Here’s Peter Levine on the way that the healthcare debate has been reported by the press in the US: “…the news media spent a year feeding American citizens a steady diet of stories about Congressional procedure, the possible impact of health-care reform on elections, and quotes that falsely described the bill or denounced its critics. [...]
Posts under ‘Media and communications’
Positive Political Blogging: Distributed Intelligence vs. interest groups and think tanks
Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved [...]
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 [...]
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 – [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
