The BBC – in it’s current incarnation – sees itself as an asset to liberal democracy in a variety of ways. I do to – and given our many failings as a democracy (our centralisation, our unelected second-chamber, our politically independent civil service, the huge unchecked power of pressure groups and media-owners, etc), the BBC [...]
Posts under ‘Distributed moral wisdom’
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 [...]
The myth of easy engagement: Evans’ Law?
Just a quick response to Tim Davies’ verygood post about ‘The Myth of Easy Engagement’. There is one argument that supports his general position that, I think, he misses. I’m sure that sooner or later, some will come up with a frivolous law (like ‘Godwin’s Law‘ or ‘Muphry’s Law‘) but if they don’t, let me [...]
Collective action and participation
From TechPresident: “Indiana Univeristy’s Elinor Ostrom focuses her work on how people can go about creating rules for transactions around shared resources, or “commons,” that make collective action rewarding (enough) for everyone involved. And where she added a particularly new way of thinking to economics was to zero in on the economic transactions that take [...]
Football phone-ins v consultation exercises
Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point. Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and [...]
Bloggers and transparency
One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse. The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have [...]
Transparency – sticking plaster or panacea?
MySociety‘s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned. Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent. “….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly [...]
Reality scores from the rebound
Direct democracy experiment MyFootballClub was featured in recent online movie Us Now. You’ll remember the MyFC website took over Ebbsfleet United (the former Gravesend and Northfleet) and promised its members all the experience of running a real football club, team selections, transfer listing players, and the rest. According to a piece on the When Saturday [...]
The Whitehouse is using MixedInk
Readers of this blog could be forgiven for believing that I’m on some sort of commission scheme for Debategraph and MixedInk. Like the best ideas in this field, these two projects have focused their energy on getting the idea right and the initial project out of the door. That’s a long way of saying that [...]
A few signposts off
We can learn things from the way they elect Popes – and the way they used to. Chris Dillow reprises his ‘extremist not a fanatic’ theme – that it is rational not to care too much about politics – and that politics benefits from our indifference. And finally ‘Reboot Britain’ will be worth keeping an [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
