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 ‘Deliberative democracy’
Democracy mirroring social media activity, party whips and ‘ishoos’
Firstly, Catherine has an interesting post up here. No conclusions yet, but definitely worth following. Secondly, Tom Watson – in one of the final votes of the last Parliamentary session – rebelled against the government for the first time in his career over the Digital Economy Bill. I’d say I’m in a minority in admiring [...]
Three signposts off
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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, [...]
