Heartland revisited: How to avoid accusations of influence
The Heartland controversy rolls on. If you’ve missed it, this is the leak of documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based libertarian think tank. The documents, which include the names of previously anonymous donors and funders, were first published on the DeSmogBlog and ThinkProgress Green websites. Heartland says at least one of the documents is a forgery, but the story has reignited [...]
Why think tanks aren’t popular
We’re beginning to think about what our website should look like. This development blog – nice and clean though it is (thanks WordPress) – isn’t our proper website of course, just our temporary home. But it’s got us thinking about think tank websites and what they say about think tanks themselves. We’ve noted before that most [...]
Access all areas
The world is run by the people who show up, so the (variously attributed) saying goes. It helps if you’ve received an invite though. Which organisations were and were not invited to attend today’s ‘summit meeting’ on the NHS reforms is indicative of how most governments try to use their power to grant access in the service of their political goals. It was a PR [...]
Paying for policy
The controversy of the week (in thinktankland at least) has been the leak of documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based libertarian outfit, or as they style themselves, a “national nonprofit research organization dedicated to finding and promoting ideas that empower people.” The documents, which include the names of previously-anonymous donors and funders, were first published on the DeSmogBlog [...]
What’s the secret to a successful think tank in the 21st century?
The Global Go-To Think Tank Index, compiled annually by the Think Tanks and Civil Society Program at the University of Pennsylvania, which ranks policy research organisations using a panel of nearly 1,500 experts and peers, claims that the ‘best’ think tank in the UK is Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs). You can always quibble with the methodologies used [...]
Blues and blueprints
The political story of the week has been the continuing travails of Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms. ConservativeHome’s attack on the reforms is significant in at least a couple of ways that interest us here: firstly because of the message it sends and how it brought to the surface widespread concerns in Conservative circles about the reforms; secondly because of the medium, which is to say [...]
Moonshots and masses
Someone recently described our idea – a think tank where the research is conducted by an online community of public service practitioners and service users – as being very “on trend, perhaps too on trend.” I wasn’t sure what the last bit meant (the conversation had moved on), but there’s certainly a lot of it [...]
Creating open space for policy
One of the great paradoxes these days is that we can be creators in so many aspects of public and cultural life that were previously the preserve of ‘elites’ – technology now enables us to make movies and music, to communicate and form our own communities so easily – but not in politics, which after all is really just the way in which [...]
Represent yourself
When we propose a new think tank where the research is conducted by frontline practitioners in public services and the public who use services or experience particular problems – and especially when we suggest that an online platform could be a major part of this – then it obviously raises all sorts of questions about [...]
Policy is for other people
Our project is one month old today. What have we learnt so far? The basic idea – a think tank where research is done by public service practitioners and the public who use services – seems to spark with people. By next week we’ll have talked to more than 35 charities in our first set of customer insight workshops, [...]