Being beastly to the Lib-Dems

I was on the House of Comments Podcast a few nights ago discussing Labour's approach to the Lib-Dems here. The shorter version of my own position is that, while it may be fun to bang on about Birkenstock Traitors, and it's a good bit of tonic for Labour's troops, that Labour's fire should all be concentrated on the Tories for reasons that seem, to me, to be obvious.

The reason I was on the podcast in the first place was to introduce a project called 'Political Innovation' (no link yet).

Connectivity - good or bad?

A really interesting exchange about how far connectivity is a social good.

Diversity and information

My friend Conall McDevitt has a very sharply titled post up here: If you think libraries are expensive, try ignorance. It's a reworking of the line that "if you think education is expensive...."

It's an oddly roundheaded aspect of British culture that we don't fully buy the idea that a diverse thinking polity is essential to the wellbeing of the nation. We don't seem to value thought and we don't seem to value diversity.

We make almost no provision for argument and debate. MPs have to justify their expenses based upon roundheaded concerns related to their poor and inappropriate impersonation of social workers and not upon the fact that they need a team of intelligent researchers and a series of intellectual throwdowns to tighten up the quality of government thinking. Now, it seems - despite the fact that we have 2,600 people for every one elected representative in the UK (in France, it's 160-1), it seems that the Tories are determined to make the populist point that 'we have too many politicians'.

We have a political ecology that is largely sceptical of the state's ability to actually do anything in the first place. This is, I suppose, a reasonable viewpoint, but for the most part that system seems to insist upon ensuring that the state does everything poorly just to prove it's point. The Post Office is a classic example of this. Like the lefty revolutionary defeatists of old, successive governments have sought to ensure that the Post Office fails in the hope that some vanguardist free-market solution will emerge to snatch the opportunity.

The idea that any business will ever invest a fraction of what is needed to make the Post Office work is a fantasy that seems to survive every form of challenge short of actually killing the postal service stone dead (which I understand is now under consideration).

We have a party political system that has an odd - and I suspect unsustainable - obsession with the papering over of cracks. As long as the mainstream media was its gatekeeper, that was possible - I don't beleive that it occupies this role any longer and I think that the public are less and less impressed by shows of 'unity' as every new day passes. We have a political class who seem to have elevated the hunt for those who deviate from groupthink and orthodoxy into a sport.

The Labour Party seems set to be offering a leadership choice of a handful of over-scrubbed white males in their early 40s with barely a shred of political difference between them and almost no life experiences beyond politics. The winner will be go up against Nick Clegg and David Cameron and the rest of use can watch them melt into one hairless pink blob whose shit doesn't smell before we decide which one to vote for next time.

Almost every Prime Minister in living memory went to Oxford, we have a We have an unwritten constitution (trans: a settlement that is whatever a handful of newspapers decide that they would like it to be at any given moment) that we are almost incapable of adapting.

We have a bureaucracy that sustains itself by ensuring that everything is done the way that it always has been done - and that sponteneity and invention have no place in the process.

We've see the investment base of our creative industries narrowed down and resulting an a contraction in the range of film and TV content at our disposal.

Today, a private members defamation bill has been published by Lord Lester of Herne Hill. It remains to be seen if this will be adopted by the government and pushed through, but Simon Singh's views on this are worth a glance if you have time. It's about the only silvery lining to this cloud of homegeneity and monoculture that is coming from officialdom. The one thing that holds out the possibility that someone - anyone - will say something - anything - that falls outside our narrow range of pemissable sentiment.

Thankfully, when I say the only thing, I'm discounting this massive new pro-diversity, pro-debate behemoth that is the read-write web. Things aren't as bleak as they sometimes look, are they?

I hope your MP is going to urge the governement to adopt this defamation bill. I'm writing to mine to urge that he does so. My old Labour MP, oddly, would have done. I'm not as optimistic with the new Tory incumbent....

Osler wins!

Just a very quick one: Here's John Gray's account of Dave Osler's legal victory yesterday. Jack of Kent (his account is here) called me on Wednesday night and said "come to the Royal Courts of Justice tomorrow at 10am."

I did as I was told, sat in the wrong courtroom watching a fascinating dispute about Leylandii while next door Dave got the judgement he was hoping for. I took some pics here and anyone who wants to is hereby permitted to do so (I'm waiving copyright).

So congratulations to Dave and best wishes to John Gray and Alex Hilton who are still fighting this one.

For anyone who came for drinks afterwards, Jack massively overstated my involvement in this. Dave and Jack are both friends of mine - I'd picked up that Dave was not enjoying the impact that the action was having on his personal life and I suggested they may like to talk to each other a while ago. That's all.

Jack and his mate Robert Dougans heroically stepped into the breach at this point and did tons of selfless and effective work for Dave. Robert - a roaring Tory and Dave, an ex-trot lefty are not what you'd normally call a marriage made in heaven, but this is one of those issues that I think cuts across traditional political cleavages.

Which brings me to the reason I'm writing this: I think that there is an emerging cross-cutting constituency that disagrees on lots of big social and economic issues, but that is strongly united on these issues. I'd really like to do anything I can to help bring this group of people together and is anyone else is interested, please let me know.

Now is quite a good time for this sort of thing, by the way....

Interactivity and it's enemies

A good while ago, I read a report on the impact of cars on the quality of life on some streets. Specifically, the impact that a busy road has on social capital. I can't remember where I read it now (I bet the estimable Kevin Harris would have a copy to hand - this work on cul-de-sacs steps on related issues), but it makes perfect sense.

Think about the number of connections that would exist on a quiet street and then sever them by introducing a busy thoroughfare. The mathematical impact is significant - it doesn't just halve the number of regular connections. You decimate them. And everyone is poorer.

A few weeks ago, I posted an outline of what I think could be a useful 'interactive manifesto'.

At 10am, as Jack of Kent reports, Dave Osler will find out if a libel action against him is to continue. JoK says everything that needs to be said there.

I hope Dave's case ends tomorrow. I hope someone reads that 'interactive manifesto' post. And, giving our new government a fair-ish wind, I hope that The Big Society narrative that Cameron spent some of the election campaign on (against the better judgment of a lot of his party) benefits in two ways from the Liberal tie-up:

1. It's the sort of Tory initiative that's likely to appeal to Liberals and one that they can use to fill the vacuum caused by their mutual vetoes over lots of planned initiatives
2. My own suspicion that it's a foil for a direct democracy lite invitation to the sharp-elbowed middle-class to wring out a greater share of tax spending for themselves may be ameliorated by the Liberals

One relatively cost-free thing that the Tories/Liberals could do would be to treat interactivity as a key public good. One that can help cut public expenditure, make for better government, better science, better innovation and service design.

A good early step would be to treat libel reform seriously. But it's a state of mind that would mean quite a lot of cultural change in the UK. But if 'interactivity' were to become anything like the watchword that the over-rated 'transparency' has become. It's an issue that doesn't really have that much partisan baggage either.

The interactive manifesto?

I've been meaning to post on this for ages and never getting around to it - mainly because I want to do it properly. But time is running out. So here's something towards a rough-and-ready first draft:

I believe that there are a lot of people on all sides of the political dartboard who have a general belief in the positive potential of interactivity. I've found that there is a community of opinion that cuts across traditional ideological divides that would agree with everything in this post.

If this is the case, perhaps it calls for the establishment of a short-term alliance in which we collectively use the latter part of the election campaign to advance questions that are important to us together. All of them are based around a need to promote the aim of increased interactivity - in all it's forms - in pursuit of the public interest. Better thinking, more fairness, higher standards and more inclusion all wrapped up in one neat package.

This means that we would all agree on the need for ....

• Libel reform. Jack of Kent blogs regularly - among many others - about the way that corporate or quack-doctor interests abuse the necessity for a law protecting reputations to stifle free comment. The result benefits charlatans of both commercial and ethical varieties at the expense of medical science - and therefore, the public interest. We need a short statement agreed by a lot of people about what libel reform should set out to achieve -and a commitment to overcome the status quo ante that always prevails in the absence of a wide consensus on the best alternative
• Copyright. Again, there is an optimal balance between the rights of the originators of content to be rewarded for their work, and the public interest benefit that arises from a high rate of exchange of intellectual property. Outdated inflexibilities in the various publishing markets mean that huge opportunities are being missed. We need a short statement agreed by a lot of people about what that optimal balance should look like in order to give the public the benefit from a high rate of exchange in the products of human inquiry.
• Open source. Too many IT projects are the product of a successful salesperson rather than a good public / commercial decision. As Dominic says, it's time people started getting fired for buying IBM. We need a government that is more effective at demanding open standards and developing software that is supplier-independent. we need a less mechanistic and more human model of public procurement. It would save money and lead to a better outcome. We need a short statement agreed by a lot of people about what they would expect an incoming government to do about this.
• Interactivity. In the perfect storm that has grown out of a combination of Freedom of Information legislation and a more interactive polity, the term 'transparency' has been almost fetishised. This creates some problems. It may be creating a less reflective polity that is open to attack from well-heeled pressure groups. In sort, a crude interpretation of the term 'government transparency' may not be in the public interest. If, however, all of the players in public life - politicians, civil servants, pressure groups, journalists, NGOs and QUANGOs, business interests, etc were encouraged to be more interactive - open, human, honest and conversational - this would undoubtedly lead to a more engaged and democratic polity. I was involved in the 'interactive charter' about a year ago, and this idea needs waking up and energising. But we also need a short statement agreed by a lot of people about what they would expect an incoming government to do to get all of the players out of their silos and to create an expectation of a higher quality / quantity of public conversation.
• Democracy: There is a high quality of intelligence and judgment outside any institution - of a quality that can usually beat the quality of thinking within that institution. We need a short statement agreed by a lot of people about what they would expect an incoming government to do to ensure that intelligence and judgment is crowdsourced wherever possible. Elected representatives should be expected to understand how interactive tools can enable them to improve the quality of their thinking and deliberation. I'd really welcome the opportunity to work with a few people to agree a short statement about what could be done to further this aim.
• Service design: For far too long, public policy, architecture and service design has been a narrow monopoly governed by experts, civil servants and suppliers. No school, hospital, housing scheme or major public service should ever again be developed without a high level of participation among the people who are expected to use the services. My mates Ty Goddard and Ian Fordham have been working to make the national conversation on school design (as one example) more inclusive with their 'Centre for School Design'. In recent years we have reached a much better understanding of how to reach and involve these people in the design of their services and I think that it's time that government placed inclusive and participative design at the centre of their modus operandi. There must be a more coherent and concise way of saying that, and it would be good if a few people could get their heads together to agree it.

So there you go. A quick burst of keystrokes. Have I missed anything? Could you put any of it better? I think that - in each case - we need a strong concise argument as to why more interactivity is in the public interest, and a strong well-written statement of what we would expect an incoming government to do to achieve these aims.

I'd love to refine it and turn it into a published manifesto. If anyone else is interested? If so, email me using this link: http://scr.im/ntah

I'll then share a Google Doc with you and you can make your own changes to my rough start.

Update: Just after posting this, I see Tom Watson has posted something - much more digitally defined - but very good all the same - and he's using User Voice to allow others to get involved.

Simon Singh

I was at Nottingham Skeptics last night to hear David Allen Green (aka Jack of Kent) speak very convincingly on libel reform. As someone who was an involved bystander in a particularly nasty demonstration of how bloody awful UK libel laws are a few years ago, it rang plenty of unpleasant bells.

Today, I've just had this email - I'm sure that any copyright rules don't apply to it and I'm posting it in full because I think it deserves the widest circulation.

Message from Simon Singh: “A big step for me, a small step for libel reform, and what you can do to help today.”

Dear Friends

Sorry for the silence, but it has been a ridiculously hectic (and happy) time since last week’s victory at the Court of Appeal. However, I urgently wanted to get in touch to update you on the status of my case, the latest news on libel reform and what you can do today to push libel reform up the political agenda.

BCA v Singh

April Fool’s Day 2010 was a day to remember. The Court of Appeal gave a ruling in my libel case with the British Chiropractic Association. The ruling strongly backs my arguments and puts me in a much stronger position when my trial eventually takes place. At last, after two years of defending my article and my right to free speech, I seem to have the upper hand and can breathe a small sigh of relief.

Moreover, the judges made it clear that they did not want to see scientists and science journalists being hauled through the High Court. In particular, they endorsed the view that a so-called comment defence should be adequate for scientific and other articles on matters of public interest. As well as the legal technicalities, the three wise, charming and handsome judges quoted Milton on the persecution of Galileo and directed that the High Court should not become an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth”.

Libel Reform Campaign

This is a small step forward for libel reform, but there is still a huge battle to be fought over the issues of costs, libel tourism, public interest defence, balancing the burden of proof, restricting the ability of powerful corporations to bully individuals (e.g., bloggers, journalists, scientists) and so on.

The General Election was called yesterday and the manifestos will be published in the next week, so we need one last push to persuade the major parties to commit to libel reform. Although we have already achieved a huge amount (from editorials in all last week’s broadsheets to the Commons Select Committee recommending libel reform), we must keep up the pressure!

Both the Labour and Conservative parties have made encouraging sounds about libel reform, but now is the time for them to make commitments in their manifestos.

What you can do today to pressure politicians

I have spent over a million minutes and £100,000 defending my article and my right to free speech, so I am asking you to spend just one minute and no money at all persuading others to sign the petition for libel reform at www.libelreform.org/sign

The last time I made this request, we doubled the number of signatories from 17,000 to 35,000. Can we now double the number from almost 50,000 to 100,000?!

You could ask parents, siblings, colleagues or friends to sign up. You could email everyone in your address book. You could blog about it, mention it to your Facebook friends and twitter about it. In fact, I have pasted some possible tweets at the end of this email – it would be great if you could twitter one, some or all of them.

You could forward all or part of this email to people or just steer them to www.libelreform.org/sign . Or you could persuade people that English libel law needs radical reform by using some of the reasons listed at the end of this email.

Remember, we welcome signatories from around the world because English libel law has a damaging impact globally.

Please, please, please apply maximum pressure to the politicians by encouraging as many new signatories as possible. Please do not take my victory last week as a sign that the battle is over. My case is still ongoing and the campaign for libel reform is only just starting.

Thanks for all your support – it has been incredibly important for the campaign and a real morale booster personally over the last two years.

Simon Singh.

Ps. Please spread the word by sending out one, some or all of the following tweets

Pls RT English libel law silences debate, says UN Human Rights Committee. Sign up at www.libelreform.org & back #libelreform Pls RT English libel costs 140x more than Europe. We can't afford to defend our words. Sign up at www.libelreform.org & back #libelreform Pls RT Two ongoing libel cases involving health. The law should not crush scientific debate. Sign up at www.libelreform.org & back #libelreform Pls RT London is notorious for attracting libel tourists who come to UK to silence critics. Sign up at www.libelreform.org & back #libelreform

PPs. Reasons why we need radical libel reform:

(a) English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee.

(b) These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to discuss matters of genuine public interest (including public health!).

(c) Our laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws are so hostile to responsible journalism. (Again, it is exactly because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome signatories to the petition from around the world.)

(d) Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically runs to over £1 million.

(e) Two separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and Peter Wilmshurst, and we are both raising concerns about medical treatments. We face losing £1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar concerns when our libel laws are so brutal and expensive? Our libel laws mean that serious health matters are not necessarily reported, which means that the public is put at risk.

PPPs. I know that I will leave people out of this list, but I owe a huge thanks to:

1. The 10,000 people who joined the Facebook group “For Simon Singh and Free Speech - Against the BCA Libel Claim”, particularly those who joined when the rest of the world ignored the issue of libel.

2. The 300 people who packed Penderel’s Oak in May 2009 and who helped launch the Keep Libel Out of Science campaign, particularly the speakers: Nick Cohen, Dave Gorman, Evan Harris MP, Professor Brian Cox, Chris French, Tracey Brown (Sense About Science), Robert Dougans (Bryan Cave) and David Allen Green.

3. The 20,000 people who then joined the Keep Libel Out of Science campaign.

4. Jack of Kent and every other blogger who ranted and raved about libel reform when the mainstream media was turning a blind eye.

5. Everyone in the mainstream media who is now covering the various libel cases and the issue of libel reform.

6. Sense About Science, Index on Censorship and English PEN, who formed the Coalition for Libel Reform. And thanks to everyone who has contributed pro bono to the campaign in terms of design, technical support, chivvying support for the EDM and more.

7. The 46,000 people (i.e. you) who have signed the petition for libel reform, particularly those who have cajoled others to sign up at www.libelreform.org/sign

8. All the big names who have spoken out in favour of libel reform, from Professor Richard Dawkins to Derren Brown, from the Astronomer Royal to the Poet Laureate, from the Amazing Randi to Ricky Gervais. Particular thanks go to Dara O Briain, Stephen Fry, Tim Minchin and Robin Ince, who have gone out of their way to step up to the plate when the campaign has needed them. Immense thanks also to the 100+ big names who were the first to sign the petition to keep libel out of science and highlighted the need for libel reform.

9. Everyone who has emailed and twittered and told me in person that I am not going crazy, and who reassured me that I am doing the right thing by defending my article.

10. Thanks to Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems, for promising to put libel reform in his manifesto. And thanks in advance to Jack Straw (Justice Secretary) and Dominic Grieve (Shadow Justice Secretary), because I know that the Labour and Conservative parties are going to commit to libel law reform. I cannot believe that they will allow more scientists, serious journalists, bloggers, biographers, human rights activists and others to go through the same hell that I have had to endure for last two years.

#PeoplePosters

It's starting to click for Labour, isn't it?

I'm not so much talking about the polls. After two years of saying "it's not all over yet" I'm now finding myself being the one who is telling everyone not to get too excited about recent tacking as the bookies are still convinced the Tories will do it.

But this idea is a good one:

Starting tonight, Labour HQ is asking its growing army of online supporters to lend your creative talents to the election campaign in an exciting new initiative to design the party's next campaign poster.

The best one will be emblazoned on ten digital poster boards in London and Manchester throughout the long Easter weekend.

We're calling the initiative #PeoplePosters.

There are two different messages you should seek to convey with your poster designs:

1 - Labour’s pledge to protect frontline services.

2 - David Cameron’s lack of substance.

And Philip Gould has three top tips for creating a great political poster: keep the message simple; use strong images; and try to weave in humour wherever possible.

The rest is up to you.

Elsewhere, I've been quite impressed by the Tories deftness with social media, but this is a surprisingly sharp response by Labour I reckon?

Read this

Here.

It's interesting.

Six rules to apply in your response to corporate media

1. You should pay for your own hosting.

2. You should write your own biography, not delegate it to invisible masses on Wikipedia.

3. You should write other people's biographies, from your point of view. Or at least tell true stories about them, which can be assembled by others into alternate views.

4. Sign your name to all your writing. Use your real name, the one on your driver's license, tax returns, passport, draft card.

5. If you care about a subject, write a definitive piece on it that reflects your point of view,. Don't settle for a compromise, group-think sanitized version in the form of a Wikipedia page.

6. You should own your own domain, or set of domains, and pay the registration fees yourself.

Here's why.

Nowhere to hide

Ewan has picked another example of augmented reality up:

"Point your mobile phone at the person speaking at the lectern, the cute person in the bar or that potential recruit and see, hovering around their head, all their social networks, tastes in music and books, and dodgy photos from last night."

The potential is quite interesting, but it's also a bit scary, innit? The interesting bit for me is how far this puts pressure on people to be interactive - particularly public figures. There will always be those who either are genuinely open about their life - I know plenty of people who like sharing every detail of their lives.

I think that Westminster may start filling up with people who are ostentatiously open about their lives in a 'look at me I'm a pretty straight guy with nothing to hide' sort of way.

It reminds me of the origins of the word 'Candidate' - from the latin Candidatus - derived in turn from the white robes that Senators wore to signify their purity of mind. It also said 'look at me, I have the wealth and slaves needed to sustain a huge length of clean white linen every day.'

The Man in The White Suit. I would say that 360 degree transparency is something that would be quite expensive to sustain - especially given the huge array of different snobberies that you'd have to be sensitive to.

I wrote a probably-too-long post on things that touch on this question here some time ago if you've got an age to waste.

Google Tax Now!

It's an odd thing about Google - corporately, their behaviour is relatively attractive. For instance, I'm writing this on software that is provided and hosted free of charge by Google. I'm an enthusiastic user of Google Apps, Chrome, Analytics and a variety of other services that they provide completely free of charge.

And what's more, though this post calls for measures that Google would oppose furiously, I don't suppose that they will do anything to delete it (though I'd be interested to see how 'Google Tax Now!' compares with the search engine rankings of my other posts?)

On the other hand, I think that my grandchildren will be paying for the investment climate that has allowed a company to spend on the scale that Google has without any direct pay-back from the customers.

And Google (along with Apple and Amazon) are now making an absolute fortune. Their success has allowed them to adopt a monopoly position and a bargaining stance that enables them to offer a very poor - almost blackmail - take-it-or-leave-it deal to authors, musicians and publishers.

Until there are dozens of competing iTunes / Google / Amazon type players that intermediate deals between users and producers in each of their markets, creators will not be able to take a fair share of the price that people are undoubtedly prepared to pay for a loosening of 'scarcity' in the supply of creative industries services.

Journalists can't say 'pay the rate that I ask or remove my site from your search' because there is only one game in town at the moment. It's not a question of how much you want to monetise your online content - it's a question of IF you want any money at all.

I don't think that a lot of the advocates of copyright reform - Billy Bragg for example - fully get this issue. They seem to be arguing that we should behave as though the market has evolved to become something that it currently isn't - something with weak intermediaries.

Like a lot of the left, we've almost totally gone to sleep on the question of monopoly and the way that it distorts markets unfairly.

An attack on the monopolistic aspects of modern capitalism should be the primary economic focus of the left as far as I can see. There are plenty of other aspects of the marketplace in 2010 in which the public interest would be served by a curbing of monopolies - there's even a centre-right communitarian appeal to such an approach!

We need to follow the French lead here: Google Tax Now!

Participation and collective action

From TechPresident:

Indiana Univeristy's Elinor Ostrom focuses her work on how people can go about creating rules for transactions around shared resources, or "commons," that make collective action rewarding (enough) for everyone involved. And where she added a particularly new way of thinking to economics was to zero in on the economic transactions that take place in ad hoc organizations. Her work is part of a body of knowledge that underlies what people are looking for and considering as they design Gov 2.0 systems of participation and new models for democracy, which makes her of particular interest to those of us interested in thinking through a distributed view of the world.

Will Davies on the 'post-bureaucratic state'

This is a cracking post - really, do go and read it. I've got a few comments that I'll come to in a moment, but Will picks up Tom Steinberg's 'capture' by the Tories.

I think I'm almost alone in this one, (Will articulates it better than me though) but I've never found MySociety's work to be politically neutral, and the way that others seem to have done so has bothered me for a while. Their work could be described as audacious and capable, but not neutral.

Tom Watson raises some questions of his own and I'd add to them:

I've always found the concept that politicians work for us to be slightly fatuous in the same way that the concept of politicians 'spending our money' doesn't work. It's not our money, it never was. It never will be. No amount of minarchist fantasy will ever change this.

Politicians don't work for us. They work for the interests of the nation as a whole. We live in that nation and every few years have the option to pick better politicians.

This is a question that should divide the left and the right. It may be the case that a lot of the left is intellectually impoverished to the point of not realising this, but large sections of the political right understand it very clearly.

If I could take issue with one aspect of Tom's justification of his position, it's this one:

I am not a political partisan - party politics bores me rather. I'm not a member of any political party, nor have I ever been. I've worked for the Institute of Economic Affairs, and I've worked for the Blair era Strategy Unit, as a civil servant.

The IEA coupled with Will Davies observation about...

"...the paradox of the neo-liberal state has always been that it is managed by self-loathing bureaucrats. It has conducted a recurring rationalist critique of its own rationality, constantly restructuring, reinventing, reimagining its own loathed inefficiencies, but never being able to settle on anything that can be agreed on as efficient."

... doesn't suggest any kind of political neutrality to me.

Back to the post though. Reading it, I was hoping that Will was going to get onto the question of pluralism. I agree with pretty-much everything he's saying here, but would suggest that the answer would be to work towards a range of crowdsourced adversarial poles of 'distributed wisdom' (if that's not too jargonny?)

In less geeky terms, I mean political parties and the way that they form policy. But not political parties entirely in their current form. I'd argue that the changes in the way that we process, share and aggregate information means that political affinity groups can have more capacity than they used to - as long as they can evolve into less hierarchical structures - in the way that Wikipedia or Mixed Ink's contributors are.

And in crudely political terms, I mean local franchises based upon such clubs - ones where the political centre has the option to withdraw the right to use that franchise under certain circumstances, and local groups are feeding back on the dirty old stuff about what you need to say and do to actually win elections.

It also raises the old question of a more politicised civil service. The way that inner-and-outer relationships between civil servants and parties work is, surely, more appropriate if we want to come up with an alternative to the Hayekian nightmare that Will sketches out.

But, as I said, these aren't quibbles. It's a really good post - go read it.

Monopolies, market research and reputation management (branding)

4iP have invested in a site called MyBuilder. It's designed to make it easier to find a good builder without being ripped off.

I'm only pointing to this because it is sort-of related to an observation that I made here recently (in a longer post) about how monopolies are sustained by their superior market research - and that the way that they keep this information to themselves could be seen as an appropriation of information that - by rights - belongs to us.

We may not have made a fully-informed decision in which we allowed them to use our judgement in the first place.

As a result, monopolies can fine-tune their services to make theirs the least uncompetitive one on offer. The result is not necessarily good for the consumer and it creates a high barrier to entry that excludes genuine entrepreneurs.

Market research also informs brand development. If you've stumbled across the concept of the 'market for lemons', one of it's corollaries is that - with imperfect information or understanding of various market options - we undervalue products. Brands allow large companies to circumvent this and be able to get higher prices for their goods and services.

So, MyBuilder - by promoting reputation management - will allow smallish builders to develop a reputation independent of large brands. Admittedly, it's not a market that is particularly dominated by these brands anyway - but I'd like to see similar projects in markets that are more dominated in this way.

Reconfiguring journalism and political discourse

Here's Charlie Beckett:

"...the US obsession with the political blogosphere distracted people from the much richer opportunities online. US pol blogs thrives because the American mainstream political media is so boring and so editorially narrow, be it Fox News or the New York Times. Here in the UK we have much more vibrant newspaper-based political journalism as well as the vast edifice of the BBC and other public service broadcasters.

So it is not so surprising that our political blogosphere is less high profile than in America. The next UK election will NOT be an Internet election and very few contests or issues will be impacted by what happens online. But away from the overtly political websites the Internet is reconfiguring journalism and political discourse. Political journalism in the UK is already significantly networked. The blogs feed into the mainstream which itself is now widely connected online to the public. Social networks as well as specific interest websites are now framing the conversation alongside traditional media."

Read the whole thing if you can? It's actually a book review, but I think he's got a good post of his own in there as well.

Will it work?

Too busy at the moment to think this one through, so here's a question:

Will a Labour version of the 'Tax Bombshell' campaign from 1992 ('cuts bombshell'?) do for Gordon Brown or Alan Johnson what it did for John Major?

On the admittedly adventurous assumption that it's possible, do Labour really want to win an election in the way that Major did? I suppose a low-majority Parliament would be less awkward for Labour than the Tories, Maastricht rebels and all.

But surely Labour - communications-wise - are totally stuffed? I'm conscious of all of the really solid stuff - the economy, the MPs expenses, the irresistible siren call of change, the disenchantment with a squabbling party (squabbling over what, exactly? If Labour could do itself one huge favour, it would be to deselect loads of it's prominent faces - they really are a complete dead-weight).

But for me, the whole error is compounded by the contrast with Obama. For Labour, it's like there's a fantasy world in which their great plans - all cooked up behind closed doors - will somehow be greeted with a fanfare of approval and that the only thing we've not quite got is Blair's ability to present these solutions.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying here, but I really don't think any political party will ever run a successful campaign on any issue again until it learns that ideas have to come from the public in some way - that the public need to be involved in the process. 

I'd never argue that you can earn respect or votes by asking people what you should do in office, but I'd suggest that Labour could do worse than asking people to describe the problems, or to collaboratively map out coherent proposals for change, and ensure that plenty of their own people are there in the mix providing the political ballast, saying things like 'no-one will vote for that' or 'newspaper owners have something of a veto over that.'

If you want to be cynical, it's a way of looking like you're listening. Or if you want to be a bit of a lefty, it's a way of breaking the monopsony on policy advice that is provided by civil servants, pollsters, think-tanks and pressure groups.

Either way, it'd be nice to see Labour even trying to make an effort to look like this fucking obvious possibility has vaguely occured to at least one person in the Victoria St HQ. I'd strongly suggest - with one possible exception - that it hasn't. (You know who you are, don't you, matey?)

It's probably too late, and there are probably too many new factors that dwarf the 'non-inclusive policymaking' problem. But take a look at ideas like www.debategraph.org or www.mixedink.com - again, not panaceas, but pointers to what a positive e-democracy could look like, and online indicators of what a possible offline approach could be.

Labour could do worse than trying to at least look like it doesn't think of itself as a bunch of wizards that know all of the answers.

That really would be too much of a lie to get away with.

True

From Jack of Kent

Microblogging?

Try nanoblogging instead.

Pointless sites

Here's an index of pointless sites. Via Dave.

Relax, sit back and enjoy Nosepilot.

Update: WTF?