My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails. This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a [...]
Posts under ‘Political innovation’
E-Petitions Site Canned
According to yesterday’s papers, the No10 Petitions website has been canned. I can understand that a lot of the people behind it saw it as a learning experience and it clarified a few things. My problem with the whole project is that this is one area where politicians let themselves down. Civil Servants go on [...]
Electronic Voting
Apologies for the light posting here lately – I’ve been busy with the Political Innovation project. There’s a series of posts I’ve added there on ‘What Politicians need to know about social public information.’ I’ll be reviving this blog shortly. In the meantime, here’s something on electronic voting that I found via O’Conall Street.
Imbyism?
Here’s Rory Sutherland on the Spectator blog: “….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change [...]
Political Innovation No1: Towards Interactive Government
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A few words on governance
Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils. It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of [...]
Democratic, decentralised and difficult
I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services. The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet [...]
