Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved authority.

The TPA: Corporate shills?

A great deal of our time as bloggers is thus spent exposing the same old partisan front groups – the left are interested in the TaxPayer’s Alliance, – corporate shills, and organisations that exist purely and simply for the promotion of a particular set of views. Right-wing bloggers hunted down a significant scalp last year, taking out the earlier incarnation of Labour List – a site that appeared to simply be a political attack dog, and one that wasn’t embedded in the better instincts of the blogsophere.

While individuals can always change their mind on an issue, interest groups cannot, and will not. Moreover, their neatly packaged set of proposals can be tempting for governments running short of ideas, and short of friends.

Whether the groups are ostensibly on the left or the right, their influence can only be bad for politics. In the name of “balance”, the essential politics within a debate – the key issues and arguments – is drained away, or rechannelled to the financial benefit of one organisation.

Why should we – as bloggers – put up with seeing the same discredited arguments trotted-out again and again, and which we have argued over and over again, when we have – at our disposal – a vast resource of evidence, argument, and opinion to call upon?

What I propose is a collective – and non-partisan – organisation of political bloggers, which will challenge the interest groups in the name of honest and open politics, and provide newspapers and online news sites with a central resource that allows them to dispense with the services of self-interested think tanks and self-styled experts.

These bloggers would come together whenever required, putting aside their partisan interests, to tap the blogosphere’s collected wisdom – and, just as importantly, its memory – to fisk, rebut, and generally trump groups that are used to thinking in relative isolation. Bloggers will have many advantages, not least access to background information about the groups, via SourceWatch et al.

Of course I don’t propose that bloggers attempt to produce consensus. Not only is this implausible, but it would be dishonest, and would drop us into the same trap as the BBC and others. While artificial disputes help no one, genuine disagreements must come out. The public must have access to the full range of political opinion – no political cause benefits in the long run from anything different.

All in all, by shaking up lazy journalism, exposing lazy thinking, and by undercutting the “go-to” groups and “experts”, the reputation of the political blogosphere – as simply the best resource for distributed thought and opinion we have – must surely increase.

Please join the Positive Political Blogging campaign on Facebook, and help spread the word!

Dave Briggs has a good post up about how organisations introduce technology. He contrasts the ‘JFDI’ approach (which stands for Just Do It) and a more boring sustainable approach.

Tactics: For teams that are scared of losing.

I’ve met Dave and he has very sensible views on Football. Our mutual friend Brian Clough could have contributed to this whole discussion. As he put it (here) …

“…tactics aren’t for me, they’re things that teams dream up because they might lose”

Translating that into Dave’s question, it’s basically about getting organisations to increase their desire and competence in the field of ‘interactivity.’ The rest – the tactical choices of which technology, the timelines and roll-out plan – become somewhat redundant when you are able to deploy a team that know what their jobs are and are happy, competent and confident that they can do them. This question applies to local authorities a good deal.

On the day that David Cameron is majoring on his notion of The Post Bureaucratic Age, there is a lesson here: So much of the division between the boring ‘tactical’ practitioners and the JFDI enthusiasts stems not from a gulf in the understanding of the technology, but in the willingness of individuals within organisations to interact.

I’ve spoken to meetings of councillors and officers at over 100 local authorities over the years, and I’ve watched the body language: When you suggest that it would be a good idea for councillors to use easy-to-use web-tools, the more senior officers in the room start to futz with their biros.

There are all kinds of ‘budget maximising’ bureaucratic reasons for this resistance, and I’m sure that this is partly Mr Cameron’s target here. But I’d suggest that there is a bigger obstacle here.

Demands for ‘transparency’ from public-sector bodies are fundamentally unfair for the reasons I’ve set out here. They are one-sided. Perhaps the biggest underlying theme in modern politics is the question of who gets taxpayers money? Is it the public sector, or their competitors in the private sector?

It’s a profoundly political decision. To demand transparency from one, not the other is to take sides, and I suspect that this is what the Conservatives are doing here.

Given the restrictions of commercial confidentiality, we can’t easily demand transparency from the private sector (though reformers demanding less short-termism in investment decisions may disagree).

One thing we can demand – from all economic actors – is more interactivity. If interactivity, not transparency were the war-cry, it would be a fairer, clearer instruction to give to everyone.

Peter Levine says…

“Although I acknowledge the value of expertise, we can identify several important general reasons why it is never enough and we always need citizens’ participation to tackle social problems.”

What follows is a list of three reasons why experts shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions on their own. It’s one of the best posts I’ve read on the subject, and rather than spoil it, I’ll urge you to read it all. However, there’s one issue that I’d have near the top of any such list that is missing (to be fair, the post is called Part One, so maybe Part Two is devoted to the question I’m about to raise). It’s this:

• Experts explain awkward issues satisfactorily to other experts. Their explanations are less useful to the lay-person
• Sometimes the public are given a glimpse of the experts’ explanation. More often, they see it through the dysfunctional prism of newspaper journalism
• Politicians – usually generalists -  then have to field an unsatisfactory briefing in the context of a bloody awful report in a newspaper – one that has been seized upon and further distorted by a pressure group of some kind.
• The politician then has to take the consequences of not taking the decision that the newspaper / pressure group prefers. If s/he does this successfully, they may only be substituting a very bad policy with a quite bad one (i.e. one based upon a partial understanding of the expert’s brief)
• And whatever happens, s/he has to bear any consequences of the policy’s failure

However, if more people are able to get at the expert’s advice, mash it around into something that proves to be a more accessible explanation (something that enables to politician to understand what the expert was really saying), then a more participative polity has improved an outcome. It can help to break the hold that newspapers and pressure groups have in describing problems, and this can only be a good thing, surely?

As an aside, Chris Dillow is often very good at dismissing experts in his own inimitable fashion.

Update: Before posting this, I saw that Peter has published part two of his critique of expertise. And he’s interviewed here on blogtalk radio.

Ewan McIntosh has picked another example of augmented reality up:

“Point your mobile phone at the person speaking at the lectern, the cute person in the bar or that potential recruit and see, hovering around their head, all their social networks, tastes in music and books, and dodgy photos from last night.”

The potential is quite interesting, but it’s also a bit scary. In a post here a while ago, I asked what the upsides and downsides were of forcing politicians to be ostentatious in their displays of personal virtue and openness. But former BBC Newsnight Editor Brian Walker seems to be going a good bit further in raising demands for personal transparency in this post quoting Mo Mowlem’s cancer specialist Mark Glazer over at Slugger O’Toole.

Shorter version: Mo Mowlem had a frontal lobe tumour – a condition that “can cause disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement” at a time in which she played a critical role in fostering the negotiation of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement. This was almost a wartime posting and any errors of judgement could have had serious consequences.

So, disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement then? Sounds familliar:

If you want to argue for mental health tests, then maybe you have to also demand a daily breathalyser? Churchill was thought to have rarely been sober beyond lunchtime during the war and we seemed to do alright in that one, didn’t we?

Senior corporate roles within PLCs have made both physical and mental health a pre-requisite. It’s not just footballers that have to have a medical as part of their job-interview any more. When a friend of mine sought a board-level post on one of the UK’s larger PLCs, I was astonished at the degree of intrusion that she had to agree to -it was not just the bog-standard psychometric testing either. One thing made this process manageable though: She was well advised not to tell anyone in her professional circle that she was applying for the job in the first place – something that she had no problem doing.

If it was public knowledge that she’d gone for the job, and she didn’t get it, then her mental health would have been a matter of public speculation.

Applying this kind of corporate risk-aversion to representative government adds a new layer of bureaucracy that politicians have to be responsible to – one that competes with their primary responsibility to those who elect them.

This isn’t entirely a one way street though, as the Guardian article that Brian points to notes:

“As time has worn on, Glaser has begun to feel that her illness may, oddly, have been a reason for the success of the peace talks, rather than a cause of instability that threatened them. “She was racing against time,” he says.”

Surely this is another argument for distributed authority in which decisions are taken in a collegiate way by a diverse group of individuals rather than they are made currently? And is this insistence upon individual public virtues actually a symptom of a decline in the quality of our democracy?

Perhaps a group of individual drunks, lunatics and hypocrites making collegiate decisions would make produce better policies than a group of buttoned up risk-averse purveyors of public cant with strong individual powers? And, as Brendan O’Neill argued a while ago, isn’t politics and democracy supposed to be about a clash of ideas and principles rather than a game of personal one-upmanship?

Further to my previous post on why visualisation of data matters – and what the potential abuses are in the hands of pressure groups.

I’ve just seen this video by an American pollster and data visualiser @alexlundry – he covers the deceptive use of visualisations and the way that lobbies use them.

He covers the reasons why this is a much more powerful way of presenting information.

He also covers …. oh, just watch the whole thing. It’s only a coupla minutes and it’s very good.

(via Tom, Tom and Russell).

I draw one hefty conclusion from it. We need to find a way to increase public awareness of how this data can be abused, manipulated and misrepresented using the devices that Alex has outlined here. This is an important bit of civil literacy that could counteract many of the threats that I outlined in my previous post here.

Perhaps a Tumblr-type website where any mashups that anyone sees are submitted, then people who know about it (or are prepared to read a few of the books in this presentation) give the mashup points based upon the provenance and honesty of the data and it’s use?

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 allows a large number of people to take existing technologies, adapt them slightly, pour the newly-available information into them and then present them to anyone who is interested. It creates fantastic new research possibilities, and allows developers to visualise the data in a way that may tell us something that we didn’t know already.

Continuing my theme from the other day, this is another way of crowdsourcing intelligence and judgement rather than expressed opinion.I suppose it’s worth putting all of this into the rubric that most of the bloggers on this blog use to define what is good and what is bad though. Creative use of policy-related visualisations are definitely a good thing. Anything that makes it easier for more people to participate in deliberative processes is, again, a good thing – especially if it involves getting lots of people involved in the design of services. Datasets + visualisations should help there.

My one concern would be the ‘arms race’ one. At the moment, government – representing (in theory) the interests of the nation as a whole, has one strong suit in it’s ongoing battle with sectional interests. It has access to large amounts of information and it has a large apparatus of civil servants, think tanks, academics and local politicians that it can use to organise, express and apply that data.

Government enjoys monopoly privileges. From a democratic point of view, this looks quite bad. The flipside of the question is this: If you make data that government previously monopolised open to the public, will it be used by a wide well-meaning group of civic minded individuals? Or is a body of people with a mandate to promote the interests of the nation as a whole handing one of it’s most valuable weapons to a well-financed group of vested interests? The question of institutional capture.

It’s certainly the case in the US that commercial lobbies have been able to supersede governmental bodies as the representatives of the US abroad. As just one example, it was widely acknowledged that the US position at WIPO in the mid 1990s was represented by commercial lobbies within the motion picture and music industries – and not bodies that were being managed from within government.

Like I say, on balance, this is a good thing. But we should be aware of the dangers.

If only all decisions were made by jurors, right....? (Click image for credit)

Like a minority of people who have watched what will surely be 2009′s official leitmotif - the demand for full disclosure from MPs – play out,  I’ve wondered when similar demands will be applied to those who rival MPs for power.

This phrase of Larry Elliot’s – explaining the roots of the current economic crisis – underline the problem here:

“But there is a motley band of discontents for whom business as usual, in whatever form, means that another crisis will erupt before too long. They argue that the exiguous nature of current reform proposals is explained by the institutional capture of governments by the investment banks, the world’s most powerful lobbying groups.”

Certainly, politicians have been teed up so that they can be whacked squarely whenever they get ideas above their station. Right now, it would be hard to make the case that MPs are the right people to take on Tom Wolfe’s over-powerful Masters of the Universe.

In the same way that the Ross-Brand affair was used to tee the BBC up by politicians who don’t wish the corporation well, there’s an argument that demands for transparency rarely come from an organisation’s friends.

Much of this has been led squarely from the political right. The Taxpayers Alliance and a range of right-wing anti-BBC bloggers have worked in tandem with media owners that have been frustrated with what they see as the BBC’s anti-competitive influence on the media landscape. Certainly, at this moment, the libertarian right is the key mover behind the UK’s anti-politics campaigns on MPs expenses for reasons that have more to do with a pro-direct democracy position than more short term party political advantages. The current scandal has, after all, hurt the Conservative Party as well as Labour.

It’s hard to seperate this question from the differing political attitudes to the decline of newpapers. In no less a place than The Washington Post, we see this:

“For the first time in American history, we are nearing a point where we will no longer have more than minimal resources (relative to the nation’s size) dedicated to reporting the news. The prospect that this “information age” could be characterized by unchecked spin and propaganda, where the best-financed voice almost always wins, and cynicism, ignorance and demoralization reach pandemic levels, is real. So, too, is the threat to the American experiment.”

From the left, there appears to be an emerging response. The first is to harass the newspapers, those who use the libel laws to suppress inconvenient truths and other pedlars of perverted science. Jan Moir, Trafigura, and the British Chiropractic Association have all felt the sharp end of this kind of crowdsourced hostility in recent months.

Over on OpenDemocracy, Tom Griffin wants to see lobbyists put more firmly under the spotlight. Certainly, this idea has some traction with the liberal centre, and in the US, the Sunlight Foundation is at least as concerned with transparency on the question of lobbying as it is on the personal conduct of politicians.

It’s hard to see where this will end. There is a case to be made for…

• Significant reforms to media ownership rules to ensure that the media is sufficiently pluralistic
• Similar reforms that ensure that commercial lobbies can be uncoupled from self-serving media interests (I argued this point in a good deal more detail over on Left Foot Forward)

I would suggest that this argument has a long way to go. The left doesn’t appear yet to have recognised the importance of rescuing journalism in the way that the right has embraced it’s decline, otherwise the NUJ’s Jeremy Dear wouldn’t be struggling to raise his arguments for new forms of journalistic funding to a level where anyone would hear them.

And if you’ll forgive me further self-linking, there are a number of posts here that raise the question of what happens if we treat politicians as jurors. If MPs are only really allowed to meet advocates in a recorded way, that would surely be the consequence of Tom’s proposal?

Either way, I’d suggest that advocates of transparency from all sides need to spend more time outlining what they think is permissible and desirable in representation, campaigning and media behaviour. We all seem to know what we’re against, but the interesting question, for me, is what we are in favour of?

Here’s Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University questioning the benefits of government transparency:

“There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it.”

The whole thing is worth a look though.

An old gentleman writes....

Apparently 13.1% of FoI requests to ‘Departments of State’ are now made through MySociety’s ‘What do they know?’ website. How on earth did they find out such a statistic I wonder?

Meanwhile, as it’s Friday, it’s time to enjoy how FoI requests are, occasionally, handled in the US. From the Martin Rosenbaum on the BBC FoI blog:

“You’re a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn’t know you and believe that you’re more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don’t bother.”

As Martin points out, the Information Commissioner would have something to say about this response if it was supplied in the UK. I’m not a great advocate of copying US custom and practice in all things, but it should be entirely up to elected politicians how they respond to requests like this, surely?

Following the Daily Mail’s crusade against council employees using Facebook, Sunny, here, (in the comments) thinks it’s time for everyone to write to their local authority to find out how long council employees are spending on the Daily Mail website.

This is what FoI requests are for, isn’t it?