I note the comment above about politics getting in the way – but I think with enough impetus and public pressure behind an idea, the politics will suddenly fall into place. A different kind of democracy? – well maybe ideas like this might help to challenge some of the negative aspects (amongst lots of positive ones) of our current systems.

It’s an interesting idea and one that should work but there is a single decisive omission in the code of the argument – politics. If the regions/sub/authority is a system then it is not as a coded system would be with rules and functions that execute as programmed (whether badly or correctly). To extend the metaphor it is rather all of those things with a large unpredictable variable playing an equal role in the overall process so that the result is unknowable and can only be predicted on the basis of probability and is often unknowable. This is the limit of bureaucracy and in this context it is emphasised. At the most basic level the political utility of transparency is missing from this model. It’s like saying that people really want the truth. But that’s not the truth, is it? It should be and would be if we were playing to how we would like to be, but that’s not how we are. The political risk would be too high and sooner or later (probably sooner), someone would use it for political gain (see banks, phone hacking and MP’s expenses for reference).

I’ve spent 15yrs in the public sector in the UK and rarely seen anything like what you describe (i.e. hacker philosophy) work for long. The public sector works because of a few inspirational and dedicated people in key roles giving life to processes and hope to others through the integrity of their work. If that could be changed then maybe it would work. But then it would be a very different kind of democracy.

There might be something in that.

Thanks

This idea is still definitely ripe for a pilot project – turning council minutes, FMS reports, and all sorts of other things into tracked issues. Know any LAs who might be up for prototyping it?

Tim

It’s hard enough to know what’s district council and what’s county council, so it would have to be at a county level. But suppose it wasn’t council, but another public body? NHS, police and every other relevant organisation would have to be signed up.

Good idea though

If place is a system, it’s an SOA one and local authorities are the Enterprise Service Bus.