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 [...]
Posts under ‘Conversational localities’
Open minds – the councillor-curator?
Kevin Harris has forwarded this article about the role that councillors are obliged to adopt in relation to planning. Nothing in it will come as a surprise to anyone familliar with the role of a modern councillor, but it’s a nice round up of an issue that will continue to perplex anyone with an interest [...]
Breaking the monopoly that civil servants have in describing government
Charlie Beckett has yet another good post up – this time, over at OpenDemocracy. The point of Networked Journalism is that the citizen as an individual and as part of these organisations is now part of the production of news communications. The relationships offered by networked journalism offer the potential for increasing trust in that [...]
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 [...]
Six minutes a month…
Because the average member of staff who has access to a PC is spending six minutes a month on Facebook, Portsmouth City Council have decided to ban access to it. Predicatably, this has been welcomed by The Taxpayers Alliance: The Taxpayers’ Alliance said the move would stop the “waste of public cash”. Mark Wallace, from [...]
Local newspapers v council newspapers redux
My recent sojourn in the west of Ireland has made me look at this whole newspapers v councils issue in a new light. Roy Greenslade, it seems to me, is thinking inside a very English box. On the Guardian blog, he accuses Darlington councillor Nick Wallis of disingenuity in his dealings with a local journalist [...]
Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks
Kevin Harris has blogged about his planned contribution to the Reboot Britain ‘PICamp’ session – over here. Here’s a flavour: To my mind, it doesn’t work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished. So it would help if we [...]
A think tank of your own
Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point: Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers [...]
Lurkers, intermittent contributors and heavy contributors
Further to the earlier post about active citizenship, during a conversation with my mate Nick Buckley of Gfk NOP, he reminded me of Jakob Neilsen’s ’90-9-1′ pyramid. I’ve not looked at this for a while now but it makes the point, doesn’t it? There are only a few people that really warrant the title ‘web [...]
Community sites and active citizenship – a #LocalGovCamp roundup
LocalGovCamp roundup Dave Briggs surpassed himself on Saturday convening a terrific event in Birmingham. I’m hoping to pick up a number of issues that came up in different posts here, but I’d like to start with the session that I helped lead on. I don’t want to detail or argue any of the issues that [...]
