The good news is that (with the kind help of Deloittes and the London Borough of Barnet) we did it a few months ago (it was picked up by The Evening Standard here.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share everything that we learned doing this, but today, I’m going to start with the transcript of an interview that I did (partly by email) with Adrian Tan – one of Deloitte’s team. I think this captures what we set out to do quite well, and I hope it’s worth reading.

Data gathering for Barnet Schools Data Project

Paul Evans: Adrian, we’ve agreed that this exercise is a starting point for involving school pupils in the London Borough of Barnet in the use of open data. We want to show them what is available, how it needs to be formatted so that it can be used and how it can be juxtaposed and visualised to draw some conclusions.

Personally, I’m interested in the democratic and participative aspects of this. I want to…

• Increase awareness among the pupils of the availability and potential uses for public data
• Consequently, increasing awareness more widely within the borough of this opportunity
• Illustrating ways that this method of working can tell us new things that we didn’t know about the borough that we live in – thereby contributing to local policy development
• Highlighting problems that we encounter in working towards these aims (so that others can think about how these obstacles can be removed)

We’d like to look at what we can do with the public data that the government are pulling together from various sources onto a one stop shop at data.gov.uk along with anything else that we can get our hands on.

Adrian Tan: From a policymaking point of view, the potential use of public data is interesting.

• One could look at the data and identify clusters and patterns of occurrence. This is an evidence based approach which tells how events have actually taken place, rather than simply how we think they might have had.
• Armed with hindsight, we can then use the open data, with the right level of granularity, to mash it up with other sources to gain insights into the possible contributing factors. Open data enables valuable lessons to be learnt and unravels precious insights. What we need next is foresight
• Open data needs to be synergized with the right tools such as predictive analytics to proactively identify and address issues.

Fundamentally we are interested in how things will happen before they do, and not just simply why after they have.

PE: So what are we going to achieve by introducing school pupils to this idea?

AT: The reason it’s worth involving school pupils is that – while the Open Data initiative is undoubtedly commendable,not everyone is capable of appreciating data.

A common drawback is the vast quantities of data one has to go through to identify patterns and insights. Manipulating and making sense of data requires experience and knowledge – it’s not a skill that can be acquired in a day. For a layperson, it’s hard to know where to begin with raw data. It’s not always straightforward even for data professionals.

We’ve been working on ways to ensure that the data isn’t going to be overwhelming. Properly presented, it should engage people in an intellectually stimulating manner.

We will have an introductory day with the team at Deloitte, trying out some new and existing tools and we’ll be writing this up once the day is complete.

PE: What can we do in one day with school pupils?

AT: We’ve been testing out new visualisation tools and we’d like to show some of these to the pupils. People who have the experience and statistical grasp can look at vast quantities of data quickly and become aware of the important details about the place that we live in, or alternatively we can put things that we broadly know under the microscope and see if we can learn something useful.

You need the right tools of course. Dull data is hard to engage with. But if it’s presented in an intellectually stimulating way, it makes you think. We’ve always presented numbers as graphs, but today’s software really allows you to get the numbers into a place where anyone – not just a statistician – can learn something interesting from them.

Visualisation provides a bird’s eye view to an ocean of data and it also allows the user to put a magnifying glass on areas that matter most. Above all, visualisation allows people to lift themselves from the details, offer a fresh eye and possibly come up with novel ideas to address issues.

We want to show them what is available, how it needs to be formatted so that it can be used and how it can be juxtaposed and visualised to draw some conclusions/implications.

A good place to start with school pupils is to look at how they can use data to support what they’re already learning in schools. Different groups of people will be interested in different kinds of data. If we can find the right questions, we can encourage school pupils to add to the sum of human knowledge – to explain their surroundings to the rest of their school. They could even explain their surroundings to their local authority and precipitate real change at a local level.

PE: So what useful data have we found so far?

AT: Well, let’s start with traffic data. We can go here (insert link) to find out all sorts of information about local traffic accidents. We have the following information about each accident

1. Age Band of Casualty
2. Age Band of Driver
3. Car Passenger
4. Carriageway Hazards
5. Casualty Severity
6. Casualty Type
7. Control
8. Junction Detail
9. Junction Location
10. Light Conditions
11. Pedestrian Crossing – Human Control
12. Pedestrian Crossing – Physical Facilities
13. Pedestrian Location
14. Road Surface Conditions
15. Road Type
16. Sex of Casualty
17. Sex of Driver
18. Special Conditions at Site
19. Speed Limit
20. Vehicle Manoeuvre
21. Weather Conditions

There is more information than this, but I had to do some cleaning up and I had to exclude some information that was simply not in a useable format. The 21 streams listed here are the ones I could use usefully.

So are there combinations of ‘road type’ and ‘speed limit’ that are particularly likely to result in accidents or the severity of accidents? How far does weather conditions affect the dangerousness of a particular type of road?

PE: So we can plot these on a map and offer predictions about where accidents are likely to happen? Can we say ‘when it’s rainy and dark, you should particularly avoid this stretch of road’? Will school pupils be able to print off maps that they can show to their school, providing useful pedestrian warnings?

AT: As the data came with longitude and latitude figures, we were able to plot these on a map.

As for predicting about where accidents are more likely to happen, we have to look at this with a statistician’s eye. If most of the accidents happen in fine weather, we can’t necessarily conclude that bad weather has nothing to do with accidents for all of the obvious reasons – especially if there are no bad-weather days in the period we’re sampling. And so on. We have to weight figures accordingly and not succumb to any of the usual cognitive biases.

This still leaves us with a lot to play with though. The interesting point about this set of data is the level of granularity. For each accident, there is record of whether it is slight, serious or fatal. This piece of information is crucial to a predictive approach. We could look at, within each category of vehicles type, the percentage of accidents that have resulted in a fatality and compare it across other vehicles. So we weren’t surprised when we found that accidents involving motorcycles of over 500 cc were twice as likely to result in a fatality than other vehicle types. Although this finding is intuitive and nothing new, by using this ‘granular insights’ approach, we could apply this methodology to other data fields and predict fatalities as well as accidents. Obviously, this is useful information for any policy-maker. Using this methodology, we hope school pupils can print off maps that they can show to their school on a number of variables, providing useful driver and pedestrian warnings.

PE: What else is interesting about the Accidents data?

AT: If we can draw data from several sources, we can provide a more useful picture. We can find things we hadn’t even thought of looking for. However, this isn’t always that easy. Matching up data may not always work. buy cialis online Different sources can granularise their data in different ways so we aren’t always comparing apples with apples. Different time frames (data collected over different periods of ime) means we are unable to draw conclusive inferences about what is actually driving the behavior /outcome hat we are interested in. The Accidents data is an exception. Weather, road condition, junction type, accident severity etc is all recorded at the same time. But once we juxapose it with other information, it becomes trickier.

PE: OK. I know we’ll be looking at other bits of information around crime and health, but let’s stick with the Accidents data for now. Is there anything we could d to take it further than just a day event?

AT: We think that uploading the data used on that day onto a public server where the pupils can continue to play with it and share it with their family and friends will be useful. Having data on a public server means people can share a view. Sharing a visualisation helps to create a shared view of a situation and draws members of the community together and aligns thinking on how we can improve on things that matters most to us.

PE: And can councils and councillors get anything from this?

AT: In an ideal world, the pupils would get this data together and come out with recommendations that could be taken to a council meeting. In reality, that probably won’t happen yet.  What we’re doing here, for now, is stimulating thinking. It should be of interest to councillors that school pupils can draw interesting conclusions from data. It shows councils how they can raise their game. It also illustrates the need to collect, store and share better data.

It will also result in an instructive process where we all understand statistics a little better. The dialogue between people crunching data and people who have to make decisions on it will always be interesting. We all have to learn various golden rules about how correlation doesn’t guarantee a cause, or how common biasses skew findings and mislead us all.

But we need to make a start – hopefully we’ll know a lot more once we’ve spent a day mashing data around with a group of school pupils.

This isn’t a review (I’ve not finished reading it yet!) but the book carries a powerful case for rationalism in politics. The author tends towards a sort of post politics-ism that I’d not go along with, but this is a quibble for another time.

The discussion among the Skeptics was interesting though, and I wanted to capture one issue:

How can Geeks engage in politics? Should they stand for election? Few do. Should they continue sticking up for their own – defending Simon Singh with The Quacklash or fighting cuts to research funding- that they sometimes do so well?

Henderson identifies a new, growing player in political life: The scientific commentator – writers like Ben Goldacre, Tim Harford. He also sees a possibility of science-minded community banding together to become a Mumsnet type of political force – one to be courted by aspiring Prime Minsters.

Personally, I’m not convinced about that last suggestion. It conflates ‘has a science background’ with ‘active rationalist’ a little too much for my liking.

Flicking through it, I can’t see the kind of intervention from Geeks that I think would be the most useful – the clear-thinking candid friends of democracy. So here’s my suggestion.

Henderson makes the point that “what politicians think is less important than how they think.”

I’d suggest that it isn’t necessarily the role of politicians to think, or at least not to concentrate efforts on thinking that could be better used elsewhere. Politicians role is a pragmatic one. Sure, they have to deliberate and to represent and do it in a principled way. But they’ve also got to behave in a strategic way. The toughest task that Burke or Rousseau set politicians was the need to represent the nation as a whole, or The General Will while being able to bring morality and principles to bear. Like it or not, they have to apply their judgement almost entirely to the competing claims made by interest groups rather than sifting through representations from dispassionate rational commentators.

One of the biggest problems that politicians face (and the one they often solve in the way the mediate between demands) is an over exposure to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Politicians meet a lot of people who are certain about a lot of things, and certainty and knowledge are often found in inverse proportions. As Bertrand Russell put it in his article ‘Triumph of Stupidity‘;

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Or as buy cheap cialis Yeates said in his Second Coming;

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”

Or as Darwin put it;

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

(That’s enough quotes – Ed)

It’s very rare for Politicians to have an interlocutor that can defensibly describe itself as representing the public interest. The best arguments for Parliaments is that they create a kind of distributed moral judgement that helps to mediate between a range of outrageous claims.

There is surely a sub-set of the scientific method that seeks to take competing evidence and provide a summary and commentary upon it – isolating dishonesty, identifying biases or signposting the logical fallacies.

Take the tricky subject that Henderson dwells on at length: The sacking of David Nutt. Sure, politicians need a briefing on the medical issues concerned. They need one on law and order as well. They also need to evaluate the various claims that rest very heavily upon them, for example;

“If you legalise Ganja, the Daily Mail will see to it that you never get elected again.”

This is an important scientific claim that is as pertinent to this issue as any other. It needs to be tested. If it’s true, then legalisation is unthinkable, whatever other issues are on the table. Politicans commit their lives to a wide range of positions. If adopting one policy effectively stops their political party from being re-elected, they’d be fools to run with it.

We’ve spent the last few months listening to Lord Leveson unearth the shocking truth that newspapers exert an unhealty and anti-democratic influence upon public life. That newspaper owners bully politicians into serving the interests of newspaper owners. Who knew?

Politicians need Geeks to anticipate the big issues that are going to come up in future. It has to be one that the participating geeks don’t feel very strongly about. They need to get together to compile an agreed text that politicians and commentators alike can use as a guide to the issue. They need to request from politicians a copy of all representations that are received on that matter and they need to map them – do a bit of wikinomics, perhaps, maybe using debategraph or data-visualisations to add meaning and context to statistics that are used.

This is something that would need political scientists involved as well, because no legislation exists in a policy vacuum.

It should also attempt to understand the political and democratic circumstances in which the issue is being decided. Too often, we castigate politicians for refusing to accept a hospital pass. For a legislative change to happen, any rational bystander has to be able to look at such a piece of compiled evidence and say ‘if I were that politician, I’d vote for that change.’

I think that there’s an exciting project in there somewhere.

But for now, let’s think about Geeks running the world again. Here’s Jarvis:

What’s the point of being rich if you can’t think what to do with it?
‘Cause you’re so very thick.
Oh we weren’t supposed to be, we learnt too much at school now
we can’t help but see.
That the future that you’ve got mapped out is nothing much to shout about.
We’re making a move, we’re making it now,
We’re coming out of the side-lines.
Just put your hands up – it’s a raid.
We want your homes, we want your lives,
we want the things you won’t allow us.
We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs
We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds.

Mis-Shapes by Pulp

But in recent years, politicians seem to have jumped the fence. Instead of sticking to their story – that their job is to deliberate and buy cialis online act in the public interest – the vast majority appear to be happy to temporarily adopt the line that they are there to do whatever the public want them to do.

So in 2008, the previous Labour government announced an obligation on local authorities to encourage local petitions coupled with an obligation to respond to them in a clearly defined way.

Now, there’s a more precise way of interpreting that, but seeing as few local authorities know what it is, and seeing as I heard a rumour somewhere that the Coalition has modified this obligation (or something), I really can’t be bothered to look any further.

Where I live, there is a huge local push to get thousands of names on a petition to change the local parking policy. Aside from the mobilisation potential, it’s a futile exercise. The Council already know just how many people detest the local parking scheme – they don’t need a petition to tell them this.

At a recent public meeting I watched the Council leader, beetroot-faced, being forced to stand in front of a room full of angry local traders with only one line of response: that there was no way the council were going to change any significant part of their parking policy unless a judge forced them to. The budget was set, and that’s that.

Similarly, the Coalition announced some obligation on Parliament to make time for a debate if 100,000 signatures told them to do so. Or, more accurately, this is what the media reported them as doing. The truth is more fuzzy and equally boring and irrelevant, because Parliament can ignore this obligation if it chooses to, as it did recently with 38 Degrees’ petition.

It’s all such a load of rubbish, isn’t it? It’s a downward spiral:

1. You sense that the public have a lack of faith in Representative Democracy
2. You introduce a process that allows people to have more of a say in Representative Democracy
3. The public use it to demand something that elected representatives are not prepared or able to deliver on
4. The petition is spiked, or paid lip-service to (i.e. perfunctory debate, status quo-ante retained)
5. Quick assessment to see if this has improved or damaged the reputation of Representative Democracy

The offer of a petition is a typical politicians answer. It should be treated with contempt.

And who knew this could happen, as well….?

Just to recap, I’m helping to organise an open data project for some school pupils within the a London borough in the new year. One of the big tasks is to flush out all of the data that may be available.

I’m going to be taking subject areas such as crime, health, education/children’s services separately and posting on each of them, using the  links and a few ideas that have come from different directions.

My first subject, though, will be on voluntary/civil society activity in a particular borough – in this case, Barnet.

This is a good example of a data-set that isn’t generally available yet in any standardised form, but one that may be of interest to school pupils in mapping some aspects of their locality.

In terms of drawing down experience of a local voluntary sector and open data, Jo Ivens in Brighton has pointed me to the Data for Neighbourhoods and Regeneration site here – a very good set of signposts – along with her own Databridge site.

I started to try and summarise a few good points from this site but ended up finding all of it worth reading – it will prove to be an incredibly useful resource for everybody involved in this schools project. As a taster, I’m shamelessly pinching this video, but the whole site is worth a visit.

I’ve also had a helpful conversation with Ruth Mulandi, CEO of Community Barnet – the local voluntary sector hub – and this is what I found out.

Firstly, they hold most of the data that may be useful within their website Content Management System (the tool that they use to maintain their website).

This includes their directory of community organisations called InBarnet. They have over 1,000 community organisations registered within the borough – around 850 of buy cialis online which are active.

Being able to download this would be very useful, and I’m told that it’s possible, subject to a few caveats:

• The database includes information that individual groups have submitted to CommunityBarnet, but of it is on a ‘not for publication’ basis (in some cases individual phone numbers, contact details etc) and it is subject to some data protection rules
• CommunityBarnet don’t have the resources to regularly run bespoke dumps from this database at no cost– they have one person managing all of this and it’s not a full-time job by any means so additional data work needs to be resourced somehow
• It is an ongoing project to get all of the info about all of the groups that they ideally want to provide, such as what each group does, where, when, what type of service they provide and how etc etc, and to keep this up-to-date for all of the 800-odd active groups on the borough
• The database on the website is searchable, but obviously not all of the data is there (if groups have not provided it yet)

However, leaving aside some of the data that cannot be fully shared with third parties their website gives the undertaking that…

We can provide more specific reports , including:

Type of service provided: one to one support, counselling, after school clubs, befriending, advocacy, day care services, mentoring, training, and many more groups and individual needs served: children, adults, carers, parents, mental health, learning difficulties, cultural and faith specific and many more

Some of these groups provide specific services (lunch clubs, advice, day-centres, etc).

My contact at Community Barnet has offered me any reasonable amount of help in extracting this information in a useable form, but I’ll have to bear in mind the constraints that they are under in doing this.

So, what else is there?

In this document, we see some results from a 2009 survey in which 25% of the active organisations  on the database provided a response outlining what they do, who they do it for. Again, Ruth tells me that this is all held within that unified database held within the website management system, so it should be very simple.

I suppose my big question is this: How long before some government agency starts to standardise the collection of data about voluntary sector activity for publication? Mapping these services would surely have some use – not least to the local authorities concerned.

With the ‘Big Society’ as such a priority for the current government, it can’t be too far off, can it?

But here’s an overarching question to start with: If we’re planning to ask school pupils to find data, tidy it up and find new ways to visualise it, it’s obviously useful to ask; Who this is intended to benefit? I think that answering this question can, in itself, tell us a lot about how participation works. It can help us understanding the negotiation that is needed to get the right sort of broadly-based participation that democratic processes need.

We may have reasons that we want people to engage, but we only get access to their cognitive surplus if we can incentivise people (in this case, school pupils) to play along.

In the next few posts, I’ll be signposting useful data. But why would school pupils manipulate and visualise it in the first place?

The obvious beneficiaries could be the pupils themselves. Are we asking them to pull together information that is practically useful to them or that tells them something that benefits them? It could be something that they learn from or that has some utility for them, or something where the collection and preparation of the data is particularly rewarding?

A number of my respondents here and elsewhere have been saying that this is an opportunity to promote coding for kids and / or to get some useful tools built that could have a practical use for somebody. Simon Burall pointed me to the Code Academy site that provides an addictive step-by-step introduction and to Emma Mulqueeny’s work at The Guardian, including links to the new Coding For Kids wiki. Alternatively, there’s the fairly self-explanatory Apps for Good project.

We’re talking about visualisation here, so there are plenty of educational opportunities around maths or design/technology.

Or would we get away with asking for a more selfless contribution? Are we appealing to a civic and democratic sensibility by asking them to “tell us something interesting and useful that we don’t know using information that is freely / easily available”? Essentially, providing unsolicited social research to the local council and other bodies? I suppose they’d learn something about citizenship and sociology from that, but…

Perhaps we’re asking them to do something voluntary? There are 850 active local voluntary sector bodies in the London Borough of Barnet, many of whom don’t have the resources to do research, publicise their work effectively or get their work more effectively on the map – avoiding duplication of effort and maximising take-up or funding opportunities. Could school pupils help their local voluntary sector somehow by crunching data?

Alternatively, we could be asking them to provide information. They could develop an app of some sort, or – more simply – gather information in a spreadsheet (mobile smartphone + Google Docs forms anyone?) One suggestion that came my way was something around personal safety matched to geographical locations. Noel Hatch suggested ideas around behaviour change – even looking at information from their own social networks.

Simon Burall (again!) pointed me to this deciphermydata site from Gallomanor – a really nice project to crowdsource information about flu from schools. The pupils learn a lot around collecting and using data, and scientists learn a lot about instances of flu in schools.

We could be asking pupils to manually gather local geographical data, information about services or local features, information about education provision or….

That paragraph could go on for a long time.  I can think of lots of things that seem good ideas to buy viagra online me, but I’d be really interested to hear the much better ideas that everyone else has.

There are strong democratic arguments for doing this – ones that aren’t immediately obvious. There are also good ‘transparency’ arguments (but I’d make my usual point here about transparency and democracy not always pulling in the same direction).

Local Ward Atlas data - click to explore it

There are two other reasons why this is worth doing:

1. It’ll be fun to do. School pupils, doing all kinds of things with data that their older neighbours wouldn’t value just for the hell of it. Anyone watching this will learn a lot and probably have a laugh while doing it
2. It will be a good thought experiment for everyone involved. In my experience, most people who work in or with local authorities don’t really understand the potential to do good things here.

I’ve never seen anyone try to pull together a good index of all of the relevant and interesting data that is available within one local authority area with the aim of giving school pupils something to work with, so over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing exactly that.

In this case, I’ll be looking at what data we can find on the area covered by the London Borough of Barnet (I live there, and the council have expressed an interest in this anyway) from a variety of different sources.

I’ll be writing a short article here on each of them outlining what they have and how it could be used, and hopefully sharing a few of them on the London Data Store blog. I should add here that a lot of what follows has resulted from conversations with friends, too numerous to credit here, but I was give a good initial steer by Emer Coleman at the London Data Store who has a strong local authority background.

I’d really welcome your feedback on any of this.

So, my first question; Are there any obvious omissions from this list of sources (below) that I’m going to go to for data that we can use with school pupils at a data-hack event?

• The council themselves – for demographics, expenditure, service provision and take-up, revenue and other relevant data. There is currently a Maps Facts & Figures page on their site, but I think that there could be more ‘machine readable’ data that we could get from them with a bit of help
• The data behind the police crime-mapping services
• The London Data store - loads of information from a wide variety of different subject areas
• The local Primary Care Trust /NHS
• The local voluntary service council

There’s one further area that has been suggested to me. School pupils are likely to be very interested in Children’s issues anyway, and every local authority commissions some research that doesn’t fit into national frameworks. So I’m going to be having a conversation buy cialis with the Children’s Services office if I get the chance. In addition, any information I can get on schools will be particularly useful for the same reasons.

If my own children are anything to go by, I suspect that they will want to move quickly beyond the data that we provide them with and start creating their own information. There’s a huge wealth of information that children could provide about their local area – data that could be crowd-sourced with a bit of creative thinking.

We will need to ask them – or even encourage them to do the asking. This is, of course, the holy grail of democratic data-use – participation and co-design. But for now, I’d like to explore the limits of the data that adults have provided. At the moment, many adults don’t really understand that a huge variety of data-types + analysis can be very valuable.

We can walk now. Running comes later.

In the meantime, here’s a quick stop-gap while IA while ago, I posted something here on the common misconception that many of us have about consensuses (consensii?).

I think that this is important for democracy, as one of the harshest charges that politicians face is that they are out of touch or that they don’t listen to us.

Now, in a week where the ‘We buy viagra online are the 99%’ meme is doing the rounds, here’s a nice post about the False Consensus Effect….

“which states that individuals view their own preferences, behaviours and judgements as being typical, normal and common within a broader context; it also suggests we find alternative characteristics as being more deviant and atypical than they actually are.”

Worth bearing in mind.

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics.

I say that my local MP quite like Tom. But he’s also not quite the same. Earlier this summer, for instance, Tom attained a status that very few politicians have ever held. He could have walked into a bi-partisan pub and had drinks bought for him from all sides because he behaved in a way that most people think good MPs should.

But was Tom really a one-man force of nature – a campaigning multi-tasking up-all-night political polymath, on top of the details with carefully phrased rapier-like questions?

I yield to no-one in my admiration for him, but I really don’t think he was this superman. I say this because he did something a bit cleverer than that: He rode the network into battle. His 3,225 Facebook friends and 51,984 Twitter followers gave him extra eyes, ears, hands and brains. They allowed him to stretch his Parliamentary Allowance and give him all kinds of resources that he won’t need to claim for on annoying IPSA forms.

Sure – he worked hard and picked his fights well. But his real talent was in finding help – and not just of a material kind.

Where his followers weren’t slipping him data, they were chewing over the evidence, road-testing a few ways of describing developments giving him phrases that were useful when the cameras were on. When they were doing none of those things, he got feedback – encouragement and reassurance.

When you know you’re onto something, it gives you that extra bounce. His self-image here didn’t need to develop that self-loathing edge that sustains fake indignation. A politician as exposed as Tom would never get away with that these days.

By embedding himself in the network, he had little choice but to apply high standards of self-criticism. Either be a genuinely good guy, or act his socks off every day.

Now contrast Tom with Sir Stuart Bell – the unobtainable member for Middlesbrough.

Sir Stuart hasn’t held a constituency surgery for 14 years. He is made even harder to contact by the fact he doesn’t have a constituency office.

According to the paper, his response to questions about this has been to point out that he meets with members of the public by appointment instead, and people can reach him by telephone at any time.

So reporter Neil Macfarlane set about trying to find out how easy or otherwise it was to get in contact with the MP. Over several months, the Gazette rang Sir Stuart’s Westminster office and his home number over 100 times. No-one ever answered. That’s despite claiming staffing costs of £82,896 last year. Contrast that with Teesside’s four other MPs, all of who have their phones answered at the first attempt.

Sir Stuart isn’t on Facebook or Twitter either as far as I can see. And – when we find out what he thinks – I doubt if it’s ever as nuanced or road-tested as Tom’s positions. The contrast in self-awareness as well as political competence will be eye-watering.

So there’s a heirarchy here: On the top, Tom Watson, the go-to example of the networked politician.

Somewhat below him is my MP (no slouch with social media by the way, but as guarded as most MPs) who is in a marginal seat and is accordingly, visibly, busy.

Then, a long way further down, there’s Sir Stuart, who has managed to hide way for 14 years without hosting a surgery because, in Middlesbrough, they’d probably elect a Donkey if was wearing a red rosette (Tory equivalents are undoubtely available folks!).

I’m sorry it’s taken me to get to it, but here’s my question:

If you’re good at networking, are political parties as important

to you as they were? Does Tom need to get his cut-and-paste replies from Labour HQ as often? Does he need to rely upon the whips to guide him through issues he doesn’t understand as often? Does he need to scour local committee rooms get find local canvassers who will knock on doors for him at the next election?

And most importantly, Tom has created a situation where he has to behave publically like an honest human being. In being well networked, has he redefined what representation is?

And should we be voting for people on the basis of their personal network more than their party rosette?

Update: More on lazy politicians here.

Chad. High disease prevalence and not much democracy

Amartya Sen has powerfully made the case that democracy brings with it guarantees of social justice.

Summarising for speed, Sen has argued that democracies don’t have famines, that they provide regulatory minimum standards that ensure that earthquakes don’t result in huge death-tolls as poorly-built structures collapse, and so on.

In a democracy, we are very likely to have better, universal services compared to non-democracies.

It’s a familliar argument, but one that was recently subject to a fascinating twist. In a recent New Scientist [£] article, evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill makes the case that democracy only emerges in societies in which there is a relative absense of infectious disease.

In summary, societies with a high prevalence of infectious diseases tend to an understandable level of xenophobia. Epidemics, after all, are often the consequence of population movements, therefore, outsiders are treated with a good deal more suspicion.In addition, class structures in such societies are likely to be more impermeable as people who are wealthy or powerful enough to be able to afford it, distance themselves from the wider population to protect themselves.

There’s a fair bit of tangential evidence cited here as well: For instance, a 2006 study by Carlos Navarette shows that – when prompted to think about disgusting objects such as spoiled food, people tend to express more nationalistic values. I also recall (from elsewhere – can’t find it now) that there was research showing more ethnocentrism among women at vulnerable stages in their pregnancies.

However, digging further into the article, there’s a lot to argue with in Thornhill’s conclusions. The New Scientist raises questions that this is less a function of disease than

it is of general instability and fear.

Also, there’s lots to argue with in his definition of ‘democratisation’ (apparently lots of referendums is one plus-point!).

There’s a spectrum that he uses that has collectivist societies on one end (people placing the overall good of society ahead of of the freedom of action of individuals within it). Such a society, according to Thornhill, tends to be more respectful of authority, more xenophobic and more conformist. On the other end of the scale, there’s individualist societies where there’s more emphasis on openness and individual freedom.

Again, I’d like to see more digging into this particular question (and I’m sure it’s out there somewhere) but how does this capture Scandinavian models of government? I’ve heard arguments that Scandinavian social democracy was largely made possible by the relative lack of racial outsiders and that the dramatic emergence of xenophobic parties in these countries has been more pronounced than in societies more accustomed to population movements.

Particularly, given the terrible calamity that befell Norway last week, this is a pressing and uncomfortable question. Norway is at once, both a very democratic country, and one in which an established General Will leads to a good deal of conformity.

This is a country where thousands of teenagers will attend an alcohol-free open-air summer camp organised by the dominant political party! Try that in the UK!

It’s also one of the countries that has faced a dramatic political jolt from emerging populist anti-immigation parties who often treat their social settlements as values that need to be protected from outsiders. How does this democratic ideal address the potential challenge to its values in an age of large-scale population movements?

So. Do democrats have a strategy for defending democratic advances in a time of social upheaval? I’d be interested in any thoughts that this posting provokes from readers?

As I’m one of the hosts, I thought it worth dropping a few conversation-starters in the mix. Issues where politicians seem to have reversed themselves into a cul-de-sac. Issues where a game-change could make a difference.

Like most people, I have prejudices as well as arguments – please take all of these examples (listed in no particular order) in this spirit – I’d like to focus on the gamed nature of politics rather than specific evidence on these issues:

• Sentencing policy: Whatever you think to the way we handle criminal sentencing, it seems to be subject to pressures that don’t have much to do with reducing reoffending. Does the tension between evidence-based approaches, newspaper versions of the problem and electoral horizons and timescales resolve itself well? I don’t think so.
• Immigration policy: A similar problem – moral questions of freedom of movement, economic ones around the flexibility of the economy, sociological ones around social capital and the effect upon communities of the kind of churn that flexible economies bring
• As I was writing this, my friend Tim Davies forwarded this post on gaming and climate change (among other issues) from Duncan Green of Oxfam, so that’s another one to add into the mix.
• Then there’s the related question of participatory budgeting and the potential extensions we can apply to the idea? How can choice-games be used to improve efficiency in public management (a friend working at a local PCT said to me recently that he believed that doctors often find it harder to under-prescribe or under-refer patients to hospitals because of the way their work is structured.

Then I’ve a few personal hobby-horses:

• Participation – how do we strike the balance between getting more people involved in policymaking, but balancing the need to ensure that segments of the population aren’t over/under represented, while ensuring that we get the benefit of expertise, experience, creative thinking and the practical input?
• Representation – how do we incentivise politicians to play their role in a more participative democracy with the public interest as
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  their main focus?

• Journalism – (particularly relevant this week): journalists almost have a constitutional role as well – they refer to themselves as the fourth estate often enough. How do we incentivise them to behave like decent intelligent human beings? How do we strike the balance between the need for diversity and pluralism in the provision of news while recognising the fact that the business model has a lot of uncertainty around it? Good journalism is literally worth billions in terms of the value that it adds to the economy – but no-one’s prepared to pick up the bill.

Also, aside from the potential for positive social change, there’s also the question of education – how far does addressing these problems increase or challenge the legitimacy of the structures that exist to tackle them?

Enough already! Here’s a re-run of a Ted talk that I linked to here a while ago – it makes the case for this approach better than I can.

If you’re coming along tomorrow, please try and think of any games that could be changed?