Steps along the same path – Participatory Budgeting and Cooperative Council
Lambeth recently hosted the visit of two Participatory Budgeting experts from the US, as part of a study tour organised by Church Action on Poverty, as the culmination of their People’s Budget campaign. Josh Lerner, from the North American PB Project and Alderman Joe Moore, from Chicago met with elected members and senior officers at [...]
Hacking local democracy
So how about we hack local democracy? What am I talking about? Hacking is associated with coding, but as I learned at bluelight camp..essentially it means taking a thing and modifying it to make it work better. I know that lots of policy people, active citizens, politicians, public authority officers and others have really good [...]
Guerilla Voice: Putting practitioners front and centre of the evidence agenda
Imagine if it was suggested that improving services and policy didn’t need to involve frontline practitioners. However odd, this is pretty much how the Government’s evidence agenda has been presented.
Guerilla Voice: We need a People’s Budget
“Why then can’t we establish a ‘People’s Budget’ process – one that develops Budget policy in the open, in parallel to the (somewhat necessarily) closed decision-making process in the Treasury?” In contrast to the idea of open policy, the most important thing that government does – setting tax and spend policy – is strictly a closed affair. It’s time this changed.
Frontline voices: Mark Parker – community organising and politics
“Growing policy from the grassroots guerrilla-style takes time, courage, guts and determination and no little willingness to challenge established orthodoxy.” Mark Parker shares his commitment to community organising.
Frontline voices: Emma Daniel – Cool again, local democracy that is
“Thanks to digital tools – democracy can become cool again.” Emma Daniel writing on Huxley06 looks forward to a new social media-supported era of local democracy in which local people’s voices are welcomed.
Guerilla Voice: Charities need to find ways to speak out
This week, the report of an independent inquiry suggested that charities are increasingly afraid to challenge public policy because of fears of retribution from government, especially if they are reliant on public contracts. At the same time, the Government proclaims its commitment to ‘open policymaking.’ If we are to have better policy, it’s vital that [...]
Frontline voices: Jim Brown – In defence of probation
“There’s nothing quite like having to eat some humble pie. Having to admit that you might be wrong about something.” Jim Brown challenges his own ‘Luddite view of Twitter’ and considers the possibility of an online community ‘in defense of probation’ at a critical time for the service.
Frontline voices: Laura McInerney – The Connected Society
“Imagine the wealth of information these online conversations would give to policymakers otherwise locked in their ivory towers and desperate to get the input of workers who might make their policies actually work.” Laura McInerney reflects on the possibility of professionals helping to inform better policy and where this is already starting to happen.
Frontline Friday round-up 18th January 2013
Our round-up of frontline blogs we liked from the week of 14th January 2013, from welfare reforms to the probation service, child care cuts to politicians blaming civil servants – and the price of speaking up.
We can’t improve consultation without talking about class
Discussions about consultation often focus on methods and means, but of course there’s a broader social context to engagement. Declining trust in political institutions and weakening identification with the mainstream political parties threaten to undermine efforts to engage people in new ways. In short: we need to talk about class. This post is part of [...]
The Government is paying the price for its lack of openness on the NHS
The NHS is facing significant financial pressure as a result of austerity with smaller increases in spending, which are not keeping pace with demand. This has meant that the NHS has to find £20 billion in efficiency savings by 2015. At the same time the health service is facing one of its biggest upheavals ever, [...]
Best of the frontline bloggers (week ending 19th October 2012)
Here’s our selection of the best frontline blogs we’ve read this week – from social care to local government comms. Do send us your suggestions for great posts we’ve missed – and those frontline bloggers we should follow in the future. Social care What I would say to Norman Lamb From Ermintrude2 Posted on 18th October [...]
The power of Mumsnet – for Blog Action Day #PowerOfWe #BAD12
This post is about Mumsnet. We believe that sites like Mumsnet could represent the future of developing public policy. They point to the potential of mass membership online platforms to engage thousands of people in practical consideration of policy issues and so radically widen participation in policy – or as we call it, guerilla policy. [...]
Open policymaking: Should there be a ‘duty to involve’ for national policy?
As Edward Andersson from Involve noted in his recent blog reviewing the new consultation principles issued by government: “Today consultation has, for many citizens, become a byword for formalistic, tick box exercises, done to mask a decision which is already a ‘done deal’.” Edward rightly suggested that the new principles, while important, fall short of providing the [...]
Consultation can’t fix our broken politics – we need new ways to engage the public in policymaking
Is consultation broken – or is it our political system? Consultation seems to have become the lightening rod for general discontents about politics and policymaking. Let’s improve consultation - but let’s also rethink how we do policy and politics at the same time. In the Open Policy project with the Democratic Society in association with the Cabinet Office, [...]
Open policy needs people to step outside of institutions to tell the truth
Christopher Hitchens used to evaluate the credibility of any person or organisation by their willingness to cite ‘evidence against interests’, that is, to acknowledge facts that are contrary to their own position. It’s a good test – and one that many policymakers, commentators and think tanks would fail regularly. With this in mind, we should [...]
Making open policy a reality (part 2)
A couple of weeks ago the Government announced its plans for ‘open policy’. In this post and the previous post we suggest how it can make open policy a reality. As part of its recently published civil service reform plan, the Government has committed itself to ‘open policymaking’. It has announced a new “presumption in [...]
Making open policy a reality (part 1)
A couple of weeks ago the Government announced its plans for ‘open policy’. In this post and the following post we suggest how it can make open policy a reality. As part of its recently published civil service reform plan, the Government has committed itself to promote ‘open policymaking’. This includes: commissioning policy development from outside organisations such [...]
Are directly elected mayors making use of social media?
We’ve been blogging over the past couple of weeks about how various bodies – think tanks, commissioners, civil servants and trade bodies – can make better use of social media such as Twitter. In this post we consider how directly elected mayors can use social media in their work – and share some observations from [...]