It’s late on Friday afternoon – here’s some brain-candy to chew on over the weekend.

Here’s Douglas Rushkoff – one of the most established commentators on interactive communcations explaining the cost of transparency. It’s liberating stuff – yet a lot of it seems so straightforward in Rushkoff’s hands. It often reads like the bleedin’ obvious. A lot of it is aimed at the individual, discussing their rights and the way they are manipulated and exploited.

Douglas Rushkoff: The Future of Transparency from Applied Brilliance on Vimeo.

There’s not much in here that seems directly aimed at a local government audience (indeed, nothing expressly) yet I’d suggest that it’s hugely important to grasp the power-relations that effect us all – and Rushkoff is great for that.

One possible lesson though: how important it is to engage all council employees more in engaging with local people.

It’s a regular theme of this blog that transparency and open data – while undoubtedly being good things – can often create situations in which democracy is diminished rather than enhanced.

The other day, for example, I posted my misgivings about guerilla webcasting of council meetings. (Shorter version: can result in selective reporting, poorer press coverage and increased power for small heavy-preference pressure groups – boo!)

Looking at it from the point of view of a local authority (particularly the communications team as well as the councillors) transparency and open data seem to have created a situation where the amount of time spent dealing with the angriest local residents goes up.

That the armchair auditors – far from being constructive partners – are non-neutral political activists [this post makes this case in more detail] who are selectively disrupting the aspects of the local authority’s work that they don’t like.

And this can be a good thing – up to a point – but it fundamentally undermines the duty of a democracy to address the concerns of the whole electorate – and not just those with time on their hands.

You could say that Councils only have themselves to blame for this. If information has to be dragged out of them by FOI requests, then only people with time on their hands will do it. If information isn’t attractive to engage with, then only people who have the time to puzzle it through will do it. [Again, this argument is made in more detail here].

If information isn’t made available in a format that allows other websites and forums to consume it, then the only people who will look at it are the lean-forward activists who can trawl the Council’s website. Good, attractive, easy-to-read, well-presented information can – and will – be linked to from Facebook groups, Mumsnet, Netmums, hyperlocal sites and other relevant local forums.

So this brings me to the suggestion: How can we get a lot more of the key information that Local Authorities provide about themselves into an easy-to-understand, easy-to-engage-with, easy-to-share and easy-to-mashup format quickly and easily?

Here’s how. A local authority could engage with the Design/Technology teachers in their local authority area. They could show all of the useful ways that council data can be presented – from the high-end where data is extracted, cleaned-up and poured into a visualisation tool (this Redbridge local business mapping project is very much the poster-child for this kind of thing as far as I can see).

In addition, they could show good examples of how short YouTubed videos, presentations (slideshared or using Prezi, for example) can make more engaging presentations than raw CSV files or PDFs posted on the council website. It doesn’t even need to be that sophisticated.

Every page on a local authority webste could probably be re-written and presented in a more easy-to-engage with way by a user of the service than by a provider. I mean no disrespect to local government Comms people in saying that their audience can probably explain Council services better than the providers of it can – once that audience understands what the services are.

So how about this? Councils can hold a borough-wide competition – facilitated by local schools – for the pupil (or group of pupils) that takes some information that the local authority is willing/obliged to provide and creates a consumable, re-usable artefact that makes it easier and more attractive for the public to understand and enage with the information.

Talking to a few teachers I know, there are a number of ways that this can fit into the curriculum both in terms of design/technology and citizenship.

And if this is a good idea, then I think local authorities will need the following resources to draw upon:

• An outline of which parts of the curriculum this can enhance – essentially something that helps councils sell the idea to local teachers
• A good set of web-pages to look at that have how-to videos/worksheets/presentations/infographics
• A set of suggestions that councils can give to teachers (e.g. “why not get data about which businesses we deal with and put it on a map to encourage is to source more local suppliers?”)
• Guidance and contacts on how to run a local hack-day (it would be reasonable for a council to pay a few good data-visualisation people to facilitate something like this) to bring expertise into the process
• Advice on the practicalities (CRB checks, how do find a venue and organise a hack-day)
• Suggestions on how the motivation/judging can be done and how they can generally nudge-up the quality of the work provided by the schools and their pupils

I’d be interested in seeing if a few people would be interested in pulling together a set of re-usable resources like this that can help councils do borough-wide schools open-data projects. It will be good for the quality of education and – I beleive – result in a broader and more conversational engagement with local citizens.

Is this a suitable idea for an event like Local Gov Camp on Saturday perhaps?

Here’s Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University questioning the benefits of government transparency:

“There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it.”

The whole thing is worth a look though.

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?

Old Anarchist joke: Guy Fawkes - the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.

Two weeks ago, Internet campaigners made a decisive intervention on what was, as far as the media were concerned, a big story.

Perhaps the most prominent single political blogger in the UK – Guido Fawkes – was followed by perhaps the leading alliance of hacktivists MySociety in demanding that MPs desist from exempting themselves from the full disclosure rules in the Freedom of Information Act.

One rule for them?

As far as I can see, this is an oddly directed campaign. There is one strong argument in it’s favour:

• If Parliament imposes Freedom of Information rules on other areas of government and failed to make the case for Parliamentary Privileges at the time of the original drafting, it looks foolish to try and wriggle out of the obligations respectively – and it damages Parliament’s reputation to do so.

The other arguments are, I think, a good deal weaker.

An effective way to ‘clean up Parliament?’

Will it stem corruption? I don’t think so. Most of the recent scandals have been to do with the choice of staff who have been employed and what they do. Disclosing receipts won’t deal with that.

And what about dealing with the perception that MPs are on the take? I’d suggest that there are a number of problems with this.

Firstly, as a perception, it’s not that fair in the first place. When the media have managed to create an impression that something is large when it is – in reality – small, one has to wonder how far the provision of evidence is going to make any difference.

By international standards, the UK is a fairly robust democracy with a low level of corruption.

The real shortcomings to our democracy – the centralisation, the lack of bicameralism, the Presidential trumping of Parliament, an unsatisfactory voting system and so on, never seem to attract the kind of attention that capricious personality-centred campaigns like this do.

Even with orchestrated campaigns by newpapers and pressure groups, the public don’t beleive that the UK is really a corrupt place. The idea that such campaigners will give it a rest once this disclosure is in place is very optimistic, as far as I can see. The Guido Fawkes blog makes no secret of the contempt that it holds elected politicians in. Perhaps now that one set of ransoms have been paid, the next hostages will be kidnapped?

This measure will do nothing to restore confidence in democracy. It will just give anti-parliamentary campaigners more petty ammunition to misrepresent what MPs expenses are for. Prepare now for a string of minor scandals about who bought which pot-plant for their London residency.

Does the ‘transparency’ campaign exacerbate the problem it purports to solve?

This, I would suggest is a significant problem. The leitmotif of modern politics – individual corruption of politicians – is drowning out many bigger issues, and providing the cynical campaigners of The Taxpayers Alliance with more ammunition is likely to only exacerbate the problem while keeping the spotlight off many of the real issues that could concern us.

So, in summary, a strong-ish argument – that MPs should have drafted a bill more carefully a few years ago, a couple of weak arguments and a fairly serious unintended consequence.

What about the other guys?

Now I’d like to introduce an argument against doing this.

Parliament competes with other institutions to influence legislation. OK – it does the drafting – but it does so against a backdrop of coercion from the political centre, the permanent bureaucracy, the media, pressure groups, and political parties. It was ever thus. Surely pro-democracy campaigners should be campaigning against those coercive forces?

But when you impose degrees of transparency upon one side of that never-ending struggle – without doing the same to the other participants – you essentially weaken the only grouping that has a legitimate claim to represent the interest of the nation as a whole. We can do mashups of MP’s disclosures because they are obliged to disclose things. Lobbying companies are under no such obligation.

So what about demanding more transparency from MPs rivals? This site aims to expose the mendacity of The Taxpayers Alliance. And the NUJ have started to campaign on the subject of newspapers not doing their jobs properly.

These attempts to crowdsource data to hold participants in civil society to account are clearly going to be a more prominent feature of political life. There are lots of small, fairly uncoordinated campaigns designed to demand transparency from the rivals of Parliament.

Perhaps the next time web activists are looking for someone to target – someone that we can demand full disclosure from, they may choose a tougher – and more deserving target? But here is the big question: How much of a following wind would such a campaign get from slightly demagogic mid-market tabloids?

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.