Local Democracy
I visited Kingston (upon Thames not Hull) today to hear from Councillor Mary Reid about progress on the e-democracy projects that have been taking place in local government over the last 18 months. Mary is Chair of the committee that has overseen these.
I must admit to being something of a sceptic about the extent to which government can fill this space as I see democratic developments as being generated by people outside the institutions of power. However, I was pleasantly surprised at just how much has been achieved by this programme.
What is especially impressive is the open way in which all the experiences are presented on the website – www.e-democracy.gov.uk – so that others can benefit from them. The case studies and guidance should prove very useful for public bodies in the UK and elsewhere and potentially helpful tools have been developed such as the Groupserver product that offers a free opensource system for online forums.
I shall spend some time browsing the site and digesting the various reports and expect there to be a lot of valuable material within it. The question now is whether this will go any further with local authorities who have not taken part in the pilots using the expertise. It would be ironic if local authorities in other countries ended up making more use of this Government-funded work than those in the UK.
Some Councils are clearly more progressive than others.
I became so fed up trying to get any reply from my local ruling party District Councillors that I’ve now got a Downing Street petition running proposing mandatory replies to reasonable communications from constituents and official discussion forums to enable a local and national policy debate audit trail.
To find a link to the Downing Street petition, click my blog post signature and visit the blog I’ve set up to support and debate this proposal.
The more online signatures the better.
It would be lovely to have your support.