Number 10 has revamped their website, according to The Register.

The Ministry of Justice has launched a new programme called Building Democracy, where projects can bid for £15k or so of money from an innovation fund.

The way they’ve handled it is rather good - they’ve put a bloggish website up (at buildingdemocracy.co.uk) and ask people who are interested in bidding for the money to float their idea in front of the masses first.

We have two ideas we’re interested in. Society Governor Helen Cammack and her company, Niggle, have proposed a Text Your MP service, while the Society has suggested a development of the political compass idea that I posted about yesterday.

All comments - here or there - gratefully received.

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’.

Involve have published a short new guide to principles of deliberative engagement in policy making. Download it in PDF here.

Through a circuitous route I came across Andrew Wadge’s blog. Andrew is the Chief Scientist at the Food Standards Agency and his site is a good example of how government specialist blogs can impart complex information in ways that engage people and don’t preach.

The CLG discussion forums about the Empowerment White Paper (here) are eerily deserted. I don’t think this is because people aren’t commenting: I commented myself. But evidently they are not getting round to moderating any of the comments. It’s a busy day for them, but three hours to moderate a comment on the one day when they might expect a spike in traffic? It’s not very social-web-savvy.

The Empowerment White Paper is out, and a summary is available here as a PDF. The full monty is here and is accompanied by a separate Evidence Annex

I’ve read the summary, and although it’s not earth shatteringly radical there are a few good ideas. In particular, it has a helpfully political take on citizenship- it sees the citizen primarily as a political actor rather than merely a consumer of government services.

Here are a few instant personal reactions.

Definitely good things:

• the duty on councils to respond to petitions, and ability for petitioners to force debates in full council where responses aren’t satisfactory
• public sessions to quiz leaders of public sector bodies such as hospital trusts
• £7.5m to support empowerment, as long as it’s used wisely
• community pledgebanks (hello, Tom)

Interesting ideas, but risky or unproven:

• participatory budgeting in every council

• community asset transfer
• changes to rules on political neutrality of local government officials (to increase the number of people standing for election as councillors)
• a duty on councils to promote democracy
• removing barriers to commissioning from faith-based groups
• community justice. It sounds rather like ‘people’s lynchmobs’ but means that community service orders will be more obviously linked to areas where local people think work is needed

Disappointments:

• the obvious padding - if the executive summary includes a pledge to continue working with various forms of media, the writers must have been running short of ideas

• the absence of anything really radical or directive around neighbourhood councils or involvement
• incentives for voting, which makes my toes curl - if you need to be given a scratchcard to vote, perhaps you don’t understand why it’s important

The Unite trade union is merging with an American trade union, as the BBC reports. This will mean, I’m sure, difficulties between the UK and US arms in terms of voting rights, policy positions, etc. Will their decision making be the trade union version of the EU - compromise building between independent bodies - or a single multi-national democracy, with the nationalist tensions that implies? We don’t know yet, according to the New Statesman, where a TUC official is quoted as saying:

They (Unite and USWA) seem to be focused on the politics first, rather than on creating an organisational structure and fitting the politics around it.

The LGA have launched a new scheme, advertising all the good things that local authorities do. As Shane McCracken says, it’s a shame that democracy and participation don’t seem to have made the list.

The International Centre for Excellence in e-Democracy is having the funding taps turned off by central government, report Podnosh and Delib.

Views around the web are mixed as to whether it is a welcome relief or an opportunity missed. Although I’ve never had much to do with them directly, from reading the commentary I’d guess it was a step back before two steps forward. ICELE seem to have fallen into a local-authority-shaped hole, for instance providing their own democracy software rather than relying on people to provide their own solutions from the market or open source. If this sort of thinking was typical, they were clearly a bit behind the curve.