I’ve been given an outline of what guidance it includes and I’m here to tell you now that – when you see it, I think you will agree with me – that it is the most spectacularly stupidly moronically pusilanimous bit of thick box-ticking bureaucrat-ese that you will ever stumble upon.

Think what the most stupid thing that they could say could be. Then times it by ten. It’s more stupid than the result. Unless someone changes their mind in the next few days…..

We’ll see….

Every candidate at the next general election will be subjected to a set of rules to cover election expenses. To ensure that these rules are adhered to, candidates have to put an imprint on all of their materials and present a bill at the end to The Electoral Commission (I think?).

This is designed to stop the outright purchase of elections. But can it be stopped in future if a lot of campaigning is done by deniable outriders? And surely orchestrated print based campaigns aren’t that much use any more? My two examples come from either side of the political divide:

• On my right, there is the Tax Payers Alliance: Not officially Tory and not even endorsing a lot of Tory policies – but doing real daily low-level damage to pro-collective action politics in general and Labour in particular
• On my left, the Unions. Many of the largest Unions are not affiliated to Labour. Some are even a bit grumpy with the current flavour of the Labour Party. But they are even less keen on the Tories and can use new media tools to increasingly damage them.

In both cases, the parties will benefit from more resources without ever showing them on the balance sheet – courtesy of negative deniable ‘swiftboating‘ campaigns. So how long will the rules continue to be relevant?

“Philosophers have sought to understand the world. The point is to complain about it.”

Here, Peter Levine has a nice post up about the ‘complaints choir‘ in Chicago.

“Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of funding without much thought about what was needed in local situations, thus attracting many who were willing to spend it for them without the burden of values or the inconvenience of insights into the nature of exclusion.”

Tactics: For teams that are scared of losing.

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 (here) …

“…tactics aren’t for me, they’re things that teams dream up because they might lose”

Translating that into Dave’s question, it’s basically about getting organisations to increase their desire and competence in the field of ‘interactivity.’ The rest – the tactical choices of which technology, the timelines and roll-out plan – become somewhat redundant when you are able to deploy a team that know what their jobs are and are happy, competent and confident that they can do them. This question applies to local authorities a good deal.

On the day that David Cameron is majoring on his notion of The Post Bureaucratic Age, there is a lesson here: So much of the division between the boring ‘tactical’ practitioners and the JFDI enthusiasts stems not from a gulf in the understanding of the technology, but in the willingness of individuals within organisations to interact.

I’ve spoken to meetings of councillors and officers at over 100 local authorities over the years, and I’ve watched the body language: When you suggest that it would be a good idea for councillors to use easy-to-use web-tools, the more senior officers in the room start to futz with their biros.

There are all kinds of ‘budget maximising’ bureaucratic reasons for this resistance, and I’m sure that this is partly Mr Cameron’s target here. But I’d suggest that there is a bigger obstacle here.

Demands for ‘transparency’ from public-sector bodies are fundamentally unfair for the reasons I’ve set out here. They are one-sided. Perhaps the biggest underlying theme in modern politics is the question of who gets taxpayers money? Is it the public sector, or their competitors in the private sector?

It’s a profoundly political decision. To demand transparency from one, not the other is to take sides, and I suspect that this is what the Conservatives are doing here.

Given the restrictions of commercial confidentiality, we can’t easily demand transparency from the private sector (though reformers demanding less short-termism in investment decisions may disagree).

One thing we can demand – from all economic actors – is more interactivity. If interactivity, not transparency were the war-cry, it would be a fairer, clearer instruction to give to everyone.

It is possible that the Tories are regretting using pics of David Cameron to front their 2010 launch?

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 journalism and policy advice. This is a slightly different issue from the long-standing, Weberian concern with professionalisation of politics. A professional politician is one who is expert at campaigning and winning elections, but has no experience or life outside of this. New Labour was more about the scientisation of politics (sorry if that’s not a word), in which expertise in economics and public affairs became a precondition of political authority.” (emphasis mine)

Potlatch (Will Davies) seemed to see a deepening of the trend towards a more professional political elite – one in which a rare combination of skills was a pre-condition to success. It does have echoes of the almost caste-based Enarque phenomonon in France in which a professional supporting bureaucracy grows up around political parties, consisting of the children of other Enarques.

The second was on Political Betting – a site that convenes genuinely valuable political data* (most political blogs attract opinion – what we would like to happen. PB is specifically about identifying what is actually going to happen) in which Councillors were offered as an underestimated political force.

Political centralisation is widely seen as a consequence of the way that carefully managed branding around charismatic individuals has supplanted the more earthy questions of local representatives, lively public debate and a more engaged electorate. My own Labour Party experience features countless examples of MPs being warned – in a roundabout way – that the only reason they are in Parliament is because of the party logo – and that any individualism on their part is unwarranted arrogance.

If you ask most political pundits, they may be keen to tell you that the election will be decided by a battle of the brands. That Lord Ashcroft is in a position to finance a Tory victory and that local issues are largely irrelevant.

I think that this is becoming contestable. I don’t think that anyone expects Labour to fight a ‘presidential campaign’ with Gordon Brown as the sole focus for the voters. But even the Tories are concious of the way that social media activists are capable of damaging the brand value of a leader – and they are stepping back from hanging the campaign on David Cameron. As Guido Fawkes reported recently, they have also dropped the tag of ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ (and I hope its not seen as a partisan point when I say ‘thank god for that!’)

If it’s true that – in a more peer-to-peer polity – one of the deciding issues is the number of local councillors that you have, perhaps this presents those councillors with an opportunity to reverse the trend that has continued as long as the mass media has dominated the political space?

Is it time for Councillors to demand powers that are commensurate with their ability to win elections?

* Let me just add this: Political betting is a really great political blog. Really good. Subscribe to it if you can?

Google Buzz: A great deal more important than anyone seems to be saying?

It will change the very character of representation and the way we make big decisions.

You either buy that premise or you don’t. If you do, I’d be interested to know what you think that the media is going to look like in a few years time.

Writing elsewhere, I’ve made a contention that I’ve not been contradicted on (yet). Please do contradict me if you want – I think that it’s a fairly important suggestion to absorb if you can’t. It’s actually two contentions – one following the other. Here goes:

1. Newspapers often have really good articles by knowledgeable writers who are writing for their audience and not themselves. They have to write to a readable length, check their facts, make issues understandable and keep up their reputation for fair dealing. As long as you monitor a few relevant titles, you can keep yourself informed and challenged on most of the issues you need to know about in order to be a good citizen who votes and gets involved in public life.

Some of you are more sceptical than others about how good newspaper journalism is, but I suspect most people would agree with that – up to a point?

Now here’s my second assertion:

2. Though newspapers cover big issues reasonably well, on almost every subject that they cover (and plenty that they don’t) there is – somewhere – likely to be a better article written by a blogger than anything you can find in a newspaper. The problem is simply how you find it.

I really don’t think either of those lines of thought are problematic. But if they aren’t, the implications are vast, aren’t they?

Newspapers exist for a number of reasons. They keep us entertained, make us laugh, satisfy our appetite for gossip, and so on. But the broadsheets (and even the tabloids and local press, up to a point) also have a very specific role – that of the fourth estate – the one that satisfies Thomas Jefferson’s slightly overstated emphasis:

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

The most exciting innovations that the internet has brought has been collaborative filtering. In the mid 1990s, there was (for me anyway) a fabulously exciting project called Firefly. It was clunky and small-scale in a way that Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us aren’t, but it was basically a hugely influential idea that has set the template that all social networking sites have worked towards. The holy grail of an application that knows what you want and will go and get the best version of it for you to meet your specific personalised needs.

The thing that we have all learned since is that the combination of usability, seducability and the sheer numbers and velocity that the social web creates has made a lot of things possible. Google Buzz – unlocking a lot of the potential that Google Reader brings us – has the potential to supplant that fourth estate broadsheet role.

The implications of this are huge as far as I can see. One of them is that it may compound the problems created by Google’s monopoly status.

I’m surprised that we’re not all talking about it a good deal more than we are.

“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 networkers, sharing and seeking recommendations among peers rather than trusting broadcast messages. The real contest is not the three-way blogs/newspapers/politicians fight, but how effectively each can cast its bait into the social networking sites, and who will have the greatest effect.”

So the creation of good viral objects may make a big difference? Apropos of that, yesterday, the people behind MyDavidCameron added a new string to their bows: MyToryTombstone.

Whatever else it does in terms of damaging the Tories (I’m sure the Tories have plans of their own on this front), this comment really sums up how difficult it will be for parties to get their narrative out this year.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

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 and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ’so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?

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 on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib’s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.