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 [...]
Posts under ‘Decision making’
The Conservatives’ £million question
I’m not a natural Tory (if you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m quite the opposite) but I can’t help but be impressed with their grasp of a few of the opportunities offered by new (potentially) democratic tools lately. The first one is their use of Google Moderator in the Q&A that is embedded in [...]
Local democracy and the strange case of speed humps and 20 mph zones
Speed humps: love ‘em or hate ‘em, here in the UK they’ve become a symbol of the traffic calming zeitgeist. Speed humps also pose a major challenge for local democracy. That’s because local authorities are legally hampered from taking full account of the commonly held view that whilst speed reduction is good, speed humps are bad. [...]
Does twitter damage the quality of parliamentary debate – or improve it?
Kerry McCarthy MP tweeted last night that she will be going in to bat for tweeting MPs on Radio 5Live later today. Her adversary on the show will be John Pugh MP – and Torcuil Crichton explains the background: Dr John Pugh, the analogue Lib Dem MP for Southport, has a motion down condemning the [...]
Transparency: The arms race hots up
E-mail has transformed the way that senior politicians behave. Fifteen years ago, almost all conversations between politicians, lobbyists, civil servants and everyone else were either verbal or on paper. Technology has made recording easier. Written communications are infinitely more index/searchable. It would be an understatement to say that the situation has been transformed as a [...]
Empowerment research – yes – actual research….
I went to an interesting seminar last week at the CLG (yes – unusual!) where Prof. Lawrence Pratchett and Dr Catherine Durose from De Montfort University talked about a recent systematic review they have carried out of a number of different empowerment tools. You can find the full report on the CLG site and its [...]
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. [...]
Community sites and active citizenship – a #LocalGovCamp roundup
LocalGovCamp roundup Dave Briggs surpassed himself on Saturday convening a terrific event in Birmingham. I’m hoping to pick up a number of issues that came up in different posts here, but I’d like to start with the session that I helped lead on. I don’t want to detail or argue any of the issues that [...]
Getting the politics right for reform
Matthew Taylor, former No 10 policy wonk, has an interesting article on his blog about public service reform. He rightly says that finances over the next few years are both a huge challenge to public services, but also an opportunity to make real change happen. That won’t come about, he says, without a change in [...]
Let Simon Decide
Because it’s probably wrong to write a post everyday about how marvellous Debategraph or Mixed Ink are as concepts, for a change, have a look at ‘Let Simon Decide‘. ‘Simon’ is an avatar for good decision-making processes and the collective wisdom of the site’s users. It’s designed to ensure that users go through all 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? 
