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.

Flip-cams: The sword of transperency or an engine for selective reporting?

My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some good journalistic legwork to conclude that…

“…Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police have simply acted in an altogether hapless, illiberal, and alarming manner. A person, surely, should not be arrested and detained just for filming a public council meeting, and a council should not be able to prevent someone from doing so in this manner. In my opinion, all the councillors, officials, and police officers involved in this sad sequence of events really should be ashamed of themselves.”

I’m in two minds over whether the flip-cam will improve the quality of local democracy, and I think this highlights some of the tension between liberalism and the good practice of liberal democracy.

On the one hand, all of David’s arguments stand – and then some. Surely a good democracy should remove any barriers that stop people from viewing democratic proceedings? Transparency will result in less corruption, better decisions, a greater sense of participation, and so on.

On the other hand, there are a few snags. Firstly, if individuals are doing this selectively – on issues that they care about, we will naturally expect to see a bias towards issues that small groups of individuals care about. These may be (but not always will be) subjects that effect people who have more time/resources on their hands. If this becomes the main way that Council meetings are covered, it can expose councils to more pressure group politics.

This may be at the expense of the decisions that many of us – people with mild preferences and a need to see policy serve the interests of the whole community – would expect to see from local authorities. I know I trot it out a lot, but the example of a more direct democracy provided by California should be a shocking example to us all.

So, is a balanced view of proceedings going to be distributed by citizen journalists? Or will it inevitably result in selective reporting?

Blogger arrested for filming council meeting http://t.co/4CpUfyN MP and public barred http://t.co/wwwR6Gs who do these ppl think they are?

June 12, 2011 12:16 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengoldacre

ben goldacre

Another question: Does this drive up the quality of deliberation (i.e. do Councillors raise their game?) or does it result in either a more guarded approach or, conversely, a more soapboxy style?

We expect councillors to behave in a disinterested way and there must be some parallel here with the jury room: Would juries make better decisions if they were selectively recorded?

Then there’s the question of professional journalism. I know this is a moot point at the moment, given the headlong retreat from half-decent reporting among local newspapers. But we expect pro-journos to cover issues in an even-handed way, catering to mild preferences of a broad audience rather than the narrow views of a deeply interested one.

Will this kind of guerilla coverage drive this kind of reporting out? I posted here a couple of years ago about the negative impact that opening Parliamentary proceedings out had – the conclusion was that newspapers stopped covering it because anyone who was really interested could get the real thing on the radio or (later) TV. Will this apply to local authorities, or are we in a different ballgame with local politics?

In my experience, the answer may be that councils should routinely film all proceedings and index them professionally. This will reduce the scope for selective coverage and allow visitors who follow the links the option to hear all of the points (and the context provided by professional local government officers) to the proceedings. It will also allow people to drop randomly into a council meeting and see a broad range of issues being discussed responsibly (or not).

A firm in Brighton called Public i (declared interest: I’m personally friendly with a few of the team there) have been offering a web-casting service aimed at local authorities for some years – it indexes each speaker which saves you ploughing through whole meetings if you’re only there for a particular reason [random example here].

Surely councils need to pro-actively promote a public awareness of the whole of their work? Given the low interest in local politics, it will make it easier then for local journalists to report procedings and may result in more broad coverage. Unless they do this, we can expect selective reporting to dominate agendas more and more.

Pic from 'recycled scissors (click for original)

… 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 Post quotes one Heather Wisnicky saying:

It’s your choice, it’s your child…government can’t rule us on everything we do,”

So there’s the oppression of minorities argument for starters. It also addresses some wider issues around family law – the secularist argument that our children must choose their religion for themselves. On balance, I’d probably agree with that one, but we have to ask where it will end.

Should we, for instance, be banned from raising our children in the faith of our own choosing altogether? No daily prayers? No baptisms? No rite-of-passage rituals, worship or sacraments? In the long run, hours each week practicing a religion add up to an imposition far more severe that a little snip at a time in your life that you’ll recover from it fairly quickly?

Some big decisions about social rules are probably best left over long periods of time when they will work themselves out tidily rather than the short, sharp shock of a public referendum.

(Hat-tip: Maria)

PS: You have no idea how many very poor jokes I’ve added and deleted in drafting this post. Even this interesting study of the health benefits is worth reading if only to find the name of the World Health Organisation’s quoted doctor.

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.

Copenhagen Climate Change Summit: Failed by the decline of 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 combine people with any efficiency. Heiferman gave an example of Seth Godin sending a tweet urging people to use Meetup in order to discuss his work. Within days, hundreds of events were organised all over the world to do so.

John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation followed Heiferman to the podium and told us that Barack Obama deserved a good deal more credit than he was being given because he’d inherited the task of government – an idea that in itself was becoming broken thanks to the Internet.

A recent edition of BBC Radio 4′s Analysis programme – Doomed by Democracy (featuring our own Halina Ward) focused on the unwillingness of democracies to address the demands from the scientific consensus around climate change.

Mark Littlewood of the Institute for Economic Affairs argued that a good deal of the problem was down to over-spinning on the part of the scientific establishment. If they were to refrain from this, he argued, the public would be more likely to take their claims on face value. It’s an argument that entirely ignores the fact that commercial pressure groups will not limit themselves in the same way – in direct opposition to the general public interest. In a more direct democracy, the unequal ability to convene entirely undermines the notion that the quality of argument should be a deciding factor in a debate.

The Analysis programme was a bizarre one in which ‘democracy’ was taken to mean a debased variation on Direct Democracy. Here, the ability to combine (see the way that newspapers whipped up the anti road-pricing petition a few years ago) showed exactly what the challenge from those who have “knowledge of how to combine” means. It doesn’t mean that democracies are incapable of making decisions that are unpopular in the short-term.

I feel a post coming on along the lines of ‘how democracy can be saved by a rejection of direct democracy in all it’s forms’. At my current rate of posting here, though, don’t hold your breath willya?

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 End

I’m looking forward to reading a few crits of what has made the final cut, but in the meantime, here’s a purely personal observation on this:

I’m no Tory myself, and it would be unfair of me to present myself as any kind of neutral on this question, but the Tories’ plans for local government are easily the most worrying aspect of their policy development in recent years. Sir Jeremy Beecham highlighted the threat that this has presented to representative democracy at the time:

The truth is that the effect of these proposals would be to undercut representative local democracy and diminish the appeal of service as a local councillor.

For me, one of the biggest local policy foul-ups has been the implementation of choice in local schools – where pushy-parents can game the system to ensure that their kids end up in schools that are more socially exclusive than the old Grammar Schools. As far as I can see, so many of aspects of public policy today seem to be about finding ways of getting people who could be paying tax into a position where they aren’t – and where they are the key beneficiaries of those who do pay it.

Is every aspect of local public spending going to be gamed in this way? I think that this is what the Tories have in mind, and we should be worried about that.

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 he seems quite hung up on issues of individual liberty and he says he’s in favour of positive democratic reform. His slogan is “Whatever the majority vote is, I will vote that way.”

I’ve addressed this issue here in the past at some length [most recent related rant here] but I think I can leave it to Lolcats to explain the trade-off problem that presents one of the biggest challenges to this direct democracy approach:

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.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

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 and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?

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 risk accordingly)

Slow-loading screens weed out all but the most determined

So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time?

Of course, this makes a massive case for investment in ‘usability’ (and going beyond usability – almost into seduction) – making the online experience a compelling and pleasurable one. Compelling, not compulsory, as David Barrie puts it here. The ‘Nudge‘ argument, if you like? But it also makes the case for investment of time and energy in ways of getting people to make quick light responses on issues where they care very slightly rather than strongly.

Is there a case for using mobile phones to do surveys – sending people text messages and saying ‘answer our five questions and we’ll refund £2 from your council tax.’ This will incentivise people who….

• don’t have access to a computer, sufficient bandwidth or a local authority that could design a usable interface if their lives depended upon it
• don’t care about specific issues enough to sit through a clunky consultation questionnaire online
• think that saving £2 would make a slight difference to their lives

In other words, exactly the opposite kind of people who normally get involved in consultations in order to provide responses that are unrepresentative (and therefore, often worthless). If – instead of valuing people’s time at £0, we value it at £2 (or whatever figure finds the right equilibrium), we will get a more representative sample of collective wisdom.

I’ve been researching mobile phone multi-question survey platforms and I’d be interested to see if any local authority and government body would consider this approach instead of the usual ‘come to our website and Have Your Say’?

Two things.

This is ‘why pie charts stink’ – a nice programme for visualising data:

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 there as an idea. The site looks a good deal more useful now – here’s a useful primer on direct v representative democracy for you.

Click for picture credit

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 an NHS would be run against the backdrop of UK media coverage of America’s simultaneous healthcare debate. Every “death panel” and “compulsory abortion” myth concocted on K Street would soon be digested by British correspondents in Washington before being tailored for a UK audience as an insight into the fallout from the introduction of “socialised medicine”.

….you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Over the coming months climate legislation will be discussed before the Senate. A vote is expected next year and a hurricane of hysteria is already forming, with Britain’s climate debate likely to be caught in the vicious tailwinds.”

I’d be interested to know how Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell would see this issue being dealt with in the fantasy direct democracy that they would like lead us into. Everyone with a political bone in their body likes to foist the ‘worse than Hitler’ charge upon their political opponents. It’s usually inadvisable and rash.

But if the worst fears of climate change scientists come to pass, our grandchildren may well have the advocates of populism and direct democracy right up there with the brownshirts in their demonology.

Just a thought….