As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post [...]
Posts under ‘Local government’
Frank exchange is better than pussyfooting
The Political Innovation project I’m currently working on (more soon!) is going to be very focussed upon the political aspects of interactivity – with the premise that more, freer, better exchanges of evidence and opinion are a public good – and that not enough is being done politically to facilitate these. Via Norm, who offers [...]
Public service media as an asset to democracy: Where next?
The BBC – in it’s current incarnation – sees itself as an asset to liberal democracy in a variety of ways. I do to – and given our many failings as a democracy (our centralisation, our unelected second-chamber, our politically independent civil service, the huge unchecked power of pressure groups and media-owners, etc), the BBC [...]
Localocracy & Opinion Space
Looking at the Personal Democracy Forum session on ‘New Tools for Listening‘, there’s a presentation from Localocracy and Opinion Space along with a quick trot through Google Moderator (which has now been integrated into YouTube to help deal with their burgeoning comments issues there). It’s an interesting approach that allows people to participate in local [...]
Creating informed communities
Apologies for the very light posting here in recent weeks. When you blog about politics and elections a lot, you probably have the excuse that you are doing rather than blogging during elections, and this is true of some of our contributors. In my case, a tide of work that was only indirectly related to [...]
Covering the Local Elections on Harringay Online
This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this [...]
Conservative local government proposals
The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut. It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today. Shift Delete Command backspace SysRq F12 Home PgDn Escape [...]
Democracy mirroring social media activity, party whips and ‘ishoos’
Firstly, Catherine has an interesting post up here. No conclusions yet, but definitely worth following. Secondly, Tom Watson – in one of the final votes of the last Parliamentary session – rebelled against the government for the first time in his career over the Digital Economy Bill. I’d say I’m in a minority in admiring [...]
Centralisation: A turning point?
For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend. The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics: “Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – [...]
Three signposts off
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 [...]
