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).

I really don't know if Niccolò would endorse this advice...

Thirty is a big number – too big for me. But I’ve got a few observations that I’ve been working on that I’d like to offer – in beta – that are intended to help people who are already politicians adapt to the way that interactivity has changed the way that public life is conducted.

There are new possibilities, pitfalls and expectations that need to be met. Here are my ten (draft) ground rules for interactive public representation.

Some of them involve a fundamental rethinking of the standard advice that has been offered to young politicians through the ages:

1. Cut your workload by effective listening. A lack of thinking-time results in indecision and procrastination. Find ways of asking for solutions to small problems and internalising the answers without it disrupting your work. Establish a network of informers – people who will give you short summaries of the key questions that you are facing and answers to little questions. A briefing on how you consume shared information will help here. This is what Twitter can do for you.
2. Build a network of people that you deal with. Social networks are important – they ensure that you have a well of goodwill to draw upon. New technologies allow you to stay in the peripheral vision of large numbers of people. You can even approach a sub-set of your networks and invite them to take very simple steps that will promote your work more widely. To join your ‘relay team’.
3. Find ways of keeping that network informed without doing any extra work. Increasingly, you can show your networks that you’ve read / done / attended something by adapting your personal systems. Many effective communicators use social networking tools effortlessly once they’ve investigated how some APIs and RSS feeds work (you can ask a social media geek to spend a short time sorting this out for you if you need to). This can effortlessly solicit useful recommendations and let the people who work with you know what you’re really interested in. Remember, we all vastly overestimate how much the people we need to know about us actually do know.
4. Switch ‘broadcast’ off. There are ways of effortlessly providing your network of informers with positive feedback and evidence that you have heard them. This will motivate them to provide you with more, better information. The really valuable thing that social networks offer is a cluster of articulate people that you can eavesdrop upon (in a non-sinister, non-intrusive way, naturally). Broadcast is becoming less useful to you anyway for reasons that I’ll come to shortly.
5. Don’t ask for solutions – ask for descriptions of problems. To do the former will attract lobbyists and force you into a frustrating auction of promises. Doing the latter will give you time to think, allow rival pressure groups to neutralise each other, and help build a consensus around any decisions that you ultimately make. Your network of informers and staff need to understand that you expect high standards from those who brief you but this often encourages rather than discourages them. Psychiatrists never tell you what do to. They tell you to talk through your problems. The right answers suggest themselves. That’s ‘the talking cure’.
6. Show your working. By making decisions in a more transparent way, you can explain trade-offs, enhance your reputation for inclusivity and avoid accusations of partiality. The ‘crowdsource a description of the problem’ advice helps here. In the past, this involved bureaucracies and checks and balances. It created monopolies and gatekeepers. It is so much easier to do this now in a highly visible, productive and human way. This is what a blog can help you with.
7. Certainty stops you thinking and silences your advisors. Projecting an air of open-mindedness and a willingness to be persuaded results in better decisions and fewer unintended consequences.
8. Avoid unnecessary partisanship. Politicians always overestimate how much it impresses others. It creates unwanted enemies and cuts off the valuable flow of information that your networks can bring you. Politicians often confess that their best advice sometimes comes from candid and not-unfriendly opponents
9. The ‘big idea’ is dead. Think about it. When is the last time that a politician or organisation ‘unveiled’ a ‘solution’ or a ‘Big Idea’ that no-one had thought of before? Remember how well that was received? Forget it. People don’t want to read your prescriptions. They want to work with you to write them. Your problem – indeed, this may be the biggest ethical challenge that you face – is how you ensure that your interactivity doesn’t skew your decisions in favour of the interests of ‘active citizens’ and away from those of people with mild preferences or those who are unable or unwilling to interact with you when you’re framing your policies.
10. Be good. There was a time that politicians could inhabit a closed order in which they were only judged by the standards of their caste. Those days are over. By being open and interactive, by building a network of friends and informers, by showing your working and being inclusive in the way you make decisions, you will be able to take your place among the more trusted and respected associates that the public encounter every day.

OK, OK, they’re not finished. And none of them ar

(Note: A minor edit was added at 9.58am to point 9)

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 their draft NHS manifesto launch. It’s a very savvy way of avoiding the appearance of control-freakery that has dogged Labour’s ‘Big Conversation’ while at the same time weeding out the trollery that neuters a lot of online political discussions.

But on a bolder canvas, their offer of £1m to the developer of the website that can “harness the wisdom of the crowd” by producing an online platform to solve “common problems” is very striking. The dovetailing of this approach with Cameron’s notion of the post bureaucratic age is very deft.

There are a number of constructive responses to this, but they don’t really include Marina Hyde’s bit of hired trollery. Rosa Prince at the Telegraph has picked up on what appears to be an imaginary hostage to fortune here – the opportunity that the internet offers to give the people who call Radio 5′s 606 phone in the opportunity to pick the England team. The Ebbsfleet United project was designed to offer living proof of this blog’s central thesis – the value of representative democracy – and Anthony’s account of it here is worth revisiting this. But as far as I can see, Hunt has simply not mentioned the idea that the England squad is a suitable candidate for crowdsourcing.

In a recent Times column, Matthew Parris touches on a fair bit of what must – and should – make up the Tories motivation in all of this:

Responding to Margaret Thatcher’s unfairly quoted remark, “There is no such thing as society . . .”, Mr Cameron has said, repeatedly: “There is such a thing as society; it’s just not the same as the State.” I’m sure Cameron wants the phrase to be seen as a philosophical anchor.

He concludes:

There will never be a better time to make that journey, now everybody knows that the State cannot afford its present level of beneficence. Do Cameron Conservatives acknowledge, even to themselves, that if they are going anywhere at all, this must be their destination?

There is a sweet spot here: where doing the right thing is also doing the populist thing and doing the Tory thing: a move to break the monopolies that dominate policymaking – the think-tanks, pressure groups, civil servants and party bureaucrats – is long overdue. Only £1m to fix such an obvious glaring hole? As a Labour supporter, I find the neatness of it to be quite crushing.

But beneath that, a serious attempt to gamechange the failing public policy processes  needs to understand what causes those failings. Using the internet to break one stranglehold only to step into another one would be disastrous, and the Tories do have bad form in this department. For example, this approach needs to be a good deal more literate than last years’ bloody awful ‘localism’ proposals.

What stands out from the Editors Notes in the press release is that – largely – this plan is avoiding many of the populist forms of crowdsourcing that are likely to result in poor-quality policymaking. The refreshing thing here is that there is no simplistic appeal to anyone with a bit of time on their hands to Have Your Say. This is an important concession. There is, however, a danger lurking in the final bit of the editors notes – ‘Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in policymaking’. It looks suspiciously like a muffled appeal for a lot of expressed opinion.

I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the editors notes were written by … ahem …. Tom Steinberg (who does know what he’s talking about and has the imagination to adapt good ideas from elsewhere) and then that last one was added by a politician who didn’t really understand the idea properly.

There are a number of reasons why the harvesting of expressed opinion will not necessarily (or even usually) result in good quality policy-making. These are – in no particular order:

The ‘detached wisdom’ problem: if you want to find out what people really think, you have to find a way of getting a representative cross-section of people to lodge their mild preferences. Stockbrokers will often advise you make your best judgments when you are not emotional about stock. There appears to be a parallel here with The Long Tail argument: That the most evident views on any subject are either those who really REALLY care or who have a vested interest in a particular outcome. The larger volume, however, comes from the general bubble of conversation that is largely ignored by the media and by politicians. If policymakers only have the opportunity to hear what self-styled experts or enthusiasts have to say about a particular subject, they will miss precisely the wisdom that Jeremy Hunt seems to be looking to harvest.

The ‘active citizen’ problem: related to the ‘detached wisdom’ one: Time-rich, often more materially wealthy than average with particularly strong views on specific issues. It makes for shrill, populist, non-inclusive policy-making and it foregrounds the concerns of a small social group over a wider one.

The ‘convening power’ problem: that wealthy or influential individuals (newspaper owners, celebrities) can campaign on particular hobby-horses at the expense of the issues that have more general lightly-held support from a wider range of people.

The groupthink problem: There is a point here that all points of the political compass should really acknowledge: That high-quality thinking is incompatible with the kind of groupthink that mass-media led politics promotes (a central plank of James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds thesis, by the way). This one is related to the ‘convening power‘ problem. Processes designed to harvest observations from the public will be gamed by political opponents, and particularly by newspaper editors. Outliers will be castigated and apostates will be hung out to dry. It’s also too good an opportunity for your political opponents to turn down.

I’ve argued before that the best way to harvest The Wisdom of Crowds is to quietly eavesdrop upon it rather than do it in a high-profile way. The form that questions take is important as well – asking the public to describe the problem rather than shout their proposed solutions at you. And these are the tasks that the semantic web can solve. It offers a tremendous potential for new forms of collaborative working and interdisciplinary exchanges. Again, the Tories are hitting exactly the right notes by promising to free up public data.

At this point of this post, I need to link to a good easy-to-read politician-friendly article entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’ I can’t find any at the moment, but if anyone has seen one, I’d welcome the link.

By the way, I’m not completely opposed to the idea of harnessing expressed opinion and finding ways of getting value out of it. This guy seems to be looking for this idea and I hope that they talk it through. But if the Tories want to spend their money wisely, they need to work with the sort of people who could write that essay and build a spec around it.

In fact, here is an idea that I’ll give them – something that they can do before they get their hands on that £1m Cabinet Office nest-egg: They can take the Conservative Party’s petty cash tin out and offer a £1,000 prize for the best essay entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’

It would need to be written for an audience of politicians and party bureaucrats and it would need to soft-pedal on the threat that this approach holds for party bureaucrats as well….

Pic: Karlonsea - click for credit

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.

Here’s where I’ve got to in understanding why (stick with me please: it’s also about consultation, deliberative democracy and the Sustainable Communities Act).

A lot of people like the idea of slowing traffic to 20 mph in residential areas (in a 2005 survey cited in a study for Transport for London, 75% of the British public supported 20 mph speed restrictions in residential areas). Less noise, less antisocial car-driving behaviour, less road-rage, reduction of casualties from road traffic accidents, and encouragement (perhaps) for people to leave their cars take to public transport.

All this has helped 20 mph zones to sweep across the country. The London Borough of Southwark (where I live) aims to make 20mph the default speed limit across the entire borough. This sounds good to me.

But this is the problem. It would appear that 20 mph zones cannot, by law, effectively be implemented unless ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming measures are adopted at the same time. In other words, you can’t have a 20 mph zone unless you simultaneously accept measures like chicanes, speed cushions, speed humps, raised tables, pedestrian islands and the like.

As a (former) lawyer, and therefore something of a nerd about rules, I wanted to know why I kept coming across this argument. In fact, that I’m aware of it at all is down to the e-democracy practised on the East Dulwich Forum where local councillors interact with a very active local community. (Sadly that’s not the ward I live in or my rapidly developing views about 20 mph zones might not have ended up here!)…

Eventually I found the legal answer I was looking for. And it’s clear that it perplexes even experts working within local authorities. For the legal reason that you can’t have a 20mph zone without lumps in the road lies buried in regulations governing the use of traffic signs.

The way this works is that The Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2002 say that a 20mph zone sign “may only be placed on a road if no point on any road (not being a cul-de-sac less than 80 metres long), to which the speed limit indicated by the sign applies, is situated more than 50 metres from a traffic calming feature”. And then the Regulations go on to list the traffic calming features.

Innocent, isn’t it?

But the result is that the real choices offered to people consulted on 20 mph zones are about the kind of self-enforcing traffic calming measure proposed (e.g. whether it should be a hump or a cushion). In contrast, often what people (including me) want to support is the effective enforcement of a 20 mph speed restriction, not the humps and cushions.

Speed cameras and interactive speed signs aren’t an option in a 20 mph zone since they’re not self-enforcing. Consultation responses that request them instead of cushions, humps and the like are therefore likely to be treated as irrelevant.

This poses major problems for public consultation, since unless extraordinarily good practice is followed; deliberative democracy even; it’s unlikely that people will realise what they’re being consulted on.

If you like the idea of a 20mph zone but hate the idea of speed humps, cushions, chicanes and the like, you’re on a hiding to nothing. But it must be unusual for residents to be told that in advance, or to be involved in decisions on what the alternatives might be before consultation on a specific traffic calming proposal linked to 20mph zone starts.

The other problem is simply the conflicting evidence on the pros and cons of speed humps and cushions and the complex balancing acts. Hump-topped ones seem more effective; but they cause greater problems for emergency vehicles and buses. Flat-topped ones don’t work as well, but people on busy roads (which need the speed restriction more) might end up with them because such roads are more likely to be used regularly by buses and emergency vehicles. Etc. If you’re fascinated by this, please see this report from Transport for London, by way of just one of many examples of relections on the subject.

This is a classic situation where deliberation, based on the full range of facts, is more likely to generate consensus. And lack of deliberation dissent.

The Department for Transport notes that: “The value of adequate consultation being undertaken cannot be over-emphasised. Without such consultation, schemes are likely to be subject to considerable opposition, both during and after implementation”. Indeed. Barnet borough council has had a policy of reviewing and possibly removing previously installed speed humps for some years.

For the time being I shall be responding to my current local consultation to say that I’m in favour of the new 20 mph zone that’s been proposed where I live, but not to the use of speed humps and cushions and other so-called ‘vertical deflections’ to enforce it.

In my case this is partly a nimby (‘not in my back yard’) response to extra vibration and possibly extra noise caused by having one directly outside my house. Not just that though: if I thought they’d work it’d be great. I don’t drive and I dislike speeding. But I’m convinced, by credible evidence from Southwark Living streets in particular that humps and cushions generally don’t work very well in my bit of London.

One street where a close friend lives is down to get a sinusoidal hump (why local authorities go out to public consultation using words like ‘sinusoidal’ without further explanation is beyond me). It’s a very short street which ends with a right angle turn up a hill. It would be almost impossible to speed up or down it if you tried. But presumably this and other streets (such as one which already has a speed camera) have to receive ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming features because otherwise they can’t form part of the 20mph zone.

What I want to be asked is whether I support effective enforcement of a 20mph speed limit in my neighbourhood (I do). And then I want a proper deliberative process about the options so that I understand why it’s really necessary if I do end up with a speed cushion outside my house. But that’s not the question on the table.

What we’ve been asked is not ‘do you want a 20mph speed limit in the zone shown on the attached map’ but ‘do you want a 20mph zone’. Legally there’s a difference; and the difference determines how my view gets counted. It’s obvious isn’t it? Um, not.

Ah; legalistic hairsplitting that only a nerd would get excited about.

The majority of people whose views, like mine, can’t count are likely to feel frustrated and alienated by the Council. My own frustration is partly directed at the Council for not giving us residents the full facts when they consult. But it’s also got a legal outlet; a bigger target to blame. So that’s comforting.

Now a council could in principle impose a 20 mph speed limit without ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming measures (at least I think it can; I’m not sure how it works in London); but that hasn’t been proposed in my neighbourhood; it’s very unlikely that it will emerge as an option out of consultation because people haven’t been told it might be an alternative; and anyway 20mph speed limits without additional ‘self-enforcing’ traffic calming are recommended by the Department of Transport only for use on roads where average speeds are already below 24mph (definitely not the case on my street save for when it’s too congested for cars to move).

Essentially ordinary 20 mph speed limits rely, like most others, on police enforcement. And the police may have better things to do than deal with calls about speeding cars in an area with a 20 mph speed limit, runs the argument.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with my specific views on speed cushions. The wider issues here are about deliberation and consultation.

Still, if you do happen to agree with me that speed cushions and humps really aren’t the best thing since sliced bread…. could this be an area where people should ask for their local authority to get new powers under the Sustainable Communities Act?

Then local authorities could adopt 20mph zones (not just limits), complete with signs, and experiment with alternative approaches to enforcement that don’t rely on speed humps, cushions and the like. Many residents would thank them; at least if there were good ideas on workable alternatives that didn’t involve citizens’ vigilante speeding patrols.

Might it be worth a coordinated effort if there’s another round of proposals under the Act to ensure that at least one such proposal gets through to the Act’s ‘selector’?

Long live localism and the ‘duty to involve’.

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 growing tendency of hon. members to text, e mail and twitter their way through parliamentary debates. According to his motion “greater interest is shown in e-mails and messages than in the contribution of parliamentary colleagues”, although he admits the practice is “at times quite understandable”.

I suspect that this is more of a topical debate than something Dr Pugh would die-in-the-ditch about, but it’s worth breaking down anyway. Does he have any valid arguments here?

Firstly, if MPs are sitting there gardening their inbox, then there is no question that he’d have a point. And if a bunch of MPs simply thumbing lengthy responses to emails into their Blackberrys during PMQs, it would soon take the life out of the whole spectacle. It would lead to the suspicion that they were in the chamber simply to be seen to be there.

Certainly, the body language around the chamber during PMQs doesn’t suggest this.

The other question is whether MPs are paying more attention to what their peers on Twitter are saying than what is said in the chamber. Leaving aside the fairly boring point that Dr Pugh is asking (we would surely expect MPs to be able to multi-task), the question of whether it is proper to tweet from the chamber rehashes some old questions raised elsewhere on this blog. For example…

• Would we allow a juror to tweet during a trial? And isn’t an MP supposed to be a bit open-minded in the way a juror is?
• Surely parliamentary debate is a closed system that relies upon a voter-mandate? You need to get elected to take part – not just qualify by thumbing 140 characters into a text message?
• Is tweeting really a recreational activity? And surely MPs should be sitting on very uncomfortable chairs plainly not enjoying themselves whenever we are looking at them
• Does it slightly damage the image of parliament by showing MPs engaged in a slightly trivial pastime?

… and there are plenty more similar questions whose answers would reveal what kind or representation we really want.

Then there is the question of how this improves the quality of thinking. On the one hand, Twittering – like getting involved in comments boxes on blogs – leads one into multilateral conversations of the kind illustrated on this old post of David’s – better than the very orderly (!) unilateral conversations that dominate parliamentary debate. Anyone who has used Twitter at a conference to conduct wider conversations will know the value that this can add. This must be a good thing, no?

On the other hand, there is the question of quality. Dr Pugh would have an open and shut case in arguing that conversations on Twitter involve snatches of commentary that are taken out of context. It would be impossible to offer much by way of context in 140 characters.

Critics of twitter characterise it (usually from a distance) as a confederacy of airheads. It would be hard to treat Twitter as a sober academic conversation. It is, however, a bubble of noise that one can tune into. It’s a way of keeping lots of people in your peripheral vision, and of being able to get an instant catalytic reaction out at the right moment.

I’d be interested to see if there are any examples of an MP either reacting to something in Parliament on twitter in a way that game-changed the debate (in the way that a good parliamentary heckle can). Or, failing that, has an MP picked something up from twitter that they then used as an effective heckle?

Another question: Has anyone had a Parliamentary question suggested to them on Twitter and then used during a debate? If an MP could illustrate that their performance as a questioner improved because of Twitter, then it would be a slam-dunk of an argument for Kerry.

Then there is the question of demagoguery. The pro-Twittering MPs argument is that it’s a good thing that people who make decisions are reacting to debate in a very candid way. This bespeaks a certain honesty and a willingness to justify oneself. But does it also leave the way open for demagogues to provide a populist running commentary on Parliamentary proceedings?

The allied question is the one about the use of reason. MPs are supposed to be open to debate. Does Twitter have the potential to reinforce popular mandates – particularly on totemic issues?

Leaving aside the rabble-rousing potential, this candid exchange is surely a good thing though? There have long been suspicions that elected representatives have been ‘captured’ by pressure groups. Moreso in the US, but it is still an issue here. MPs have sometimes had their offices staffed by willing ‘interns’ supplied by lobby groups, and this has stretched as far as having MPs using pressure groups to co-ordinate the conduct of a debate.

Twitter is much more candid than this, and any MP who is plainly dancing to a pre-determined tune would be less able to get away with it if s/he were twittering at the same time. Twittering is antithetical to opaque arrangements where the decision arising out of a debate has been pre-mandated either by a pressure group or party whips. It also allows MPs to illustrate the fact that most of these big arguments aren’t the binary questions that are presented by party spin-doctors. There’s often a much more granular discussion going on in the corridors and Twitter surely has the potential to reflect this? Especially at a time when the mainstream media are determined to conceal it as part of the process that Pierre Bourdieu described as ‘demagogic simplification‘?

But on the wider question, I’m finding it hard to be even-handed here. Surely Twitterers are being more interactive and conversational? How can this be anything but a good thing? And surely they are likely to be a bit more human and less narrowly dogmatic? They are plainly answering to a wider constituency by using social media tools. And surely they likely to be a bit more ironic in their detachment on big issues? Are they likely to be less prone to ‘the lust for certainty‘? Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve argued that these human traits in themselves provide important arguments in favour of representative democracy?

By Twittering, they are less unreachable and rare in their appearance. They may be more approachable as a result and enjoy a less adversarial relationship with local pressure groups?

And lastly, by using Twitter, MPs are staying in conversation with the people who elected them. They are showing their personal complexity to their constituents. If you would like the personal vote to become more important than party-voting (I do) then this will surely help in that direction.

On balance, I’m with Kerry on this one.

Update: Here’s Ton Watson on Twitter: @maggiephilbin As a minister, not a day went by where I didn’t glean insight from my Twitter community. As a backbencher it’s more fun too.

Supports Kerry’s point, doesn’t it?

PINing - the arms race continues (click for pic credit)

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 result of digitisation and FOI legislation. It has also transformed the way that representatives behave. One MP is now offering a ‘lifestream’ from her website!

We can speculate all we like about how this has impacted upon the quality of governance, but rightly or wrongly, politicians are constantly trying to evade this scrutiny – using different email addresses or other off-record channels.

In the US, it seems, the main worry is that it allows politicians to collude with lobbyists to an even greater degree than they do already. And in order to continue doing this, they are resorting to ‘PINing’.

The full story is here.

Professor Lawrence Pratchett

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 excellent to see someone looking at stuff that has already happened rather than running around trying to start something new the whole time.

The research picks up 6 tools but the 3 of these I am interested in specifically are:

• Participatory budgeting
• Petitions
• eParticipation

I think in the research and discussion it was clear that the first two of these are far more tangible and as such can more clearly be evaluated.

eParticipation was not defined well enough for my liking and seemed to talk too much about eForums which is such a small part of the potential. Where things did get interesting however was in talking about the link between empowerment and co-design – which is a connection I see very strongly.

Co-design seems to be a necessary part of empowerment but this brings a few problems that need addressing:

• Does Local Goverment really want to share power?
• Do the citizens really want to be shared with?
• What’s the role of the representative?
• Is it sustainable?

The seminar also made it clear to me how inadequate a tool based approach to empowerment is – you need a clear idea of what you want to create and a strategic vision for achieving this that goes beyond the tactical. This worries me because we are not even starting to have the debate around this with decision makers even though those of us thinking about these issues knows its essential. However much we prefer to do this by stealth we need to lobby and educate on a far wider basis if we are going to make these changes happen and I am not sure who is doing this or how it will happen – answers on the proverbial postcard please!!!

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 to Whitehall would scarcely mean “that Ofcom, as we know it, will cease to exist”. Some 90 per cent of Ofcom’s remit comprises unglamorous work such as telecommunications regulation, upholding broadcasting standards, allocating spectrum, and, crucially, policing competition. All this can properly be done only at arms length from civil servants and ministers.”

I’d agree with Stephens’ highly critical conclusions about the seriousness of the Conservatives here. All of that said, if MPs had to pick up that 5% that he mentions, it would be a minor triumph for common sense, the taxpayer and a for democracy as well.

Here are a few observations about OfCOM’s activities in the past year or so:

• Not content with having one place to farm out awkward questions, Lord Carter’s ‘Digital Britain‘ was launched in competition to OfCOM’s Public Service Broadcasting review
• In reply, OfCOM have strategically launched their local media review
• While this happened, DCMS have a new minister in the driving seat – one who shows no grasp of the policy questions or any disposition to ruin the end of his ministerial career with futile study
• … and anyway, whatever the DCMS decides, it will be overruled by the bafflingly named BERR
• Carter resigned before his report was published, undermining the whole shooting match

And where, exactly, does parliament fit in to any of this anyway?

These exercises were a complete waste of time. They have taken place in the context of impending General Election and the fin de siècle atmosphere in which all complex policy matters are discussed. Few of these conclusions are likely to result in legislation before the chess-table is turned on it’s head by an incoming government.

It’s a farce – and one that exists because Parliament doesn’t have the resources or the self-confidence to take these issues on in the first place.

We can assess the commitment to promoting ‘scrutiny’ at a local level from the main parties by looking at their attitude to these ‘political detoxifying chambers’ that QUANGOs partly provide. David Cameron could announce that he will ignore the outcome of both the Digital Britain review and any forays OfCOM is making outside of the more complex regulation of things like Radio Microphones – an issue that it would probably be unwise to hand back to Westminster.

Update: I’ve just seen this post over on Jim Godfrey’s blog:

The real solution in my view is not necessarily to weaken Ofcom by taking away PR functions and slashing salaries, but to strengthen the DCMS. Too much of their policy ‘thinking’ takes place elsewhere and they need a strengthened capacity – in concert with the Department for Business.

From Spaceman's Flickr pics

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 came up in this post (time enough for that / the archives here touch on a lot of the arguments anyway), but it pulled together what are, I think, four of the most interesting questions:

The one I posed was the old chestnut here:

“Nosey do-gooding interfering unelected self-important fanatical busybodies and how social media loves them.”

This was a flame-baiting conversation starter to smoke out what I’d see as the ‘direct democracy’ problem. Will Perrin responded with an outline of his own local media project along with a profile of a few others:

“Community empowerment through the web”

Will’s examples neatly punctured the simplicity of my arguments with really good examples of the way that active citizens have created very popular active local sites that highlight the pavement (or in Will’s case, the burning vehicle) problems. It illustrated the power of the crowds – ensuring that details get picked up on, demanding flexibility and imagination from local agencies while creating a degree of community cohesion and social capital. As it happened, the event was on the doorstep of Digbeth which has it’s own site – and the site-manager was there to outline her work.

An outline of Will’s work can be seen here on David Wilcox’s site.

For my part, I offered a range of theoretical objections to this. The potential for abuse from unelected ‘community activists’. Many of them are unrealised phantoms, but it wouldn’t do to discuss this issue without raising them. The notion of community leadership (or ‘Gauleiter’) or the ‘community representatives‘ that proliferate in Northern Ireland are the ones that spring to mind.

Also, in my local area, the most prominent local blog isn’t run by quite the benign ringmaster in the way that some of the sites Will highlighted are. It’s not really a community site, but it is one that acts as a local ‘gamechanger’ - and not necessarily one that is the unqualified public good that Will’s site is. It’s much more in the Victor tradition.

At one point, the conversation veered towards the question of local authorities and their response to the retreat from local reporting of the mainstream media. Will’s view is that – under no circumstances – should councils ever be allowed to publish their own local newspapers.

I’d suggest that Will’s position could be taken one step further: You could reduce local authorities websites down to the very bare bones: An unstyled bit of CSS that provides just the facts. This could be picked up by trusted service users and they could describe the councils services for them – providing information and a feedback loop in one go. As the Norwegians describe the whole Web 2.0 concept: “The ordinary citizen as a supplier of public sector information.”

All of this led to the prior established claims of representatives / mediators (trans: Councillors and trained local journalists). Will was a good deal more sceptical than I would be about thier respective qualities or legitimacy.

As you’d expect at an unconference, the real strength of the discussions was the spontaneity. Will and I only spoke for a few minutes preparing the session and one issue came up there that we didn’t get around to during the session:

My view is that active citizens are a valuable asset insofar as they can flush out all of the issues and help to provide a better description of the problems and the options that are open to councillors, but that elected councillors should always have the final say on policy issues.

Will doesn’t really agree on this. My understanding of his position is that the imperfections of our electoral system mean that councillors can only deliver for their particular ward if their party is in power. When in opposition, all of the resources pop up elsewhere in the borough.

I’d be interested to see research that illustrated this, but it has a prima facie credibility about it. This, combined with the all of the well-trodden questions around the legitimacy and competence of local councillors does add weight to his argument.

Resolving this one, I suspect that we’re slightly at cross-purposes, as my argument on the sovereignty of councillors is based largely on them making decisions about optimal policies rather than about the allocation of resources – not entirely extricable questions but slightly different ones.

Bit either way, this session threw up the contours of a big big debate that needs to play itself out over the next few years as new modes of communicaton change the relationships between elected members, political parties, local officials, active citizens, professonal journalists and the general public.

I’m not sure that these are just sociological questions either. The Labour Party was founded primarily to deal with the question of representation among the lower social classes – how to ensure that the poor could be represented and get elected and support themselves financially as politicians. I do worry that online communities have the potential for placing a time-rich articulate middle class in an authoritative local position at the expense of everyone else. The dynamics of conversations are so rarely as inclusive as we would like them to be.

These are all classical questions. They’re not new ones either (the Athenians would be familiar with some of the questions). They have a political significance – different strands of libertarianism use demands for a more direct democracy in an instrumental way, and they can lead to a more populist politics.

I’m glad we got the chance to open the conversation on these issues.

The four issues were, in summary

1. ‘The direct democracy problem’
2. The positive potential of local websites
3. Local authorities – should the step into the space vacated by local newspapers?
4. The old ‘councillor / journalist compact’ – fit for purpose?

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 the national political culture, starting from the top:

There are far too many ministers, all of whom think it is their job to generate initiatives; ideas are allowed to be developed and launched without any reference to those at the front line; change management and the time it takes is not treated seriously; there is complete lack of realism about how far the centre’s intended messages actually reach; civil servants fail to see or warn (or be allowed to warn) their masters that every new target or piece of guidance had an adverse impact on all these existing targets and instructions (not to mention local morale).

No disrespect to Matthew, but this is a very technocratic argument. The idea that there should be fewer ministers is perhaps not a bad one – though it needs to happen alongside a more powerful and independent Commons and a reformed Lords. No matter how many Ministers there are, however, they will still be put on a spot on the Today programme and asked to make a commitment that “[bad thing] will never be allowed to happen again.”

There are certainly real opportunities for reform in the fiscal squeeze that’s ahead. The barrier to transformation, though, is not hyperactive Ministers who don’t let technocrats manage, it’s an immature political dialogue in which the media and the public create and feed off outrage and disgust, while politicians sit on top of the bureaucracy and try to placate the beast.

This is a local government problem as much as a national government one. Anyone who has seen parents protesting about school places or attended a controversial meeting of the planning committee will understand that.

If the spending cuts to come are not to create more disaffection and anger, they can’t be done behind closed doors. They need to be discussed openly, in public, and real choices have to be set out clearly, not decided and then ‘consulted upon’.

People should have the chance to see the books, and have intermediaries more trusted than journalists to explain to them what the choices are. They then need to be able to express an opinion more nuanced than ‘I want everything for free’.

Creating the circumstances in which this can happen is part of a widening and deepening of active citizenship that is essential if the political world is to catch up with what today’s citizens expect.

I’m not so naive as to think that this level of openness will appear in the twelve months before a general election, although it would be nice to think that it could. Afterwards, though, if Labour or the Conservatives are really serious about localism and democratic reform, a big conversation, not a Big Conversation, needs to be created.

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 the processes in addressing difficult decisions (ones that often get put off because it’s easier to postpone something when you don’t know how to do it). It aims to offer a 360-degree view of problems and to remove the emotional biases wherever possible.

Another example of how we can play a constructive role contributing to decision-making processes at any level.

(Via Read Write Web)