94. Support your scrutiny connectors

Scrutiny committees at the national and the local level depend on a wide range of people when gathering evidence.  Most of the time people contribute for free but should we do more to support, recognise and reward them?  This was a question asked by Kevin Davies for The Welsh Assembly Outreach Team before and after Govcampcymru.  Having reflected on Kevin's ideas as well as some handy input from Ben and Lou from Delib here are some suggestions about how we might build this into practice.

This (of course!) links back to the Double Doughnut of democracy idea I raised a couple of years ago (after Govcampcymru as well as it happens).  The key point being that government is not great at engaging directly and needs others to help it share and get feedback.

Currently engagement tends to take place on an issue by issue basis but wouldn't it be better to think about the people that contribute to scrutiny work as single group that we work in partnership with?

Of course this is a diverse group and includes:

1. Communicators such as journalists, community reports and bloggers
2. Citizens who want to share their views and opinions about the issues that affect them
3. Service users who can share their experiences
4. Representers who speak for a particular group, campaign or issue
5. Experts such as academics or leading practitioners

It's not easy coming up with a name for this disparate group (sharers? friends of? co-optees? partners? associates? engagers? nodes?!?) but I'm going to suggest 'connectors' as a starting point - people willing to connect with scrutiny and people who can connect scrutiny to others that they might not otherwise easily reach.

The idea of the 'connector' also preserves the independence of those who engage - after all they are not working for scrutiny but working with scrutiny - they need to be able to be critical when they need to be.

Here are some ideas of how the connectors can be better supported:

Recognition: Does the committee do enough to thank the connectors? How could their contribution be  better publicised?  How about inviting the connectors to a thank you event at the end of the year?  A letter of thanks? Some other token? Are they mentioned in annual report? Did you tell them?

Information:  Connectors thrive on being 'in the know' - do you ensure they have access to the information that they need?  A special email for connectors? Press releases?

Networks:  Having contacts is useful for connectors - committee members and officers can be useful contacts and this can be offered in an informal way - "let us know if we can help you with anything and we will if we can".  Events for connectors can also give them the opportunity to network with each other and this might also strengthen civic society around scrutiny.

I don't think this needs to be too formal but doing more for those that volunteer their time should be a win win for scrutiny and those who get involved.  It might also just strengthen citizenship and democracy.

44. Local Digital Democracy: A Five Point Checklist

Back in February 2011 I wrote a joint post with the legendary Carl Whistlecraft setting out some thinking on local digital democracy and what it might look like.  You can find the original post on Carl's blog here.

In the post we defined local digital democracy as:

• Using social media to make a bridge between the formal world of local politics and the real world of real people
• Being clear that local government is not just about services – it has a distinct and important democratic role with elected local councillors at its heart
• Recognising that the world is changing.  Social media is changing the way the world works – local democracy needs to catch up
• Recognising that local democracy needs stronger citizen engagement
• Building from the traditional ways of doing things and using online tools to make them work better and reach more people

We could also see numerous benefits including for decision making and for reputation, for councillors, officers and citizens.  

In the post we identified the five essential features of local digital democracy.  Here I have just tweaked them into a into a checklist of five questions.  I think they provide a nifty little framework for assessing whether any given council 'has' local digital democracy.  How does yours score?

Local Digital Democracy:  A Five Point Checklist for Local Government

1.  Are Councillors Online?   

• How many councillors are blogging, tweeting, facebooking etc?
• Is training and support provided for those using social media?
• Are awareness sessions provided for those who haven't yet put their toes in the water?

See CllrSocmed for much more info on this.

2.  Is the Council's Online Decision Making Social? 

• Can online agendas, minutes and reports be easily shared via social media?
• Are items broken down into bite sized chunks rather than published in unwieldy PDFs?
• Is it possible for people to comment on decision making items via social media?

See my previous post on social council decision making here. 

 

3.  Are Council Meetings Social?

• Do meetings have webcasts that allow engagement via social media?
• Can councillors and citizens tweet at Council meetings?
• Does an officer provide a formal live commentary on meetings via social media?

See the Kirklees experience for a great example.
Dave Briggs has also been looking at the issue of tweeting at council meetings.

4.  Are Local Elections Social?

• Do election teams make use of social media to promote the election process?
• Do candidates share their election materials online or parties provide online manifestos?
• Are results shared via social media?

Again, more wonderful stuff from Kirklees.

5.  Is There a Local Digital Democracy Community?

• Is the Council proactively supporting local digital democracy?
• Are initiatives such as Local Democracy Week being used to support digital engagement?
• Are there online communities supporting local digital democracy and looking at how it might be improved?

I've posted before on Council's producing democracy plans - what's needed is a digital version.

So, what does your Council score out of five?  I'd be amazed if any actually scored five but, who knows, maybe one day...

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3660047829/

30. Community Government

A number of councils have recently been pondering the question: What should be the role of local authorities?’  Examples include Essex, Enfield and Lambeth.   

I wonder, however, whether many of these debates, whilst valuable of course, suffer because they do not draw on useful thinking from the not so distant past.  I have previously mentioned the Commission for Local Democracy as a valuable source of ideas and discussion and there is also a whole series of linked books from the 1990s, under the heading of ‘Government Beyond the Centre', worth looking at.   

The purpose of this post is to highlight one of the most significant ideas from the 1990s – the idea of community government.  This idea was outlined by the excellent John Stewart in ‘A Future for Local Authorities as Community Government’ – his contribution to Local Government in the 1990s (1995) edited by John Stewart and Gerry Stoker.

Stewart was responding to what he saw as an over emphasis on structure in debates on local government at the time when what really mattered was to clarify ‘its role and way of working’.  He was concerned that local authorities had come to see their ‘main role as the delivery of services specified in national legislation and accepted the stimulus of central government grant and circular as the main spur to action’.  This service orientation, although accepted as a natural state of affairs in the UK, contrasted with local government in Europe and even a earlier UK tradition, dating back to the later 19^th Century, which saw solving wider community problems as an important role for local government.

Community Government

Stewart’s proposed alternative was community government.  This concept sees the primary role of Council’s as solving the problems of the wider community and, more than that, as a means for communities to debate issues and resolve conflicts so that:

Community government is achieved through political processes that balance different interests and values.  A local authority is the political institution for the authoritative determination of community values, based on public discourse.

For community government to be achieved the critical change is for a power of general competence to be granted to local authorities, one that could even be used to extend legal powers such as for regulation.  Further than this councils need to have formal powers to influence the work of other public service providers even to the extent of taking direct control as this is the best way to ensure that the concerns and wishes of local citizens can be met.

Community government implies news ways of operating:

• Many ways of working – councils having the freedom and capacity to meet needs in different ways including direct service provision, contracting, grants, regulation etc   
• Responsive in action – beyond simply good customer service this means that the whole organisation recognises that it only has value in as far as customers and citizens see that value and acting accordingly.  The capacity for ‘responsiveness in action’ can only be increased when the level of central government control is reduced.
• New patterns of organisation – means moving away from traditional committees and departmental structures and investing in the right structures in order to be responsive to a given need as long as these are accountable and sanctioned by citizens.  Once again central government needs provide the space for councils to innovate and experiment.  Examples include arms length companies, public / private partnerships, co-operatives and decentralisation.
• Rebuilding accountability – recognising low turnout as a problem for local representative structures, considering proportional representation and finding ways of engaging citizens actively in services and the business of the council.  

Community government is an idea that has been influential.  In the modernisation agenda associated with the 2000 Local Government act, for example, it is possible to see the influence of this idea – in the power of wellbeing, in the requirements for local strategic partnerships and community strategies, and in the emphasis on democratic renewal and community engagement.  More recently the emphasis on localism chimes with the notion that local councils should be free to meet the needs of their local population the way that they think best. 

Local government today is of course far from Stewart's ideal of community government.  For my money, however, it is always worth a re-reading - especially if the intention is to rethink the role of local government.

Manchester Town Hall Photo:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacockshaw/2975276974/

10. The New Civic Arena

Like Real Representation, the New Civic Arena is a summary of some ideas put forward by Gerry Stoker in his book Why Politics Matters.

The 'civic arena' refers to the space between the formal institutions of government and the private lives of citizens. It includes the voluntary sector, the media, public debate, popular campaigns and anything else that forms the environment where citizens experience their citizenship.

Stoker suggests a range of reforms that will strengthen this civic arena and create something new.  The aim is to create the right conditions for what Stoker calls a 'politics for amateurs' to take place.

Stoker’s suggestions come in three parts:

1.  New forms of Citizen Engagement

 There are a wealth of innovative ways that citizens can be engaged. The point is not to advocate any in particular but to promote their use more generally.  Ultimately citizens will decide which innovations will come to the fore by supporting those which they perceive will make a difference and those which can fit easily into busy modern lives. 

In his book Stoker does discuss different types of innovations which he breaks down into:

• Consultative innovations
• Deliberative innovations
• Co-Governance Innovations
• Direct Democracy Innovations
• E-Democracy Innovations

2.  Encouraging ‘Civicness’ and Voluntary Activity

Citizenship can be built in a whole range of ways that do not involve dealing directly with government and other public bodies.  In the New Civic Arena, therefore it is important to encourage 'citizen to citizen' activity through community projects and schemes such as time banks.  These types of initiatives have immediate practical benefits for citizens but they also act as a stepping stone to other forms of more political engagement.

3.  Information Flow and Understanding: Citizen Education and the Media

Reform also needs to extend to the institutions that 'frame' citizenship.  In this case both education for citizenship (for all not just the young) and the way in which the media reports politics.  For the latter Stoker highlights the need for a civic journalism which takes more of an explanatory and public interest approach to the issues.

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The idea of the New Civic Arena has a clear resonance with the concept of the Big Society currently being promoted by the UK Government (See David Wilcox's blog for a proper discussion of the Big Society).  However, whilst the problem that the Big Society seems to be aimed at solving is social needs, the New Civic Arena aims to address political disenchantment.  Nevertheless, the overlap between the two ideas is obvious.