This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here: The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts: It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives [...]
Posts under ‘Media and communications’
Launching the ‘Political Innovation’ project
When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances (be they left right, or Unionist/Republican often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats. I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist [...]
The penny drops at last!
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 [...]
Informed public = better democracy?
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 [...]
Political innovation
Apologies for the light posting around here at the moment – I’ve been very busy with another blog-related project called ‘Political Innovation‘. It’s really for anyone who has looked at politics and asked themselves “why do we still have to do it this way?” The founding premise is that interactive technology is a game-changer. On [...]
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 [...]
Crowdsourcing policy? Politicians do this better than apps
The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties. It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in [...]
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 [...]
The value of a free press
Two stories – both from Roy Greenslade in recent days – that give cause to ponder the responsibility that the media bear. The first one is the old chestnut about the big lie splashed over the early pages followed by the retraction hidden under the Darts results. Given the fuss earlier this year around academics [...]
Moonbattery
George Monbiot is here writing about the Tea Party movement in the US. He argues that the European left could learn a thing or two from the US right. It’s an odd article. It contains this sentence…. “They have been promoted by Fox News – owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch – [...]
