participation - bmwelby's blog

I started writing a comment in response to today’s essay by James O’Malley but it quickly became outsized so I’ve turned it into a blog post instead.

The source for that essay is a new whitepaper from Demos that offers up a roadmap for embedding greater public participation in national policy making. James isn’t a great fan of it and in making the URL for his essay “James vs Demos” he’s clearly writing from a place of provocation. But he’s not alone. It also drew the ire of several commentators on Twitter. What’s strange is that I think in different times all of them would have probably been at the vanguard of enthusiasm for greater openness and engagement from government, not less.

But I can sympathise with their point of view. Some of that is concern that such efforts simply create an open buffet for cranks and extremists to push their agendas because they’re the ones who show up. But overall I sense a tired frustration that the country is just really bad at delivering the things we need. And that the feeling is that the sclerosis in this aspect of modern Britain comes from inviting external voices into the process which delay and obfuscate from what needs to be done because they hold too much sway.

A good example of that could be that some of the ballooning costs of HS2 that ultimately led to its cancellation for the country as a whole coming from efforts to satisfy the concerns of certain local communities and residents. While on the flip side to that, the new government has rapidly pressed ahead with a number of energy initiatives with national (if not international) outcomes in mind that had been being held up by local objections.

But focusing on these issues is to absolve those who govern for their deficiency in leadership. We can say that in either case it’s been a face off between individuals and communities (bad) and government decisiveness (good). But that’s such a bad place for us to end up when it comes to thinking about the sort of society we want to live in and the sort of public discourse we want to engage with.

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

I’ve added this post and the second on Government as a Local Platform to my series on ‘Local Government Digital Service‘ because it’s a helpful original piece, reflecting my perspective from before joining GDS.

I started this post at the start of April, returned to it with the demise of Flip but finally finished it after Andrew Beeken shared his own thoughts yesterday.

April saw the demise of Flip. Despite being the leading camcorder brand in the US, parent company Cisco judged the marketplace to be unsustainable in the face of the competition posed by our mobile phones.

Given that they paid $590m for the technology two years ago it’s a bold move. Equally, their quitting from a position at the top is shrewd because of the inevitable future of hand-held video recording.

I really like my Flip camera and when the product was first introduced it disrupted the market but I expect to get similar functionality from my next mobile phone without having to carry something else in my pocket. Whilst convergence is not good for the 550 employees at Flip, the rest of us benefit – we get one thing where once we might have had to use more.

It’s that sort of approach which lies behind Martha Lane Fox’s vision for a single government domain and over the last three months it has been brought to life by 11 people somewhere in London. There had been glimpses of what they were working on and The Telegraph had featured a couple of screenshots as well as some interviews but this week we were able to get our grubby mitts on this “proof of concept prototype“.

Tag: participation

We need more participation in policymaking, we certainly don’t need less

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We need more participation in policymaking, we certainly don’t need less

Alpha(Local)Gov

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