I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.
Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists [...]
Posts under ‘Deliberative democracy’
Three signposts off
Using a weblog crowdsource intelligence
I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.
As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic [...]
Poblish: a new vision for blogging, and content-based policy crowdsourcing
This is the third in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. In part 2, last week, I described how existing content – the blogosphere, in particular – is currently used, or perhaps abused, by policymakers.
This time, I’m going to cover a range [...]
Poblish: crowdsourcing new policies, and why blogging has to change
This is the second in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. Last week I made the case for using existing content – blog posts; Wikis, like Debatepedia; and visual debate-mapping tools, like Debategraph – as a knowledge base to drive new policy [...]
Two applications worth looking at
Two things.
This is ‘why pie charts stink’ – a nice programme for visualising data:
Dashboard 1
Powered by Tableau
Secondly, further to Andrew’s Poblish posts, I’ve just revisited Debatepedia. I met one of the Debatepedia team last year at the WeMedia conference and I had to say at the time that it didn’t seem to be quite [...]
What’s missing from this picture?
Via Spartakan, I’ve just seen this outline of how local debate could be / is structured. And, initially, it looks fairly complete as long is it is covering only debate, as opposed to policy-making.
I think it’s a useful diagram, and I don’t have the time to do this properly – graphic design is a non-trivial [...]
More data for you
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 [...]
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, we [...]
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 their [...]
Going to extremes. ‘Whataboutery’: polarisation v ‘the hive mind’
I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein’s ‘Going to Extremes‘ lately – it’s worth a look.
Sunstein’s conclusion – that when we are filtered into like-minded groups that we reinforce each other’s prejudices and tend to reach more extreme conclusions than we would if we were on our own – is not a particularly startling one in [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
