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Forum:Will Gordon Brown be remembered for fiddling with community involvement while the planet burns?

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Forums: Index > Tea rooms > Will Gordon Brown be remembered for fiddling with community involvement while the planet burns?


The announcement about participatory budgeting [1] [2] [3] was a very good start. But communities need to be involved also in discussions about values and the kinds of futures we want. Futures which take account of climate change and very different pictures of where we'll be getting our energy from. Discussion about all aspects of more sustainable communities.

The challenge for government is to find a way to take the 'we-think' [4] phenomenon seriously. The challenge for the rest of us is to persuade government, at all levels, to stop toying with those of us who would be involved.

Throwing public money at the latest fashion accessory of a scheme or program, has got to be replaced by a more open, inclusive, transparent and long term approach. More government with the people than government over the people.

  • Open means letting the public in at the design stage of any program or initiative, including the 'how will we judge success' bit.
  • Inclusive of course means going beyond the government's favoured few.
  • Transparent means enabling the wisdom of crowds to counteract control freakery from wherever it might come
  • Long term means continuous dialogue.

Of course there may be a lot more to it than this, but getting these 4 things would show substance supplanting spin. Philralph 16:01, 12 August 2007 (UTC)


Comment

2009

  • Great council websites aren’t enough. We need 1% for open data. 13 October 2009 [5]
  • September 2009 32 per cent of respondents were involved (through membership or regular donations) with at least one of 15 selected major third sector organisations concerned with the environment, compared with 42 per cent in 2007. [6] A sizeable decline in a short time. Contrast this decline with the growth of alternatives which tend to be much more participatory, such as Transition towns or Project Dirt for example.
  • 19 ways to make the UK more sustainable. Sustainable Development Commission identifies 19 "Breakthrough ideas", including "Mobilising collective action – scaling up the active networks and organisations for change blossoming around the UK, including the Transition towns network, Green Voice, and South London’s Project Dirt", July 1 [7]
  • Lipservice and localism, June 29 [8]
  • Place Survey - based on more than 500,000 people's views and perceptions about where they live - demonstrates the importance of listening to local people and what they want for their local area, Communities Secretary John Denham, June 23 [9] Less than half of people say they are satisfied with their local council. Only a quarter of people feel they can influence local decisions, as many again would like to be more involved.
  • "Another idea is to take the key themes of Transition towns - communities thinking about the future and taking action to deal with big issues - and apply this to the way central and local government work with communities. The role of government should not be to dictate ("I'm a bureaucrat and I know what's best for you") but to facilitate - to provide communities with resources and support" May 30 [10]. / Sounds like Local Agenda 21 before the government ditched it in favour of bureacrat dominated community planning? Philralph @sca21 17:15, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
  • Please tweet for service, June 2 [12]

2008

  • "The best mechanism to confront the challenge of climate change are not market mechanisms, but conscious, motivated, and well organized human beings endowed with an identity of their own." Evo Morales Ayma, President of Bolivia, November 28, 2008
  • "...his (Obama's) only real hope in dealing with the tremendous challenges the country (world) faces will be to harness the collective ingenuity of citizens on a massive scale. In other words, he must enlist a level of participation in generating and acting on innovative solutions that has no obvious parallel in history." Anthony D. Williams, wikinomics, November 7 2008 / topic, topic
  • A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism, wired.com, August 20, 2008
  • "We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes." Clay Shirky at a Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008. / Inspiring Quotes 2, topic

2007

  • "Government must do more to help people take green action", FoE, August 24 [15]


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Contents

[edit] Extra comments

Comment in response to first posting: I agree with the need for some version of face to face stuff. But it really isn't a case of one or the other but how to do both so that they are actually mutually reinforcing.

Comment in response to second posting: It may be just me, but I can't help feeling that there's a tension between openness, wholism, inclusivity and constant lauding the likes of "very high level" and "leaders".

Comment in response to third posting: The sooner we make a proper job of envisioning a sustainable future for the world of (paid) work, the sooner everything else, including sense of community will fall into place.


As the Phillis report (January 2004) said, we need continuous dialogue. Consultation is not this. Genuine community involvement if done properly could become it. The more open, transparent and inclusive any such dialogue is, the more likely it will nuture the necessary trust, and repair any damage limited and cynical consultations continue to store up. This comment was first published on the Sustainable Community Action wiki.

[edit] Citizens' Juries

The thing about Citizens' juries is that there is no convincing argument why whatever happens in them can't be done more openly so that more people are afforded the opportunity to be involved.

[edit] Related Wikipedia content

[edit] Related topics



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References

  1. ↑ Local people to have greater say on spending, July 5 - Communities and Local Government, News Release 2007/0124, 5 July 2007
  2. ↑ BBC News, July 5
  3. ↑ The Guardian, Voters to get direct say on local spending, July 5
  4. ↑ We-think project initiated by Charles Leadbeater
  5. ↑ Mash the State, 13 October 2009
  6. ↑ Communities and Local Government, September 23, 2009
  7. ↑ Sustainable Development Commission, July 1, 2009
  8. ↑ Living with rats, June 29, 2009
  9. ↑ Communities and Local Government, June 23, 2009
  10. ↑ The Strategist, May 30, 2009
  11. ↑ Living with rats, June 3, 2009
  12. ↑ Living with rats, June 2, 2009
  13. ↑ University of Copenhagen, March 12 2009
  14. ↑ BBC News, October 28
  15. ↑ Friends of the Earth August 24
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