The BBC has an interesting article on a vote on naturalisation rules in Switzerland - which provide an excellent example of a collision between personal rights (particularly rights not to be discriminated against) and the practice of participatory democracy. More background at SwissInfo.

Update: BBC reports the result.

Not often I get my political tip-offs from Popbitch (ok, not that often), but this week’s issue sheds light on the Eurovision voting ’scandal’:

If only traditional Western European countries had voted this year the UK would have been third from bottom, rather than one of three with the lowest points.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald discusses the motivations of web journalists and sites like The Politico. In summary, the answer is ‘they all love attention and ad revenue’ but that doesn’t do justice to the article, or the supporting evidence.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a new report which says that citizens’ participation in governance and service delivery is made harder by the complexity of the structures they have to navigate. It’s not exactly news - even if you just count the major players, there are probably twenty to thirty bits of government acting in any local area - but it is a serious problem.

In Groucho Marx mode, Government probably doesn’t want to hear only from the people obsessive enough to navigate their way through the different boards and consultations, and the campaigns that really seize the public imagination tend to be quite small-scale and middle class (like the one running in the Society’s home city to prevent a new branch of Starbucks opening).

Perhaps what is needed is a sort of topic-based clearing house for consultations and projects in each local area. Alternatively or additionally, local authorities could make wider use of citizens’ panels, where (admittedly self-selecting) groups of citizens sign up to be consulted on issues over a two-year period.

(Hat tip to Ingrid at the Policy & Performance blog)

We’re over at the TechSoup forums participating in their day-long special discussion on … er … discussion.

Just checking out a new site called Create Debate, which was drawn to my attention by CitizenSpace.

As Ben at CS says, it’s not the prettiest of sites but the format is interesting. The debates pose a binary question (Has evolution been proven? Is homosexuality wrong?), and you can add arguments on one side or the other. Those arguments can then be voted up or down, Digg style, so the best-rated arguments appear near the top of the list. I like this feature, though it might be open to gaming - what’s to stop you up-rating bad arguments on the opposing side?

Downsides include the research tab, which appears to be an aggregated RSS feed from various sites, and the fact that you’re forced into a two-sided debate from the get-go. The headbutting theme is continued on the profile page, which allows you to build a persistent personality (good), but then identifies your ‘enemies’ and your ‘hostiles’, which sounds rather like the games my five year old plays with his sister.

Finally, rather dishearteningly, the site says that debates ‘will never end’. I know this is the internet, but even so.

You can see the slides I used at Shine here - they’re a PDF with a brief summary of what I said to each one at the bottom.

We’re going to be holding our first discussion event in the next couple of months, here in our home city of Brighton. We’ve garnered a few suggestions as to the topic, but we now want you to tell us what you’d be interested in hearing/talking about.

There’s a 2-question surveymonkey survey here for you to let us know.

The Society was represented at the Shine Unconference in London on Sunday, and it was an excellent day. I spent more time polishing my own presentation than listening to others’, unfortunately, but I did catch an excellent session on branding run by Neru.

As others have said elsewhere, there was a great buzz about the day, and I was only sorry that work and childcare kept me away from the other two days.

The Society’s session on Saturday afternoon gathered about a dozen people together for a discussion on our ideas and our aims - thanks to those who turned up and who left their names at the end. I’ll put up my slides from the session a bit later on.

Matthew Haughey, creator of Metafilter, shares some tips on creating strong communities in this old (but still good) article.