Nice, informal, consultation site for what Leeds residents would like to see in their city:
engagement
Bookmarks for September 20th through October 1st
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.
- Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal change – Great stuff on deploying social tech within big organisations.
- Open Government Licence – "You are encouraged to use and re-use the Information that is available under this licence, the Open Government Licence, freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions."
- Four roles for social media in workplace learning – "Whether or not l&d professionals or senior managers embrace social media doesn't really matter in the long run, because there is no turning back, only futile resistance."
- Anthologize – "Use the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book."
- “The Case for Personal Information Empowerment”: Mydex publishes groundbreaking White Paper – Worthwhile reading. I don't entirely agree, but a cogent argument.
- GCHQ spooks top UK Linux installations | THINQ.co.uk – "Whispers in the courtly corridors around Westminster, the seat of British government, have it that British intelligence uses Linux because it is secure, good at number crunching, and doesn't cost much to deploy."
- A framework for the social enterprise – Useful and interesting white paper on knowledge and learning within large organisations.
- Government Should Do its Own Data Homework | Jeni’s Musings – "It cannot be the case, long term, that you need to be an expert hacker to reuse government data."
- Behind the scenes at ShapeYourPlace.org – Great stuff from Paul Henderson on the techie bits behind a nice local government social media engagement exercise.
- Meeting the public sector communications challenge – "But what public sector communicators need to do is continue to demonstrate the value of communications, not as an end in itself, but as an agent for making things better for the public."
- Open Courses: About 10 Weeks Seems To Be It, Then? – Great post from Tony Hirst on open courses and online learning.
- Open Government as a Means to Shake the IT Suppliers Landscape – "…I have not (yet) seen any sustainable business model coming out of government “app stores”."
- Where do the good ideas go? – "Given the challenges we face as a country and as a planet, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make crowdsourcing really work here and now. But it will take courage, patience, and a process which taps into the varied time and talents of the crowd, in its widest sense."
You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.
You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.
YouChoose
In what looks like a pretty interesting collaboration between what was the LGA Group and YouGov, YouChoose is an online budget simulator that:
encourages members of the public to consider where council budget cuts should fall, where efficiencies might be made, and where income might be generated.
You can see a working version up and running for the London Borough of Redbridge, and a PDF document describes the detail in more detail (the tool is free, but decent analysis of the data is going to cost you).
I’ve not really got a view on participatory budgeting, or whether YouChoose does it well or not. Anyone with a clue want to share their thoughts?
Democracy, decisions and politicians
I’m thrashing around with a post about consultation, engagement and crowdsourcing and why efforts in this direction haven’t been massively successful for governments – whether in the UK or elsewhere. I’ll get it into a fit state to publish one day, maybe.
Catherine Howe (CEO of Public-I) is carrying out some research into how all this might work at a local level as part of her Phd, and is blogging her learning as she goes along. Her posts are long and meaty – and not nearly as disgusting as that description makes them sound.
Her latest post covers some of this territory very nicely, and links in the role of elected politicians into this. In the rush to get The People involved, our elected representatives are sometimes overlooked.
We can use and will use technology to improve the consultation process and to build in more transparency and openness but unless we also find ways to let the public set the agenda and the context, and unless we embrace the fact that decision making in a democratic process is political then we are really talking about sticking plasters and triage rather than the more radical surgery that will be needed in order to really change the relationship between the citizen and state and to create new ways of making decisions.
New governance models do not have to mean a plebiscite democracy – there is no evidence that the public want to be involved in every decision and no process that could make this an informed process. But if we are going to reinvent our representative process to take into account social change, characterised by the network society, then we need find a way to be more honest about the role of representatives and let politicians be politicians.
Bookmarks for August 11th through August 18th
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.
- OnePeople › Open source matters to open government. Really. – "Both DiMaio and Caudill make the mistake of believing that open source is about making cheap bits. Instead, it’s a blueprint for effective collaboration on a massive scale."
- Categorisation and other exciting details – "Part of the reason for wanting wider comment is the fact that I am increasingly inclined to think that the emphasis on civic space building is very obviously on the creation and sustainability of hyperlocal communities – with the role of the democratic body being to connect to and interact with these more social groupings."
- Minds in the Cloud – Exploring the Present and Future Possibilities of Cloud Computing – Interesting collection of videos.
- The future of government is open – "With open source software, governments developing open information innovations have the freedom to share software code and applications with other like-minded governments and organizations."
- Computing Machinery and Intelligence – A.M. Turing – I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?"
- The Social PR Blog – Great blog for comms/PR folk on how to get social right.
- Read+Comment | Hassle-free publishing and commenting on your documents – Incredibly cool commentable documents as a service platform from Steph Gray.
- Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information – Useful list
- What Happened to Yahoo – "Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company."
- What matters in net neutrality – Jonathan Zittrain's take on the Google/Verizon net neutrality kerfuffle.
You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.
You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.