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Posts under ‘Media and communications’

JFDI: tactics, transparency and interactivity

Dave Briggs has a good post up about how organisations introduce technology. He contrasts the ‘JFDI’ approach (which stands for Just Do It) and a more boring sustainable approach.
I’ve met Dave and he has very sensible views on Football. Our mutual friend Brian Clough could have contributed to this whole discussion. As he put it [...]

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 – ticks both [...]

Buzzing the broadsheets

This blog, titled as it is as Local Democracy but spending a fair portion of it’s commentary on social media technology, rests on the premise that local democracy will be profoundly affected by tech-driven changes in the way that the media works, and the way that people can associate with each other.
It will change the [...]

Elsewhere

I’ve just had this article published by The Telegraph. Sometimes, it’s only when you read yourself elsewhere that you see that you buried your more important point under less significant ones.
“Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are social [...]

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 journalists [...]

Local budget consultations

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:
My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.
It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money [...]

Gentle mockery

It’s Friday. And it’s nearly hometime. Let’s just pop over to the Glum Councillors tumblr site to see if there’s anything to look at?
Well, there’s Cllr Doherty (pictured):
“If this corner doesn’t qualify as a dangerous bend, I don’t know what does,” said Cllr Doherty standing at the corner … in the road … with his back [...]

Using a weblog crowdsource intelligence

I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.
As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic [...]

How to increase the ‘chatter’ level on a policy area you care about

If you will permit me a small plug for some work I’m doing, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Centre for School Design – a project that was launched on Monday evening by the British Council for School Environments (BCSE).
I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now – [...]

Poblish: a new vision for blogging, and content-based policy crowdsourcing

This is the third in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. In part 2, last week, I described how existing content – the blogosphere, in particular – is currently used, or perhaps abused, by policymakers.
This time, I’m going to cover a range [...]