all for nothing. Take Random Acts of Reality, for instance. The latest post is [...]
Posts under ‘Public administration’
Beta legislation: Changing the concept of ‘leadership’?da
The January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine has a bunch of policy-related proposals under the slightly familiar heading ‘Let’s Reboot Britain’. It’s always a slightly trying time, reading Wired when it strays into politics and public policy. For an example of what I’m talking about, this article (Synopsis: I know! Now somebody’s invented teh internet, [...]
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 [...]
Democratic, decentralised and difficult
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 [...]
E-petitioning flow diagram
Peter Cruikshank has pulled together a really useful post here, complete with print-off-able pictures – a very useful resource for every local authority to use to find out about e-petitioning (and every local authority will have to know about petitioning shortly). It’s been done as part of the Europetition project, but most of it is [...]
Petitions and e-petitions: A few observations
Last week, the a 10 Downing St petition resulted in Alan Turing receiving the apology and recognition that he has long deserved. And petitions are likely to become a much more prominent fixture of public life in the next year or so. My sources in Westminster tell me that the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction [...]
Breaking the monopoly that civil servants have in describing government
Charlie Beckett has yet another good post up – this time, over at OpenDemocracy. The point of Networked Journalism is that the citizen as an individual and as part of these organisations is now part of the production of news communications. The relationships offered by networked journalism offer the potential for increasing trust in that [...]
Strengthening local democracy, kinda
I’ve just read through the new Strengthening Local Democracy Green Paper, and I can’t sum it up better than Talking Heads did in their 1977 hit, Psycho Killer. Not the refrain “better run, run, run, run away”, but the verse: You start a conversation you can’t even finish. You’re talking a lot, but you’re not [...]
Against participatory democracy
Brian Barder’s excellent – and comprehensive – opposition to ‘participatory democracy’ has been up and commented-up for long enough to be worth a second visit if you’ve seen it already. My only problem with it is that posts such as this probably have an obligation to advocate consultation – in it’s most creative and energetic [...]
