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 [...]
Posts under ‘Conversational localities’
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 [...]
The politics of interactivity
I’m currently convening a number of sessions at a Nesta conference on the 6th July called ‘Reboot Britain’, running a strand called ‘PICamp’ – Political Innovation Camp. I’m looking for local government communications staff that have had any experience or thoughts about the changing relationships with the local media – and particularly issues around the [...]
No longer a pipe dream
Here’s Will Davies on how what used to pass for blue skies thinking is now just down and dirty: “When David Cameron declared the need for a new constitutional settlement recently, quite a bit of this was based on the capabilities of new technologies such as youtube and text messaging. Leaving aside the overall quality [...]
Steady state on citizenship stats
The England Citizenship Survey for April – December 2008 was published the other day by CLG (pdf, Excel data). Overall, despite the onset of the financial crisis, attitudes to and participation in politics don’t seem to have changed much. A few headlines: Only one fifth of people (22%) feel that they can influence decisions taken [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
