Forum:Government as a platform

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2012

An imaginary open letter: To those who would ‘engage’ us…, August 9, 2012 By Mike realisedevelopment.net

Exposing the lie, 26th July 2012, by John Houghton, cles.org.uk

2011

Westminster World Heritage Site and Parliament Square a national disgrace, Hansard Society, October 25 ^[1] New vision putting citizen and visitor at its heart needed. place, topic

High Speed 2 consultation "a train wreck", say CPRE, 28 February ^[2]

Councils and hyperlocal ‘bloggers’: It’s the council system which needs changing, not how people are allowed to cover them, David Higgerson, February 23 ^[3]

Eric Pickles: Citizen journalists and bloggers should be let in to public council meetings, 23 February ^[4]

"If nothing else the transparency that the social web embodies and that government says it wants to deliver with #opendata means that we will no longer be able to hide our policy programmes in big black boxes that we only open up on launch day" Catherine Howe, January 23 ^[5]

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Draft post to ukgovweb.org/forum

Thanks to we20 for link to Tim O'Reilly on Gov 2.0 September 4, 2009

Wondering if there's likely to be anything like BarcampUKGovweb10 (the third one?), and if so this ref a good thing to read beforehand?

Any views on prospects of similar vision being realised in the UK? Do we have to accept that essentially this sort of stuff is on hold until after an election, or are there more positive viewpoints?

A couple of brief quotes from the post:

"Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices."

..."I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?"

Just a personal view, but in response to arguably our greatest challenge - climate change, we haven't really got a lot of hope until or unless gov reimagines itself in something like this way.

Forum:Government as a platform

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