I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services. The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet [...]
Posts under ‘Local government’
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 [...]
We don’t want to read your website. We want to write it.
So: It’s now official. Local authorities are going to be obliged to promote democracy (and the bill is quite prescriptive about the role that the internet will have to play in this). It should make for an interesting seven months. There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
Sustainable Communities Act 2007: business as usual or unusual government?
So it seems that a government advertising campaign is to target climate change sceptics. Certainly, policymakers appear to be hitting problems in bringing the public along with measures to address this issue, and it’s not very likely that ‘business as usual’ within the democratic process will deliver sustainable development. So there are great hopes pinned [...]
A few links to be going on with
Just a few interesting things I’ve seen over the past few days that impact further on this councils v local newspapers issue. The first is that – when councils decide to factor in ad-revenue into their communications budgets, it adds a significant amount of uncertainty – because ad revenue can go down as well as [...]
Usability, council websites and the obligation to promote democracy
It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago) Measuring usability may also be the key to [...]
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 [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
