[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/3974198[/vimeo]
It’s a simple question, I’m trying to figure out if it has a simple answer. One of my fellow g20voice bloggers Richard Murphy knows his stuff and consciously uses his blog to campaign for reform of Tax Havens. Is it interesting or important that a blogger like Richard gets to ask questions at a summit like G20. Has anything changed?
I’ve been asked by MADE to write 200 words for the Birmingham Post. They’re gauging opinion before the Technical and Environmental Mayor of Copenhagen speaks in Birmingham next week. Klaus Bondam will be at Town Hall on April 6th to share with us how he expects Copenhagen to stays a wonderful place to live.
I was asked about an hour ago and the deadline is tonight. Here’s a bashed out draft of what I fancy saying. Please encourage, discourage amend etc in the comments. Does anyone have details of that survey that put us the 2nd best place for social media behind, is it Chicago?
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Is this a good place to talk? It’s not a question we often ask about cities. After all the whole point of a city is that we can connect, trade and work. Non of that happens without talk, does it? No it doesn’t, and neither does innovation.
Conversation is about scale, it happens where it’s easy for people to gather in small groups. The ICC is evidence that we know about audience on a grand scale, but how well do we do small scale gathering?
We need many places where we can meet, deliberately or by accident. That means a city which is easy to walking but above all has many interesting and modestly scaled places that people want to go. It means a tolerance of other’s ideas and interests, a city where people also like to listen.
These are partly planning issues and partly cultural issues. How good are our public services at setting the example and being interested in us, how good our our planners and designers at encouraging the interesting?
And of course we don’t just want to talk to ourselves. Birmingham needs take part in a global conversation. So our schools need open access to the internet and our school teachers and pupils helped to have the confidence to take part in sharing and developing ideas with people across the planet.
Oh and Birmingham doesn’t have free internet access in the city centre, whatever our PR folk may so. So Birmingham Fizz needs to be turned of or turned into a proper free wifi service, so we can finally start hearing each other speak.
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Well?
Really good clear suggestions from the World Wide Web Consortium on, amongst other stuff, how some basics need to be put in place to allow the web to really play a part in modernising the way we govern ourselves. You can find the whole report “Improving Access to Government through better us of the Web” at this link. Here’s an extract:
How Can Participation and Engagement Be Achieved?
Access of Public Servants to Web Sites that Citizens Are Using
Public servants need to be given access to the Web sites that citizens are using in order for them to be able to engage. The “lock-down” culture that exists in many government IT departments often restricts access to the more interactive Web sites for security reasons. This badly hampers the effective engagement with online communities by public servants.
Clear and Simple Rules for Public Servants
Governments need to set clear and simple rules for public servants to follow so they can be confident about engaging online without risking their career.
Training, Support and Cultural Change
There needs to be training and support for public servants in the use of appropriate tools and techniques to use the web to engage, particularly for the development of public policy. Engaging with online communities over the development of public policy will involve significant culture change in government. To achieve it will require clear leadership at senior levels. As the use of the web for engagement is so new in government there are few people with both the practical knowledge and the seniority and experience to provide this leadership.
Allow Comments on Policy Documents
Policy documents need to be presented in formats which allows for comment and discussion in a granular way. Fragments within such documents need to be directly addressable. In consultation documents for example, the relationship between the questions for discussion and the proposals to which those questions refer need to be made explicit. The RDFa [RDFA-PRIMER] based ArgotConsultation [ARGOTC] which was developed for the UK government is an example of the type of technology required for publishing consultation documents in ways that enable engagement.
I’ve just received an e-mail from Richard Rees at the city council encouraging me to mention the digital challenge which the council is throwing out for anyone who wants to contribute more to the big city plan process. Thanks for prompting me to do this, I meant to write something when the competition launched last month.
The council want you to use video or still photography to express your opinions about the plan. You can win a flip camera. It’s a great idea and I would encourage you to use any combination of video, still and or audio to show what you want changing in the city centre. How about a two minute world wind tour of your neighbourhood?
Sadly I can’t enter because the rules appear to prohibit people who are professional image makers from doing so.
If you want to take photos or make a short film then the closing date is April 20th and the rules are here. If you want to read the big city plan (work in progress) as the council expresses it please go here, if you would also like to look at a plainer English version please go here.
Some of you may know I took part in creating a plain English translation of the plan for the bigcitytalk site. It was mentioned as an example of the future of consultation (link to mentions of Birmingham) in the Cabinet Office sponsored Power of Information Report:
The original Power of Information report was one of the first to be re-worked and presented on CommentOnThis as an experiment. CommentOnThis was an early innovator in reworking government consultation documents online so that they can be used more easily. More recently a team of civic bloggers in Birmingham has translated and re-purposed Birmingham’s ‘Big City Plan’ on the web in Big City Plan Talk.
These technical developments could improve the effectiveness of policy development in consultation, but will require new skills amongst policy makers and communicators. A plan for supporting the change needed in policy development skills should be developed by Government Skills by end 2009, with a concomitant training plan from the National School for Government.
The big city talk site saw a conversation emerge involving 274 comments. Not sure how those comments have accounted for in the consultation report itself. The council tells us:
All attributable comments submitted to date have now been processed on our consultation database and are visible to all. As of 4 March, a total of 1,864 comments from a total of 273 contributors have been logged as follows:
Directly into the consultation portal: 719
Via e-mail: 679
Post 409
Other 57
I’m imagining big city talk would best be covered by other? What do you think?