The International Centre for Excellence in e-Democracy is having the funding taps turned off by central government, report Podnosh and Delib.
Views around the web are mixed as to whether it is a welcome relief or an opportunity missed. Although I……

It sounds like a silly thing to admit to, but it hapens all the time and is done in very good faith.

I’ve been involved in social inclusion and the info society since at least 1988 and I don’t think any debate that’s been started by techies has ever recovered from its own misdirected momentum. The key input has to come from people who have insights into the division, exclusion and disempowerment experienced daily at local level; and if they’re not there at the outset it’s almost impossible to engage them subsequently because of the way the language and terms of discussion get set.

So you end up being swept down a well-intentioned furrow when the experience that counts is in a parallel furrow across the field somewhere. Governemnt’s role should have been to effect cross-furrow channels, as it were (time to climb out of this metaphor, methinks) – not spend millions on the assumption that some tech solutions were out there waiting to be discovered. Paul is quite right – the approach has been fundamentally flawed, in my opinion since halfway through PAT15. Too much directing, not enough ennabling, because it was seen as ‘digital futures’ not present exclusion and disempowerment.

This may make me sound like a jaded old fart, and maybe I am. I don’t mean to pour water or scorn on a new source of well-intentioned energy combined with experience. I’ve known Simon and David for decades and I couldn’t have more faith in them. But I’d just point out that the experience that really counts needs to be in there as well, and it’s very very easy to carry on as if it were, or as if people will sign up when they see how blazingly brilliant what you’re doing is. They won’t and that in turn becomes disempowering.

Sorry if I’ve dipped in to this discussion at the wrong angle – I was really responding to the second part of Nick’s post.

k

but do you think Whitehall has the solution up their sleeve?

no, and neither do we, wikis on our own dime et al. we can do our own stuff but we have to challenge the govt. at the same time. we have to do *both*.

I am a bit fed up with ‘internal’ fighting. in my book a lot of ICELE people are good people. IME Mary, for example. With a lot of real-world experience under their belt.

We need to work together rather than be divided *by* Whitehall’s failed egov strategy.

be reminded of ‘life of brian’ and do I have to do the quote?

Of course ICELE was a waste of money. Like the wretched OeE before it, it was constitutionally obsessed with finding tech solutions with no understanding of the issues. Question is, how to get the right people in the room to break away from that. And leave the doors open.

They’re not perfect but we have sod all like that. We have a fractured policy/strategy which reflects a fractured policy/strategy in Whitehall and ultimately extremely bad political leadership.

What’s been happening over the past eight years has big, big problems. And just looking to mend it/glass half-full isn’t going to work. We need to smash the glass.