I was at the Local Government Association last night, at the launch of Votes and Voices, a pamphlet on the complementary nature of representative and participatory democracy. The NCVO were the partners for the publication and the launch event.

The main thing I took away from the event was a very positive mood among local government around the participation agenda. The audience list was hefty. Paul Coen, the LGA Chief Executive, was enthusiastic. Points from the panel and the floor were forward-looking.

The pamphlet itself was less impressive. It was described as a series of essays, though a series of articles would be more accurate, touching on the complementary nature of participative and representative democracy. This description led me to expect a light philosophical treatise - along the lines of the Empowerment White Paper, in fact - but the essays divided between big unchallengable statements on the importance of participation, and descriptions of political engagement work in a couple of local authorities. There was little that made me sit up and take notice, although in fairness this may be because I work on this every day, and I doubt that I was the target audience.

In some ways it was not surprising that the pamphlet underdelivered on the speeches. There is a rhetoric gap around participation and engagement at the moment, with people picking up on the ideas in the Empowerment White Paper, but not yet really doing anything with them. I hope that the gap is a simple time lag. My worry is that the new enthusiasm for participation will be a flash in the pan, and either nothing will happen and local government will move on, or participation will be redefined to mean ‘the things we were going to do anyway’.

I’ve just spent a train journey home listening to Clay Shirky talk at Demos, a talk and question session that’s available on podcast here.

He was talking about his new book on groups and social interaction, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and it made for a good listen. Mr Shirky is an engaging speaker, and the ideas in the podcast and the book are not only interesting in themselves, they are an insight into how thinking about the effect of the Internet has changed over the last few years.

I’d encourage you listen to the whole podcast, but the few points that stuck out for me from a Demsoc perspective were:

• The basic idea of cognitive surplus - the idea that we have a certain amount of ‘idle capacity’ in our brains during the time we aren’t working, and that we can choose to use this in all sorts of different ways
• The statistic that the creation of Wikipedia in all langugages including all edits has taken about 100m person-hours - the same amount of time that Americans collectively spend on watching just adverts in the course of a single weekend.
• The suggestion that the real rooting of local democratic action has to be around what Mr Shirky calls ‘unofficial mayors’ - the highly connected nexuses of local communities
• “Plausibility starts small and grows”
• “You can’t choose which freedoms you give away”
• The power of online networking will reduce the ability of special interest groups to affect policy through their presence in Whitehall/Washington

I love the idea of cognitive surplus, and certainly one of the challenges for society is to ensure that some of that is put into socially constructive things like creativity and political participation. Given the numbers (now and in the future) you don’t need much to make a difference. 10% or less would do nicely, and the other 90% can go on porn and orcs, that’s just fine.

The rooting of local democratic action is difficult. As Mr Shirky says, there’s a benefit in identifying the ‘unofficial mayors’ - but how do you do it, and what do you do with that person when you’ve found them. Being hyperconnected is a good start in terms of bringing people in, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the person has a good brain for policy or even democracy management.

I would like to believe that online/offline networks will reduce the influence of lobbyists, who are in any case less of a problem here in England than they are in the US. I think it’s more likely that they will reduce the influence of astroturfing (faking grassroots movements) but the fundamental problem with the single-issue movement remains: inability to make the trade-offs that politics involves.

Finally, Mr Shirky pointed out the mistake the media made around Howard Dean’s ‘insurgency’ in the 2000 presidential primaries. They saw the frenetic activity on meetup and online, and thought that meant that a lot of people liked Dean. In fact, it meant that a few people liked Dean a lot. The media have not become much more sophisticated in recent years.

To celebrate the first of July’s two great democratic festivals, here’s an article from Wired about how the USA didn’t cotton on to the importance of preserving the original Declaration of Independence until the early 20th century.

The London Borough of Kingston held an event last week on e-petitioning in local government. For those who don’t know, petitions are used quite widely as a means of interacting with local government. The reasons for petitions can vary from very local issues such as parking to whole-authority issues like school place provision. Petitions are still generally presented in the traditional bits-of-paper way, but there are some places trying out electronic versions.

The presentations from the day are available at ICELE Online.

The venerable WELL - one of the first online communities - is hosting a public discussion with Clay Shirky, who teaches the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and has just written Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

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.