Someone (not sure who) has set up a Wrangl board on the pros and cons of filming council meetings. Have a look!

The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer.

Flip-cams: The sword of transperency or an engine for selective reporting?

My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some good journalistic legwork to conclude that…

“…Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police have simply acted in an altogether hapless, illiberal, and alarming manner. A person, surely, should not be arrested and detained just for filming a public council meeting, and a council should not be able to prevent someone from doing so in this manner. In my opinion, all the councillors, officials, and police officers involved in this sad sequence of events really should be ashamed of themselves.”

I’m in two minds over whether the flip-cam will improve the quality of local democracy, and I think this highlights some of the tension between liberalism and the good practice of liberal democracy.

On the one hand, all of David’s arguments stand – and then some. Surely a good democracy should remove any barriers that stop people from viewing democratic proceedings? Transparency will result in less corruption, better decisions, a greater sense of participation, and so on.

On the other hand, there are a few snags. Firstly, if individuals are doing this selectively – on issues that they care about, we will naturally expect to see a bias towards issues that small groups of individuals care about. These may be (but not always will be) subjects that effect people who have more time/resources on their hands. If this becomes the main way that Council meetings are covered, it can expose councils to more pressure group politics.

This may be at the expense of the decisions that many of us – people with mild preferences and a need to see policy serve the interests of the whole community – would expect to see from local authorities. I know I trot it out a lot, but the example of a more direct democracy provided by California should be a shocking example to us all.

So, is a balanced view of proceedings going to be distributed by citizen journalists? Or will it inevitably result in selective reporting?

Blogger arrested for filming council meeting http://t.co/4CpUfyN MP and public barred http://t.co/wwwR6Gs who do these ppl think they are?

June 12, 2011 12:16 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengoldacre

ben goldacre

Another question: Does this drive up the quality of deliberation (i.e. do Councillors raise their game?) or does it result in either a more guarded approach or, conversely, a more soapboxy style?

We expect councillors to behave in a disinterested way and there must be some parallel here with the jury room: Would juries make better decisions if they were selectively recorded?

Then there’s the question of professional journalism. I know this is a moot point at the moment, given the headlong retreat from half-decent reporting among local newspapers. But we expect pro-journos to cover issues in an even-handed way, catering to mild preferences of a broad audience rather than the narrow views of a deeply interested one.

Will this kind of guerilla coverage drive this kind of reporting out? I posted here a couple of years ago about the negative impact that opening Parliamentary proceedings out had – the conclusion was that newspapers stopped covering it because anyone who was really interested could get the real thing on the radio or (later) TV. Will this apply to local authorities, or are we in a different ballgame with local politics?

In my experience, the answer may be that councils should routinely film all proceedings and index them professionally. This will reduce the scope for selective coverage and allow visitors who follow the links the option to hear all of the points (and the context provided by professional local government officers) to the proceedings. It will also allow people to drop randomly into a council meeting and see a broad range of issues being discussed responsibly (or not).

A firm in Brighton called Public i (declared interest: I’m personally friendly with a few of the team there) have been offering a web-casting service aimed at local authorities for some years – it indexes each speaker which saves you ploughing through whole meetings if you’re only there for a particular reason [random example here].

Surely councils need to pro-actively promote a public awareness of the whole of their work? Given the low interest in local politics, it will make it easier then for local journalists to report procedings and may result in more broad coverage. Unless they do this, we can expect selective reporting to dominate agendas more and more.

It’s Friday. It’s 3.30pm. It’s time for a nice entertaining post about the character of local government.

Oh! Here’s one – on a blog that’s generally worth keeping an eye on.

Along with the Glum Councillors tumblog, we’re seeing the culture of local government being ever-so-slightly lightened and humanised by the blogosphere.

Wonderful pop-up social enterprise thinktank Popse (possibly the first pop-up thinktank ever, but certainly not the last) popped up in London’s Exmouth Market from 9-13 May.

Among other hot topics was a proposal from the Waterways Project that a community ‘right to manage’ (or a ‘presumption in favour of community management’) should join the existing proposals in the Localism Bill.I’m pasting below some ruminations which I initially posted to the Popse website. More importantly, for reflections from the Popse team themselves, head over to this post.

——————–

The social enterprise space is where you currently find some of the most interesting conversations about democracy; its quality; our aspirations for it here in the UK.

Tuesday evening’s drop-in session provided an opportunity for one such conversation when we mulled over proposals for a ‘community right to manage’ and the prospects for mutuals.

Each of the three community rights-based proposals that are currently out there in the Localism Bill brings real potential to stimulate more vibrant spaces for democratic, participatory engagement.

They all raise concerns, though; because they promise, in essence to leave it to ‘the market of community’ (aka the Big Society) to handle some of the most significant risks.

To put it bluntly, the reality of ‘community’ across the UK doesn’t come with a ready-made cookie-cutter commitment to sustainable development, nor consistently high levels of belief in the value of participation or free association among equals. That commitment is something that has to be discussed, nurtured, debated, traded, and advanced.

The risk is that stripping away much of the current policy framework for and local level technical expertise on sustainable development leaves little institutional infrastructure for managing trade-offs or competition between adjoining communities; or even within groups in the same community. Local level traffic calming and parking campaigns, for example, are often a case in point.

All these issues aside, (and they’re points for discussion, not show-stopper objections) The Waterways Project’s proposal for a ‘community right to manage’ deserves our serious attention.

For one thing, community groups wouldn’t need to raise sufficient funds to exercise a ‘right to buy’ if they were only looking to exercise a ‘right to manage’. For another, they might be able to benefit from the skills and knowledge transfer potential of asset owners with oversight of lots of community managed assets – so long as those owners themselves were operating within a framework that allowed them to benefit from cooperation with ‘managing’ groups.

There are lots more things that need thinking through, of course, in the ‘right to manage’ proposal. In common with the ‘right to bid’, there may be restrictions in any requirement for a community group to have been accepted for registration as a Charity (the list of charitable purposes can be quite restrictive, for example; and I suspect the last thing the Charity Commission currently wants to have to deal with is tens of thousands of new micro-charity registrations resulting directly from the Localism Bill).

There are some fairly dull issues that would need to be tackled to do with risk and liability (think Japanese knot-weed and other invasive alien species for example; let alone breaches in river or canal banks). And with many of our waterways under-utilised, the idea of ‘canal-side’ or ‘bank-side’ community doesn’t necessarily translate into geographical spaces (6 or even 20-mile long strips) that make sense for the assets likely to be available.

A community right to manage in relation to our waterside assets (and waterways) would likely call for at least a wee bit of community engineering. But if environmental assets such as canals, for example, were more intensively used for transport or recreation, we might find that their associated senses of ‘community’ also stretched out.

The trick would be to find a way to ensure that the whole exercise of community management was fun; more about the participation than the risk management; and more about shared space and cooperation than competition for scarce resources and assets.

Links: http://www.popse.org.uk
http://www.waterways-civa.org.uk
http://www.fdsd.org

My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails.

A good democracy has to value everyone's time properly (click for pic credit)

This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a dedicated idea-site here – is so important.

We are, after all, being gently forced to comply with other people’s procedures where it is in their interest to invest in this compulsion (or ‘nudging’ as it is gently put).

This is the whole trajectory of the World Wide Web – from the first release of HTML scripts and early browsers in the early 1990s, through the progressive development of website coding and site-building tools, the burgeoning science of Accessibility, Usability and the ‘Semantic Web’ through to the aggressive mainstreaming that it has undergone in recent years as social media has dragged billions of people into compliance with the web. Social media is a conspiracy to dovetail all of our economic activity with the processes of the organisations that invest in online applications.

By ‘compliance’ I don’t just mean the ‘compliant code’ beloved of good web-designers. I mean our social compliance. We go to our local bank or town hall less often these days – we often go to their website, comply with their security procedures and fill out forms that are convenient for them – as suppliers – so that they can reduce ‘avoidable contact’ and thereby be more efficient.

In theory, this benefits shareholders and ratepayers respectively. But I’m waiting for a conspiracy theorist to start kicking up about this. One could take the view that this quote from the 19th Century Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon could apply equally to our relationship with corporations today:

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured.

That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.”

OK. That’s all probably a bit OTT. But where it matters, the business logic behind usability is very strong. Make it easy and attractive for people to comply and they are more likely to do so.

But in a democracy, this is a double-edged sword. If an organisation or government ask us for our opinion, or evidence, without it being a low-cost exercise for us, they will get hugely unrepresentative responses. They will get responses from…

• the time rich
• commercial lobbies
• individuals with a vested interest in a particular issue (this can be financial, cultural, ideological or faith-based, for example)

Of course democracies can’t afford to pay the public all of the time (though the use of commercial polling firms and focus groups are a well-established way of consulting the public). Increasingly, we are going to be asked to participate in government.

It is for this reason that it is vital that quick light responses are sought. That people seeking feedback are prepared to invest in ways of going to where the public already are and making it quick and easy to comply with their requests.

Last week, I posted a list of attributes that a good democracy could have – attributes that I beleive would be accepted accross the political spectrum – and ones that most liberal democracies could do a lot better on. Of my original 17 points, eight would be directly served if Microparticipation were to become a mainstream idea (no17 in particular). They are…..

1)      Wider participation in policy formation is a good thing – it increases the public stake in collective decision-making

2)      A more diverse polity reflecting a greater panorama of perspectives can only improve democracy

3)      Decision making should not be dominated by people who have more time or wealth than others

6)      People with a vested interest in particular outcomes should never have the capacity to crowd out people with mild preferences

7)      For deliberation to work, doubt and equivocation must be encouraged – and not crowded out by ‘conviction’

10)   Interest groups are good at achieving their aims at the expense of everybody else. These powers must be counterbalanced

11)   Media owners should have no more influence on policymaking than anyone else. Their abuse of this power should be challenged

17) Broad participation requires investment. Those asking questions have a duty to make it very easy and attractive to answer

There is one other factor here: Democratic deliberation is better when people who are uncertain, disinterested and equivocal can dominate the conversation. I’ve argued it a number of times here before [example]. My own most oft-repeated quote at the moment is from Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” – and my favourite Wikipedia link is to this page about the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Shorter version: certainty is a bad thing!)

Apologies again for the light posting.

I’ve written an extensive round-up of the main arguments (that I can think of) against referendums.

The full post is over on Slugger O’Toole and a slightly edited (shorter) version is on Liberal Conspiracy. Both were published yesterday.

Professor George Jones panning the government’s new localism agenda:

“This move to pass governmental decision-making to a level below local government is ill-thought-out. We do not know what is meant by community associations, how representative they will be, their boundaries, nor their audit, probity and accountability arrangements.  Rather than setting up such amorphous entities, the Government should empower local authorities, to promote and support public involvement in their localities. After all local authorities already exist with their own ready-made governance structures, their own democratic mandate, and with 20,000 community activists called councillors in place.”

Here’s US blogger Peter Levine on the various qualities that we can apply to political discourse:

“I would tend to favor stronger, bolder policies. I think our actual policies are weak rather than moderate. I welcome a robust debate but I would recommend conducting that debate with basic rules of civility even if one’s opponents fail to be civil in return.”

Here’s Rory Sutherland on the Spectator blog:

“….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change is often self-defeating, since the only people not defeated by the bureaucratic hurdles are huge organisations like Tesco — while those traditional smaller cafés and shops that traditionalists claim to love cannot summon the energy to clear them.”

He continues by promoting a smart ‘planning permission in return for something’ proposal that I’m sure I’ve seen before somewhere (when you think about it, it’s a locally hypothecated variation on Land Value Tax, isn’t it?), but nevertheless, it’s a good one.

It may have happened fifteen years later than it needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.

Click for pic credit

That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.

Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.

It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*.

The concern here is, primarily, a democratic one. In his ‘Undeclared War’, David Puttnam quoted Francois Mitterrand expressing this argument succinctly:

“What is at stake is the cultural identity of all our nations…. it is the freedom to create and choose our own images. A society which abandons the means of depicting itself would soon be an enslaved society.”

At the time, multi-channel TV was an unknown quantity, there were legitimate worries that new broadcasters (a euphemism, usually, for BSkyB) were claiming that regulation would be impossible in a multi-channel broadcasting environment – and that, consequently, it should no longer be attempted. Sky particularly had in mind the rules that say that 51% of broadcast content should originate within the EU**.

Words like ‘dumping’ were wheeled out all the time. And, of course, this debate provided the perfect cockpit in which to rehearse the opposition between Froggy cultural fragility and their apparent nemesis, our crass Anglo-Saxon values. Not only did it encompass cultural interventionism (something that the French have never pretended to undervalue) – it also touched on the deregulatory agenda.

It was certainly hard to make the case for regulation in British circles at the time. Yet, though this debate was often portrayed in this way (with the UK, as ever, held up as a Yankee Trojan horse), there was a minor problem with this:

The UK is, in fact, not only the most heavily regulated broadcasting market in the world, but it also shows signs of benefiting enormously from this state of affairs.

In terms of home-grown content on TV, we produce more for our own marketplace than anywhere else in the world apart from the US. At the same time, we don’t have the clumsy regulations that used to apply to French radio and that still apply to French Cinema (I say clumsy, but their cinema regulations seem to have the desired effect). In short, we have out-froggied the Frogs without even having to make ourselves look like them.

As long as viewers in the UK can have a wide choice of new original content (particularly drama) from a diverse range of sources, we can be reasonably confident that our own stories are getting an airing. But I’m not sure how far either the ‘public service broadcasting’ intervention that we have in the UK or the other EU models can be applied in the future.

** Footnote: I should declare an interest here – I was once Carole’s researcher – this is a subject that I know inside out – and it’s a huge relief to find the chattering classes finally waking up to it. Carole assembed a huge weight of evidence in support of this argument – evidence that was largely ignored at the time.

**This is a crude rendition of the rules, but I think you get the picture.