E-mail has transformed the way that senior politicians behave. Fifteen years ago, almost all conversations between politicians, lobbyists, civil servants and everyone else were either verbal or on paper. Technology has made recording easier. Written communications are infinitely more index/searchable. It would be an understatement to say that the situation has been transformed as a [...]
Posts under ‘Transparency’
To the barricades!
The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator. Because [...]
Social data unchained
If you haven’t seen Socrata yet, it’s really worth a look – it illustrates the quality of data that could be made available to us in the UK. It shows that – once we get beyond the classic journalistic question of “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – once the data is in [...]
Reputaton management
Conall McDevitt has an interesting post up about CEO reputations: “Communicating frequently with their employees. Certainly with their customers too, but not to forget their employees. At a time of uncertainty employees are hungry for information. CEOs need to take responsibility. Apologize if they are wrong. If they don’t know the answer, say they don’t [...]
Whiter than white?
Do we really want politicians to be public paragons of virtue? A good deal of what I read tends to work on the assumption that we do. Take this, for example: “As technology evolves, the same public information laws create novel and in some cases previously unimaginable levels of transparency. In many cases, particularly those [...]
Digital engagement, transparency and power
Kevin Harris has a long but worth-reading post over on the New Start magazine’s blog.
Are interactive media experts really improving the quality of democracy?
OK, in recent posts, I’ve moaned about the demands for political transparency that are being fuelled by new interactive media applications. Let me try and put this into some perspective: In my opening ‘defending political parties‘ post, I acknowledged that there are a few early knockout punches that could be delivered to the argument that [...]
Counterproductive demands for transparency?
About a year ago, I heard snippets of a radio programme that really stuck with me. I didn’t make a note of the name of the programme at the time (I was driving), and it has taken me best part of the last year plugging away at the few contacts I have in the BEEB’s [...]
Transparency camp
The lastest in the near-franchise that is BarCamp – TransparencyCamp (US). (No rush to book by the way. The Washington DC venue may be a bit of a big ask, and the fact that it happened over a week ago may also make it awkward for you to attend). But it’s an interesting idea nevertheless. This [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
