Here’s Rory Sutherland on the Spectator blog: “….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change [...]
Posts under ‘Democratic thought’
Political Innovation No1: Towards Interactive Government
This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here: The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts: It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives [...]
Public service media as an asset to democracy: Where next?
The BBC – in it’s current incarnation – sees itself as an asset to liberal democracy in a variety of ways. I do to – and given our many failings as a democracy (our centralisation, our unelected second-chamber, our politically independent civil service, the huge unchecked power of pressure groups and media-owners, etc), the BBC [...]
Crowdsourcing policy? Politicians do this better than apps
The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties. It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in [...]
Lists and lessons
Mark Pack has a very good post up on Lib-Dem Voice – advice for budding politicians: ‘30 things every would-be politician should do this summer‘ (he was inspired by a similar post for aspiring journalists elsewhere). Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been [...]
Social capital and genocide
Once again, Stumbling and Mumbling relays a potentially huge insight here, as part of a wider post on how pogroms of various kinds can leave a lasting mark upon the place that they happened in: “When we compare the poorest with the richest nations, it is hard to conclude that social capital can produce less [...]
Swedenise us!
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 [...]
Moonbattery
George Monbiot is here writing about the Tea Party movement in the US. He argues that the European left could learn a thing or two from the US right. It’s an odd article. It contains this sentence…. “They have been promoted by Fox News – owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch – [...]
Is the milk out of the bottle?
Apologies for the very light posting here. Normal service will be resumed shortly – hopefully. In the meantime, can I direct you over to this post over at Left Foot Forward – well worth a read: “The election results show a total fragmentation of the political landscape. They produced, what we might call, a horrific [...]
Convening power and direct democracy
Tuning into the Personal Democracy Forum 2010 event in Washington, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com offered a nice quote from Alexis De Tocqueville: “In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge” It’s certainly true that state-sponsored organisations have even less of a monopoly over the ability to [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
