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 journalists [...]
Posts under ‘Conversational localities’
Three signposts off
Using a weblog crowdsource intelligence
I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.
As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic [...]
What’s missing from this picture?
Via Spartakan, I’ve just seen this outline of how local debate could be / is structured. And, initially, it looks fairly complete as long is it is covering only debate, as opposed to policy-making.
I think it’s a useful diagram, and I don’t have the time to do this properly – graphic design is a non-trivial [...]
Councillors and the snow
Here’ Dan Drillsma-Milgrom of the LGC on how Councillors should respond to the heavy snow that we’re seeing in the UK at the moment:
“For those who know to look for it, Camden has an easy to use section of its website that directs residents to the nearest sand grit bins and shows the gritting routes. [...]
The Conservatives’ £million question
I’m not a natural Tory (if you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m quite the opposite) but I can’t help but be impressed with their grasp of a few of the opportunities offered by new (potentially) democratic tools lately.
The first one is their use of Google Moderator in the Q&A that is embedded in their [...]
E-spending
Liz Azyan picks up on some questions about e-petitions that were asked here by Paul a couple of months back. She doesn’t mention the fascinating word cloud that accompanies her article, called “E-petition verbs”.
The biggest words are, on a quick skim, “prevent, save, reimburse, make, oppose, charge and introduce”. With my local government head [...]
Does twitter damage the quality of parliamentary debate – or improve it?
Kerry McCarthy MP tweeted last night that she will be going in to bat for tweeting MPs on Radio 5Live later today. Her adversary on the show will be John Pugh MP – and Torcuil Crichton explains the background:
Dr John Pugh, the analogue Lib Dem MP for Southport, has a motion down condemning the [...]
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 place [...]
Why bringing politicians and the public closer to each other is important
Here’s Peter Levine on the study of deliberation:
“The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. Again, [...]
Civic engagement during recessions
Strictly speaking, this post of Peter Levine’s is more about volunteering than participation in policy making, but it’s worth a look.
“My best guess is that modern civic engagement depends on a funded infrastructure. You can’t tutor kids if the school lays off its literacy coordinator. You can’t read to kids if the library branch is [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
