Another day, another step in the right direction. Boris Johnson is opening up around 200 datasets about London along with an offer of from Channel 4’s 4iP fund of up to £200,000 to help developers to create innovative applications that use it.
Why is this exciting to anyone with an interest in local democracy? Well, it [...]
Posts under ‘Unelected agencies’
More data for you
Copenhagen Climate Summit widens rift between local and global approaches
I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.
I work for the [...]
Bloggers and transparency
One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse.
The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have conducted [...]
Detoxifying big decisions
Last week, David Cameron offered a fairly populist ‘bonfire of the quangos’ proposal, with the implication that politicians would take back many of the toxic decisions that they had farmed out to overpaid bureaucrats.
In the FT the other day, Philip Stephens questions the emphasis:
“…broadcasting policy accounts for only about 5 per cent of Ofcom’s workload. Moving it [...]
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 saying anything.
When [...]
Trust
Further to this (very good) post by ‘Living with rats‘ (name explained here)
“Never trust public servants, the community leader said. ‘They always dump you. They never keep their promises. They’ll always let you down.”
…. here’s rent-a-rant Charlie Brooker on good form:
But if the media’s rotten and the government’s rotten and the police are rotten and [...]
Home PgDn
Time for a look at Chapter three of the Conservative local government green paper, Shift Control.
This chapter is the section of the green paper that focuses on democracy, so there’s a lot to talk about. The chapter says that a Conservative Government would:
provide citizens in all our large cities with the opportunity to choose whether [...]
How the Arts Council is showing no sign of learning it's lesson
If ever there is an organisation that is perceived to have lost touch with almost all of it’s stakeholders (apart from the management consultants who decided how central government should assess their performance), it’s the Arts Council of England. Here, Ivan Pope outlines what they should be doing to re-connect.
That post includes a spot of [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
