The Birmingham News Room – a well-executed information hub managed by Birmingham City Council has been launched and there’s a good write-up from Nick Booth over at Podnosh.

I don’t have much to add to his account of it, and I’d urge to to have a good look around and think about the idea., but the execution is very good.

From a personal point of view, it’s also very timely as I’ll be organising a session at the PICamp strand of Reboot Britain on …

Hyperlocality, active citizenship and disintermediated local newspapers

As local news titles close and community-run websites step into the gap, there is a new way for local government to converse with the public at a grass-roots level? Are community-run websites up to the job? How do these sites help the collective addressing of neighbourhood problems? Do online neighbourhood communities create new excluded groups? Do they improve or diminish democracy?

Introduced by: Kevin Harris, Nick Booth, William Perrin, Edward Walsh (Head of Press, LGA) 12.30-1.30pm, The Faraday Room (capacity – 70)

I’ve already posted something here on the question of active citizenship and local sites, but I think the Birmingham project foregrounds the issue nicely.

You may recall from that post that Will Perrin isn’t keen on the idea of local authorities publishing their own newspapers. Birmingham isn’t doing that, but in establshing an online newsroom of this kind, it’s doing a number of things.

Firstly, the newsroom is a transparent exercise. It’s a significant step away from the idea that the information providers – a small number of comms professionals – have a narrow set of channels that they communicate with. The press release that gets faxed to a couple of dozen named journalists on long-established newspapers. The hack that is briefed over a stiff drink in the back room of a boozer very early in the day (*sigh* there are some bits of my work as a political press officer that I miss….).

It also is a step away from the exclusive briefings that journalists were used to.

The newsroom is plainly set up, at least partially, with bloggers and other citizen journalists in mind.

A relationship such as this – between the politicians, the officials and the people that write up the council’s work – is going to be very different. Councillors will no longer be able to bargain with the press. There may be fewer deals and less tortuous media manipulation.

On the other hand, it may result in poorer policymaking as the council feels obliged to show it’s working and unable to slip in unpopular little trade-offs to make bigger schemes happen.

This also raises questions of impartiality. Council press officers could usually discharge this duty using journalistic scepticism as a filter.

If they did slightly oversell the work of the leading group on the council, the hacks would soon sniff it out and make them regret it.

This site sort-of works on the principle that the public are more savvy than they used to be. Who needs to read the journalists’ take on things when you can read the press release that was the main source?

And who’s going to trust a professional hack when you can get peer-to-peer scrutiny from People Like You?

For years, councils have bemoaned the lack of local journalism. As local papers have retreated, councillors have complained about out-of-town journalists who have failed to engage with the local authority, instead writing sloppy sensationalist stories.

Councils will be reaching the public thorough different filters – this site illustrates how – and it may change local government very significantly. Filters that are sometimes less systematically cynical than under-resourced journalists perhaps? But also ones that are less effectively sceptical. Will it be a positive change?

Ding Dong! An argument can draw crowds. But can it solve anything?

Here’s a good post from an Australian blogger on the question: Is adversarial politics damaging to our democracy? (It’s actually an update on a previous post with that title). Here the adversarialism is opposed by a more attractive ‘deliberative’ model of the kind advocated here. The flipside of this argument is put very well by Peter Levine here:

“As I told the Christian Science Monitor in 2006, “Polarization tends to be a mobilizing factor in getting out the vote.” At CIRCLE, we helped to organize randomized experiments of voter outreach with the goal that the parties would learn new techniques and compete more effectively for our target population (youth). I believe we and our colleagues had some influence on the parties and thereby helped boost turnout. We also funded a study that found that parties were under-investing in their young members. Again, our goal was to persuade them to become more effective.”

There is, of course, the adversarial politics of Parliament and the media that we are all familiar with. These arguments are fairly well played out, though they are always worth revisiting. The obvious conclusion, for me is a somewhat muddy preference for a bit-of-both.

However, there is the often-overlooked challenge of ‘adversarial legalism’ towards a supposedly ‘elite-dominated’ form of representative democracy in which various minority groups seek to take a role in the political process using courts to secure rights that protect individuals and minorities.

The difference between the UK and the US is noticeable in this respect – in the past, if you want to get on in the lobbying industry in the UK, a good address book, a record in student politics, a spell as a Westminster bag-carrier and – ideally – a period as a ministerial special adviser were often the key requisites.

In the US, a legal background has always been much more useful.

However, this has changed somewhat in recent years in the UK with an increase in the degree to which independence has been preferred over the traditional ministerial discretionary powers that used to dominate public life (Sir Humphrey permitting, of course….). In the UK, now, the Westminster background is beginning to be less useful than a spell running an NGO or a charity, peppered with periods at a management consultancy, a regulator of some kind, or a period working as a civil servant.

Anyway, here are – for me – the big questions: How far is this preference for independence in intitutions that have some governance roles, combined with a demand for greater transparency from politicans (to counteract the discretion that they have often enjoyed in the past)anti-political? And is anti-political the same as anti-democratic?

Is the preference for independence in control of interest rates, the regulation of industry, and even the regulation of politics (by everyone from The Standards Board for England to the Sergeant-at-Arms in Westminster) a threat to representative democracy – or a safety net for it? And does the neutrality of regulated news organisations also provide an unflattering contrast to elected and partisan politicians?

Are these phenomena ones that have been invented to postpone a collapse in the perceived legitimacy of politicians? Or are they becoming every bit the rival to elected representatives in the UK to the lawyered-up pressure groups that dominate so much of US politics?

This appears to me to be a very important question – and one that was picked up in a recent review of the year by Guardian leader-writer Julian Glover here (you will need to scroll down to find it). My prejudices are very much in favour of politicians being able to exercise some discretion and being required to answer for it at election time.

What are your prejudices in this regard?

Update: Here’s Kevin Harris on UK government guidelines on Meaningful Social Interaction (MSI!). To my mind, the question of how civil engagement between the non-elected should be conducted is a no-brainer. Adversarial conversations in this area are rarely worth eavesdropping upon if you are an elected representative.