RightSpace: Holding on and moving forwards
[Summary: If you're involved in promoting the rights of Children and Young People, and you're an advocate for youth participation, join in the RightSpace debate]
What is going to happen to youth participation over the next few years?
On the one hand we’ve a government promising massive spending cuts*; and on the other hand, quite genuinely (I hope) talking about localism and transferring power back to communities. Whilst the coalition agreement is woefully lacking in any recognition of the rights and agency of young people, some policy proposals are creating new spaces for civic engagement and participation – whether that’s from open data and transparency; or the encouragement of cooperative and social enterprise structures for the delivery of services.
Later this year, Practical Participation will be involved in an event, RightSpace, that’s trying to explore where participation has got to – and to look to the future of rights-based youth participation. My colleague Bill Badham is already at work heading around the country talking to people about their experiences of participation, their learning from the past, and their fears and visions for the future. You can see video clips from those conversations, join in the conversation, and find out more about the RightSpace event taking place in Sheffield in October over on the dedicated RightSpace website.
Hope to see you there…
Footnotes
*I’m reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine right now, and feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the narrative of cuts being spun; so whilst questioning the spending cuts in this post – do think we need a far more critical debate about the arguments for ‘massive’ cuts – and some of the positive and ethical alternatives.
Comment on government: How should I be interacting?
I’ve just been reading the commentable version of the Coalition: our programme for government document, and, given some of the content, I couldn’t help but head for the comment box to drop in some reflections on different aspects of the proposed policies.
However, as I started to type in a comment or two, I quickly found I wasn’t certain what sort of interaction was being invited. The front page of the site states “This website gives you the opportunity to enter public discussion on the programme. We’ll take all your comments and suggestions on board and publish the Government’s response to those policy areas receiving the most feedback”, but it goes no further to explain who will be reading the comments, what sort of feedback to expect, and whether the goal is discussion between members of the public, or dialogue between the public and government.
Which makes writing a comment difficult.
Should I be constructively unpicking policy and pointing to useful resources that, in the hands of a Minister or policy official would be useful? Should I be replying to other posters, engaging in debate with them on the strengths or weakness of their argument? If so, are they getting e-mail updates about my replies, or can threaded discussions emerge? Should I be gaming the system and getting as many people to post on the topics I feel post passionate about, given the statement that only the “policy areas receiving the most feedback” are to get a response from the Government? Will track-backs to posts (so I can write a more considered comment on policy areas on this blog) be picked up and fed into the dialogue?
All these things affect the sort of dialogue that can take place – and the nature of relationship between citizen and government that can be established. Whilst it’s positive that the new government have opted for opening up comments on the coalition plan, and Simon Dickson’s work to turnaround a basic site for such comments in a short space of time is impressive, comment boxes alone do not a dialogue make. There are bit techno-social challenges to be solved to effective online participation, and we all need to get a lot smarter in solving them.
As the Government team behind this online document, and, hopefully future online documents, iterate the development of such spaces, it would be good to see a lot more attention paid to the forms of interaction between citizen and state that are to be facilitated. Personally, I’d like to see a clear statement about exactly who will be reading and summarising the comments; how that will take place; and who the summary will be shared with. And it would be good to have something more nuanced than simply a numbers game for knowing what will get considered.
What would you like to see to encourage effective dialogue on government hosted spaces around documents like the coalition agreement?
P.S. There’s one more big problem with the current commentable coalition agreement: the moderation policy suggests wants 16s to have parental consent before posting. There is no legal basis for this and its outrageous age discrimination. By all means encourage young people to discuss issues with parents before posting – but to exclude young people who are from posting without parental consent cannot be justified.
Money Saving Council.com?
Filed under: ideas that I’d like to explore more… but that someone else is probably better placed to take forward (with a bit of political commentary thrown in too at the end).
I’ve been dealing with quite a few local authority finance departments over the last few weeks as bookings have been coming in for the Connected Generation conference. And I’ve been somewhat startled by how much time and effort it takes for a local authority to make a simple payment for a member of staff to attend an event being run at cost.
Some of the finance systems and processes clearly have room of significant small savings to be made on every transaction – by switching to electronic communication and BACs rather than cheque for example. However, I suspect some of the other cumbersome processes I’ve come across are the result of past attempts at efficiency savings. And in some cases, there are good reasons (audit purposes etc.) for extra steps involved in the local authority process – albeit that those extra steps need not be quite as convoluted as many appear to be.
All of which got me thinking: there exists the potential for many small savings across government. But just cutting costs from on high is often counter productive – in many cases failing to create real reductions in spending, but also in many cases, leading to unintended consequences down the line.
So where is the online resource allowing government staff to share the tips and tricks they have used to reduce costs? And sharing learning about unintended consequences of certain cost-cutting approaches?
In response to a Tweet yesterday which shared this pondering, @lmbowler suggested that might be a ‘SaveMyCouncilTax.com’. Perhaps. Although personally I’m more for ‘MakeOurMoneyGoFurther.com’. I know we’re heading into a period of cuts, but I don’t need government to put money back in my pocket – I want government to be addressing social injustices and inequalities – making sure that it’s making the most of our funds: not wasting money, or taking on roles that people can now take on themselves through digitally mediated collective action, but investing in the (many) places where we still need government to be building the foundations of a more equal and happier society.
Where is DFID spending money on youth, and other interesting project data mash-ups
Filed under: Civic Participation, International Development, Open Data, Quick linking
I was down in London again on Saturday for the AID Information Challenge – another data-focussed event, but this time looking at International Development Data.
One of the main datasets we had to work with was the DFID Projects Database – a list of all the different development projects the Department for International Development has been funding over recent years, and has funding committed to in the future. Given I’ve recently finished getting the DFID funded ‘Youth Participation in Development‘ guide online, I initially thought I would explore how to link project data to the case studies in that guide. However, I soon found myself joining in with a team of others who were trying to visualise the projects dataset in more general ways.
The result: a faceted browsing mash-up using the fantastic Exhibit framework – turning this into this.
The faceted browser means that you can select different countries (only by their country code at the moment), years, funding types or funding programmes and explore the different project funding DFID has been giving out to these.
Click through to the Map view, and where funding went to a specific country you’ll be able to see a map of where the funds were distributed. (A lot of funding goes to regions or is non-specific geographically – at the moment this just display under the ‘could not be plotted’ above the map).
Even though I didn’t work directly with the Youth Participation in Development Guide, down at the bottom of the list of facets you will find one to help explore youth-related funding: you can pull out all the projects which include ‘Youth’ or ‘Young People’ in their project titles or descriptions.
Thanks to the Publish What You Fund and Open Knowledge Foundation teams for organising the day 
Connected Generation 2010: The Conference
Filed under: Civic Participation, Social Media, Youth Participation, Youth Work 2.0, Youthwork, digital inclusion
Lots of people have been starting to ask me when the next ‘Connected Generation’ event will be taking place. Well, thanks to the sterling work of Katie Bacon, we’ve just booked The Watershed in Bristol for 7th May 2010 to host Connected Generation 2010 – a one-day conference exploring youth engagement and technology in 2010. Based on feedback from participants at recent training events, and on the positive response to the Beyond Twitter event we ran up in Wrexham last year, we’re trying a mixed Conference and Open Space format again – with a morning of top-quality input from speakers and a range of pre-planned workshops, followed with an afternoon of curated unConference, where delegates can set the agenda and direct the conversations.
Bristol Watershed - the Venue
I’m delighted that key speakers at the event will include a gender balanced panel with:
- Amy Sample Ward – co author of ‘Social by Social‘ and expert on the use of social media in non-profit contexts;
- Katie Bacon – pioneer of digital youth work in Devon, and founder of Online Youth Outreach digital youth work training.
- Joanne Jopling – project worker for the Gateshead Young Women’s Outreach Project
- Kieron Kirkland - learning researcher at FutureLab, and lead for the Greater Expectations project
- Chris Morgan – from the Communities 2.0 in Wales, talking about digital youth and community work.
We’re still in the process of confirming the workshop programme, but plans include:
- Ethics and ICT – workshop with Andy Phippen from Plymouth University;
- Promoting Positive Activities with Social Media with Steven Flower from Plings;
- Safe and Sound Foundations – proactive approaches to safe social media engagement with young people, staff and volunteers;
If there is a workshop you would particularly like to see, drop in a comment and I’ll see what we can do…
Full details and online booking available here. (If you can’t order online because your organisation needs invoicing etc. just drop me a line…)
Fingers crossed, we’ll also be using the event to launch a new ‘Youth Engagement and Social Media’ resource which Katie and I are hard at work drafting, and, if you want, you can pre-order a copy when booking your place at the conference.
ICT Ethics – finding new equilibria profession by profession
Filed under: Civic Participation, Youth Work 2.0, digital inclusion
Ethical ICT in Youth Work (c) Tim Davies 2010
[Summary: Ethics belongs to professions, not problems & an ethical framework for youth and ICTs will require each workforce to seek new equilibria based on a number of inter-related elements]
I spend a very interesting day yesterday at a workshop organised by DC10Plus exploring the possible creation of an ‘ethical framework for ICT and young people’. This post contains a set of reflections and ‘thinking aloud’ following that session…
With technologies and the dynamics of digital environments constantly developing, ethical frameworks, over and above guidance and best-practice, are very much needed to help all those involved in work with young people (and young people themselves) to think critically about the ways technologies are used in, and impact upon, the lives of children and young people. However, when it comes to practical ethics for the public sector, it’s crucial to remember that ethics belong to professions, not problems.
That was a point brought home to me the Connected Practice symposium in September last year, where it was clear that different professional groups approached their work from very different motivations and with very different practical and ethical frameworks. Whilst some would argue the rise of a network society leads to a dissolution of barriers between professionals, and consequently, the dissolution of clear and distinct forms of professional practice, right now we are in an environment of inter-disciplinary practice, rather than post-disciplinary practice - and there are real advantages to be found in each different professional group working out it’s own ethical responses to ICT. A ‘meta-ethical’ public sector framework of general ethical principles may support a degree of compatibility and interface between different professional ethical approaches to ICT, but should not try to replace the process of each profession working out it’s ICT ethics in it’s own context. For a real practice example of how professional context affects the sorts of ethical and practical implications of using ICT – take a look at this forum thread over on Youth Work Online – where the differences between the nature of practice and relationship with young people and youth workers in statutory and voluntary sector youth work settings is leading to a need to adapt and think critically about guidance on how youth workers should use social networking sites.
The point that ethics belong to professions, not problems also highlights that ICT ethics should start, not from concerns about ICTs per-se, but from a recognition of how ICTs impact upon and cut across the concerns of different professional groups within the public sector. And any approach to ethics for ICTs & Young People should have a clear account of where and why a specific focus on young people is warranted. In Safe and Effective Social Network Site Applications for Young People (p. 7) I’ve argued that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Law, and neuro-scientific understandings of adolescence are critical to any such account.
Finding a new equilibrium
Professional ethics guide how individuals and organisations with a set of specific goals should behave in the pursuit of those goals, given the particular contexts in which they work. It might be thought that professional groups can just look at their existing ethical codes and apply them directly to the Internet. However, in my experience exploring youth work values and ethics that turns out not to be quite so straightforward. Whilst it is possible (as we do on p.g. 17 & 18 of the Youth Work & Social Networking Report) to explore how the values of a profession play out in a digital world – deriving practical and ethical guidance for real world situations is not just a case of looking at values and the realities of the online world, but involves finding an equilibria between at least six different elements, as the diagram above shows. Each element is both a variable that may be open to change, but equally a constraint on working out an ethical position:
- Young people’s use of social media/ICT/the Internet – ethics cannot be built for the ‘ideal world’, but must be developed for the world we are in. At the same time, ethical approaches may involve challenging current patterns of ICT use and seeking to encourage young people to approach ICTs in different ways.
- Professional values and skills – professional values in many service start from an analysis of the world and a desire to change something in it – be that a desire to tip the balance of power in favour of young people in core youth work theory, or a desire to reduce crime and increase social control in the basic analysis of law enforcement services. However, ICTs are implicated in ongoing changes to the world – and so professional values need to be re-examined in light of the digital world – without being abandoned.
- Models of online communication and collaboration – there are many different ways of working online. Only some should be seen as ‘youth work’ ways of working – and the choice over which ways of working are ruled in, and ruled out, of a youth work framework of ethics for ICT use will impact upon the nature of that framework. The choice of ethics will also determine which forms of online communication and collaboration are (a) open to youth workers, and (b) likely to be open to youth workers in ways that allow them to be effectively used.
- Features of available / popular social media tools – this is a particularly interesting ‘variable’ – as to an extent, for most professionals, the tools available to use are not seen as something over which they have much control. Facebook works the way it does. Changing that is not in the power of the individual practitioner. However, the plug-in and application architectures of many social media spaces mean that it may be possible for them to be adapted to be made ‘safer spaces’ for youth work practice, or more appropriate settings for the forms of practice a worker wants to explore. Right now, reshaping social media spaces is beyond the means of most practitioners – but if made more accessible, could enhance the possibility of ‘ethical and effective’ online practice.
- Institutional drivers of, and barriers to, online working. See the 50 Barriers wiki on this one.
- Consideration of opportunities and risks – based on real evidence about the opportunities and risks young people face online.
I recognise that this is still a fairly sketchy model – and my use of language above is neither as clear, nor as precise, as would be ideal. However, I wanted to share this now both for the Ethical ICT & Youth project, and as part of ongoing thinking for another project which I hope to be blogging more about soon…
Skills for public voice & participation alongside skills for social media
Filed under: Civic Participation, E-Democracy, Youth Participation, digital inclusion
Eszter Hargittai was in the Oxford Internet Institute earlier today sharing her research findings on the role of skills and socio-demographic factors in influencing levels of use of the Internet – and particularly web 2.0 spaces.
Implicit in Eszter’s argument was a relationship between the diversity of Web 2.0 use and democratisation. The presentation highlighted how socio-demographic factors, and particularly gender, can have an impact on the extent to which different groups contribute to public online spaces such as YouTube and Wikipedia. It’s not enough to give access to the web, and to web 2.0 for the imbalances in who is speaking and expressing their views through these online platforms to be challenged. Skills matter in addressing the imbalance.
However, as discussion at the presentation explored, if our concerns are of democratisation, social justice and equality, then the the skills that need to be promoted are far wider than technology skills, or skills to work with social media.
Skills to exercise public voice and to participate in community (online and offline) are arguably prior to the skills to use technology for public expression.
Both as we measure engagement online, and as we work to promote online engagement – keeping in mind a focus not only on digital skills, but also on general skills of public expression, interaction and dialogue is key.
For those working with young people and communities then that perhaps adds up to encouragement to address digital skills as part of wider civic skill-building programmes such as ‘Act by Right (now online as a free resource BTW)’ rather than to address digital skills and social media in isolation.
Just published: Social Media – Youth Participation in Local Democracy
[Summary: Introductory guide on youth participation with social media now available]
One of the curious things I’ve discovered in seeking to equip practitioners to engage with social technology is that, the more I explore about digital media, the more I end up creating printed resources, or at least, resources based on a book/handbook structure.
That’s the case with a new resource that was published today by the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU) that is the product of learning from the Network Participation action learning set I co-facilitated earlier this year.
Drawing on theory and case studies explored during that action learning set, ‘Social Media – Youth Participation in Local Democracy‘ is designed to step through some of the issues that practitioners need to consider in exploring the use of social networks and social media in youth participation.
It’s available to order from the LGIU Website, and for online purchase via Central Books.
(P.S. If you’re interested in more practical resources to support youth engagement and youth work uses of digital technology – keep your eyes open, as I’m in the midst of working on a new toolkit hopefully ready early in the New Year…)
The myth of easy engagement. Who should participate and how…
Filed under: Civic Participation, E-Democracy, Youth Participation, digital inclusion
Decisions are made by those who turn up.
Often, those looking to engage people in decision making and shaping services make the shaky leap from the fact that over 70% of people have internet access, to the idea that the internet offers the straightforward opportunity to engage 70% of the people. A few days ago, frustrated by questions driven by this logic, and of the form ‘How many people in our local area are on Twitter?’, Dave Briggs sought to explode ‘The myth of engaging with everyone‘. Dave asks for clarity stating:
The first thing to be clear on is that no one engagement method will reach, or suit, everyone.
The second thing to be clear on, is that you don’t necessarily want to reach everyone, anyway.
Two statements that seem empirically and intuitively sensible. But the argument they lead Dave to is not necessarily so uncontroversial:
My argument would always be to focus on the small number of active, enthusiastic people first.
Whilst there are a limited number of cases where putting the primary focus on the active, enthusiastic people is the right way forward, in local authorities, national government and other democratic contexts we need to think more carefully. The ‘active, enthusiasts’ who leap upon any opportunity to get involved may well be great & capable people – but they may well not have all the ideas, insights, experiences and networks that we need for innovation, change, and the development of engaged vibrant communities. The following post is not a call to reject the active enthusiasts, engaged online and willing to make considerable contributions to civic life – but it is a call to remember that, if decisions are made by those who turn up, those planning and facilitating engagement have a responsibility to make sure they are inviting and supporting the right individuals and groups to be part of the process.
So, who should turn up? Below I’ve sketched out three steps to thinking about who you need to engage, and how to manage that engagement.
This is a quick sketch – and I’m sure the ideas it explores have been well developed elsewhere – so I welcome comments / pointers and reflections to help shape and develop this more…
1) Start from the end
You can’t start planning an engagement process without thinking about why you are looking to engage people. Why you are thinking about engagement, will determine who needs to be engaged, and how.
Some useful questions to ask yourself about the outcomes you want:
- Are we looking to make a decision at the end of this process? If so:
- Does the decision need to be decided by a democratic process? Or does it otherwise need some democratic legitimacy?
- Do we already have a mandate or responsibility for making this decision?
- Is the goal to make a particular project happen where we already know what that project is?
- Is the goal to take action on a particular issue, but without already knowing what action to take?
- Is the goal to build a community who can take forward projects and action in future?
And then ask about the sort of input you need. Do you want:
- Ideas?
- Insights?
- Expertise?
- Innovation?
- People taking action?
- Voting?
- etc.
The reality is that most engagement projects involve multiple possible outcomes, and multiple sorts of input.
For example, you may want to initially get a wide range of ideas about the priorities that should be set for a £100k pot of local funding; to follow this up with a democratically legitimate vote to discover the top local priorities; to put together a panel who will invite local groups to apply for funding to run innovative projects that match up against the chosen priorities; and to decide who gets the funding and to support them in running projects and making an impact. Each stage of the process answers the questions above in different ways – and so will need to think differently about who to engage and how…
2) Think about who is affected & who should be involved
If you want to engage a local population – you could just put an engagement opportunity up online, and let the people who are interested find out. But, as Mark Pack points out in a comment on Dave’s blog post:
often those keenest on an issue have a different view from those less keen on the issue
Those who self-select to get involved in an engagement opportunity may not represent all the people who should be involved in an engagement opportunity. Of course, who should be involved depends on the sorts of answers you gave to the questions above.
If you want to get the best possible democratically legitimate outcome that respects the independence and self-determination of local communities then you need at least two broad groups of people involved:
- (a) People with expertise on the issues in consideration;
- (b) People who will be affected by decisions or actions that result from this process;
You could just work with a tick-list consisting of these two items, and check you have people from both categories taking part – but chances are that breaking down category (b) at least is going to prove useful for targeting engagement opportunities and making sure you get beyond the easy-to-reach enthusiasts.
For example, you may decide you need to hear from:
- Men & women, of a range of ages and employment situations, who live in different wards where your funding of £100k might be spent.
You may find you can generate a matrix from the lists of different group you want to engage – giving you a tool to check and think about who is engaged so far. For example, the matrix below helps get a rough sense of whether a process is hearing from participants across areas of Oxford, and from a range of age groups and employment backgrounds.
It’s important to note, however, that these are not tick-boxes. You may not necessarily have someone from every category. These lists are tools to help you think about and visualise whether or not you are getting a broad range of inputs into your engagement process.
Engaging some groups is easier than others. Although – as I heard it put at the recent Beyond Twitter conference, that’s not because some groups are ‘hard to reach’, but because from some places in your local area, the council is harder to reach. With a matrix like the above, you can think about where you put your resources, and how accessible the engagement you are creating is to different groups.
3) Think about the sorts of input you allow, and the inputs you are getting
The people you engage are not, unless they have been elected through a suitable process, representatives . Nor, unless you’ve gone through some in-depth statistical sampling, are they representative.
But they do bring something to your process. And knowing what they bring is important to ensure the outcome is as high quality and legitimate as possible.
People bring ideas, insights, lived experience, energy to take action, skills and practice know how and a whole lot more. Sometimes people should be allowed to bring a veto; or to call for a vote on particular issues.
Fascilitating engagement involves looking at these different sorts of input, and getting the right balance at the right time.
For example, you may first gather stories from across an area about what living there is like, and share these stories with the ‘active enthusiasts’ who have time and energy to give in thinking about innovative funding priorities that could respond to those stories. You may invite those affected by decisions about funding to reflect upon the ‘active enthusiasts’ suggestions. You may offer a veto power to local community members. You may seek out the views of specific groups to make sure a decision is well rounded. And you may seek to bring together a large group to vote on proposals. If all the stories and insights come from one group; all the ideas from another; and all the action from another group again – then the risk that your process is unbalanced is big.
Engaging everyone
Many people have had bad experiences of engagement in the past. Some people are not interested in being engaged. Many people face barriers to getting engaged. You can’t engage with everyone all the time.
But whatever you do, look beyond the easy and obvious, to seek approaches that will work, and that will push forward are more just society.
Why engage online?
Where does this leave the argument for online engagement that Dave Briggs was exploring in the post that sparked the exploration above? Well, one avenue worth exploring is how digital technologies can lower the costs of engaging the easy-to-engage, to free up resources to offer substantive support to those groups, who for reasons of structural and systematic disadvantage, may find their input less likely to be otherwise included.
Three challenges for proponents of a Rebooted Britain
Whilst there might still be a lot of work to do in order to remove the practical, everyday and mundane barriers to building more interactive, open government – and public services fit for the 21st Century, it’s also important to ask critical questions about the sort of public services and government we want developments in technology to help bring about. I’ve just been reading the essays prepared for the Reboot Britain conference that was held last month – and whilst their provocative cheer-leading for a digitally transformed world is often well placed, I also felt slightly uneasy at the omissions in this NESTA publication, and the challenges either unseen, or glossed over.
I’ve tried to capture that unease into three challenges that I believe need to be addressed by those proposing and arguing for more open government, digitally enabled public services and a ‘rebooted britain’. Challenges that are intended, not as a argument against moving forward, but as a the starting point for an argument for subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, tweaks to our direction of travel.
Challenge 1: Where is social justice?
It doesn’t just matter that it is made generally easier to access public services; or that access to democratic power is redistributed to a greater number of people. It matters who has easier access to services, and which voices are now being heard in democratic debate. If digital innovations stand to widen the gulf between the best off, and the least well off, then it may well turn out to be wrong to pursue them. Markets and technologies are not morally neutral or value free – and we need to ask questions about their impact on equality and socially just outcomes.
Social justice, equality and inequality are not terms that you will find anywhere in the Reboot Britain essays – and there is a lack of critical appreciation of the way in which existing social inequality can be re-enforced by the introduction of technologies that outsource to the individual the burden of managing the fulfilment of their needs, rights and entitlements from public services. Whilst the VRM movement advocated by Lee Bryant could indeed lead to a powerful transformation of the relationship between citizen and state – we should be asking ourselves the Rawlsian question of whether some of our innovations, applied without attention paid to equality, could end up benefiting the well off, to the unjust detriment of the least well off in society – widening, rather than narrowing the gulf in our unequal society.
The challenge in a nutshell: ask what sort of society your innovation creates – and tell us if that society is closer to a just and fair one?
Challenge 2: Supporting Deliberative Leadership
Accountability is generally a good thing. Having more information on which to base decision making is generally a good thing. Having decision makers who can debate their decisions by appeal to public reason, and who can account for their decisions clearly and transparently is also much to be desired. However, having decision makers and leaders who are human being is also important. And human beings have practical limitations.
Demands for data, demands for transparency, and demands for new systems for getting more voices into decision making are common across many of the Reboot Britain essays – but without a recognition that decisions should be made, not just upon data-points and on the basis of who shouts loudest, but upon careful deliberation and discursive weighing up of ideas – we risk ending up with a very impoverished politics.
To demand far greater accountability from politicians than we demand either from the media, or, indeed as categories of media / politician and ‘other’ break-down in a digital world, from ourselves – seems to risk creating leaders unable to use their judgement, not least because of the basic practical burdens of auditing all past statements they have made and accounting for any changes in their view over time.
The challenge in a nutshell: don’t stop at making demands for data – think about how it will impact upon deliberative decision making. Can you provide an account of the form of leadership or decision making you want to see – and provide a realistic portrait of a politician fit for a Rebooted Britain?
Challenge 3: Local Control vs. Universal Services
In part this challenges is a replay of the social justice challenge – in so far as it asks whether local control of services leads to a concentration of better services around the already well-off, and a relative decline in the quality of services in areas where populations find it more difficult to exploit new technologies of voice. But more generally this challenge asks whether we can make compatible the idea of Universal Services, available to everyone across the country (without the ‘postcode lottery’ frequently decried in mainstream media) with the idea of local and hyper-local control of services?
The challenge in a nutshell: Does the idea of universal and uniform provision drop out of the picture in the Britain described in the Reboot Britain essays?
Tim’s Blog
This is the personal blog of Tim Davies, an independent consultant and researcher from the UK.