Last night I was chatting with a friend about how straight-talking the Aussies are compared to the English. His example was that if he’s wearing a bad jumper out there they’ll tell him that he looks like a gnome. Then Read more…
Banksy has been held as a shining example of local eDemocracy for a couple of years now. Until now it was the petition that had gathered the most signatories on a council ePetition site. As of this morning a petition Read more…
"Once again, the citizens have disappeared."
Michael Ancram, MP, Devizes.
Yesterday the House of Commons held the first debate about the Local
Government changes – the approval of unitary status for a number of
councils around the country. The first debate was about Wiltshire, our
home county.
From reading the debate it would seem that the Government has based its decision to form a unitary Wiltshire County Council based on the ease of working of a variety of bodies and organisations and ignored strong evidence that the citizens of Wiltshire opposed the change. I’ve highlighted some of the salient parts from the TheyWorkForYou rendition of Hansard.
John Healey, Minister of State (Local Government)
So the citizens didn’t disappear but the government choose to ignore them in favour of the views of other stakeholders as described by the County Council who had proprosed unitary status.
Simon Hughes, MP, North Suffolk and Bermondsey
John Healey, Minister of State (Local Government)
But the government didn’t check what they said was true.
"the district auditor stated in response:
a press release issued by the county council—
"represents a misinterpretation of the MORI findings. "
Andrew Murrison, MP, Westbury
Even though the District Auditor felt that the county had been mis-representing findings.
I don’t want to get into the debate about whether Wiltshire should abandon the two-tier system or not,
Ben Wallace MP is the first MP to publish details of his expenses. Right down to the £1 parking charge. It is really dull stuff, but really important. People are naturally cynical in this country, so if an MP declines Read more…
The NLGN have just published a paper called 21st Century Democracy – e-petitioning and local government. It is a big title and subject. The author sees e-Petitions as the solution and there is some logic to it, but I feel Read more…
Tom Watson, blogging MP extraordinaire, was promoted in the Peter Hain aftermath to be a junior minister in the Cabinet Office. According to his blog he has some responsibility for technology projects, which is a good thing because Tom is Read more…
When we start a new project we also start a blog. I’m a Scientist has started. Cllr2.0 has been going a little longer. It is good practice. It helps us market the project, it helps us communicate with a wider Read more…
That’s a fair description of BarCampUKGovweb (although I guess the easy doesn’t apply if you organised – hats off to Jeremy, Emma and co.).
My way of describing BarCamp is that it is a conference without the interminable self-promoting presentations. It is self-organising to the extent that the agenda can and does change right the way through the day and more time is spent discussing and networking than listening to people tell you things you could have read if they’d been bothered to share it online.
More information about BarCampUKGovweb is on PageFlakes.
I want to use this post to make a few comments about the day and to move the conversation forward. This is needed because the one frustration I felt about the day was that everytime the discussion was coming round to solutions and actions someone would pop their head around the door and say
Some children’s hospital wards are decorated with ‘fun’ images of clowns. This is supposed to cheer up the patients and help healing, etc. Then someone thought of actually asking the young people what they thought. It turns out that they Read more…
What do you do if the public vote for the "wrong" name? If you’re Blue Peter you do a cover-up. If you’re Greenpeace you smile about it and be thankful for all the publicity that has been created for your Read more…