The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer. My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some [...]
Posts under ‘Direct democracy’
The next ballot in San Francisco could prove to be a bit of a close shave…
… so to speak. According to the Huffington Post, California’s direct democracy fetish is stepping into new areas including the practice of infant circumcision for religious purposes. It brings up a number of interesting issues. On the one hand, it raises questions for libertarians – often the most vocal advocates of more direct democracy. The Huffington [...]
Why referendums should be banned
Apologies again for the light posting. I’ve written an extensive round-up of the main arguments (that I can think of) against referendums. The full post is over on Slugger O’Toole and a slightly edited (shorter) version is on Liberal Conspiracy. Both were published yesterday.
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 [...]
Conservative local government proposals
The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut. It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today. Shift Delete Command backspace SysRq F12 Home PgDn Escape [...]
I can haz a vote on everyfink?
I’m surprised that it’s taken so long, but someone has finally launched a web-based candidacy for the election. In this case, the deal is that – if he wins, he will put every issue to the vote on his website and vote accordingly. There are some issues where he outlines exceptions to this rule, and [...]
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 [...]
A way of involving the ‘hard-to-reach’ groups and the expense of the ‘hard-to-avoids’
Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the [...]
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 [...]
Climate change and the lobbyists
I meant to pick this up a few days ago – I’ve been too busy to blog as diligently as I’d like to. In the Times, Greenpeace’s Joss Garman says: “Imagine if, instead of 60 years ago, the Labour Party was trying to create a National Health Service today. The right-wing campaign to scupper the formation of [...]
