It’s the idea of social public information. Public information – high-quality, unbiased and universally available information that addresses people’s everyday needs – but information that is provided by non-governmental sources. Often volunteers or commercial organisations who benefit from giving information away without compromising the integrity of that information.

It seems, however, that the transformative potential that this holds out is not as obvious to people who have less experience with these tools and a lot of other things to be getting on with.

Social public information has the potential to solve many of the problems that politicians have. It also deals with a set of forces that many politicians fear (for quite good reasons). It has become clear to me, doing this work over a number of years, that the fear-factor gets in the way of the positive political potential.

So what questions is it possible for social public information to answer? Here are a few:

How can we get the government machine to work more effectively? How can we involve people in decision-making without sacrificing good policymaking to populism?

How can we ensure that small noisy minorities (ironically, the ones who insist on calling themselves the silent majority) can be sidestepped in the pursuit of a balanced and moderated conversation with people who rarely engage in politics?

How can we make that high-level of public involvement a pleasure and not a chore? How can we get get civil servants to shoulder some of the responsibilities that they are often allowed to shrug off onto politicians? And how can we unlock the spontaneity and creativity that the Internet clearly is capable of releasing and apply it to day-to-day problems of a complicated modern society?

I’ve tried to avoid linking this too closely to the UK government coalition’s buzz-phrases, but I’m finding it hard not to emphasise that this is a vision that is both anti-bureaucratic and one that relies upon intelligent pro-social activity that is conducted largely on a voluntary basis. I certainly haven’t written it purely for a Tory / Lib-Dem audience. But ‘the post-bureaucratic age’ and ‘The Big Society’ rolled into one? It’s hard to resist making this claim for these ideas…..

I’ve broken it up into five bits in the hope that busy people will be able to take it a bit at a time. They are five separate articles anyway, but they follow a narrative to a conclusion.

I hope you enjoy reading each one of them and that you will be able to give a bit of feedback as you go. And I hope it’s useful!

• Introduction: The public seem to have confusing needs, but a good conversation clarifies a lot
• Part one: How commercial information monopolies have already been broken
• Part two: Why government information channels don’t help improve services the way that commercial ones do
• Part three: Why it’s not easy – or fair to the public – to expect the public sector to behave like commercial brands (yet)
• Part four: The internet is quite good at solving this problem – it’s already started and may be on the crest of a huge change for the better

Mick has used the site to post repeatedly on the opportunities that bloggers have to explore ground that the mainstream media has vacated. We’ve engaged in a number of commercial and semi-commercial activities (promoting Councillor websites and some social media training for senior decision-makers) designed to encourage politicians, public bodies and the media to grasp the opportunities open to them to recast a lot of the old political stalemates that get in the way of better government and a more participative democracy.

On my own (increasingly quiet) blog, Local Democracy, I’ve tried to get to grips with how representative democracy will work (and improve) in the digital age.

We’re also conscious of the impact that the read-write web has upon politics, and we’ve found our work increasingly focus around two loci:

1. Creating a positive space in which politicians, the media and public bodies can work together to make things better – thus The Slugger Awards
2. Ensuring that the changes brought about by the read-write web are not just a clash of civilisations in which transparency becomes a weapon that the unelected can derail democratic institutions – thus Political Innovation

We covered the Awards a good deal on Slugger, so maybe we should link instead to another Belfast blogger’s account of the night. Or you can watch UTV’s coverage of it here.

This year, we’re doing it all very differently. We’re crowdsourcing a good deal more. It won’t be a prescriptive bunch of MLA of the Year or Councillor of the Year awards this time. Instead, we’re asking the readers to define what the awards should be. Full details are here.

We’re also working on a series of events in Edinburgh, Belfast, London and (hopefully) Cardiff and Dublin called Political Innovation. We’re doing this in conjunction with a range of political blogs, the Daily Telegraph, NESTA, Edinburgh School of InformaticsFull details of this can be seen on the Political Innovation website, but – and this is where we cut to the chase ….

We need sponsors.

Both the awards and the Political Innovation project provide opportunities for sponsors to meet and converse with new audiences and to be associated with highly visible projects that are aimed at making politics and public affairs better.

If you think that your organisation shares any of these values and / or would welcome the opportunities and exposure that these activities are offering, then please download this two-pager on Political Innovation and Slugger Awards sponsorship packages which you can read and circulate among your colleagues. It’s a neatly distilled version of everything in this blog-post and should give you all of the background you need before you call me on 07973 714206 to discuss how we can get you involved in any of these activities.

“Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are social networkers, sharing and seeking recommendations among peers rather than trusting broadcast messages. The real contest is not the three-way blogs/newspapers/politicians fight, but how effectively each can cast its bait into the social networking sites, and who will have the greatest effect.”

So the creation of good viral objects may make a big difference? Apropos of that, yesterday, the people behind MyDavidCameron added a new string to their bows: MyToryTombstone.

Whatever else it does in terms of damaging the Tories (I’m sure the Tories have plans of their own on this front), this comment really sums up how difficult it will be for parties to get their narrative out this year.

So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time?

Of course, this makes a massive case for investment in ‘usability’ (and going beyond usability – almost into seduction) – making the online experience a compelling and pleasurable one. Compelling, not compulsory, as David Barrie puts it here. The ‘Nudge‘ argument, if you like? But it also makes the case for investment of time and energy in ways of getting people to make quick light responses on issues where they care very slightly rather than strongly.

Is there a case for using mobile phones to do surveys – sending people text messages and saying ‘answer our five questions and we’ll refund £2 from your council tax.’ This will incentivise people who….

• don’t have access to a computer, sufficient bandwidth or a local authority that could design a usable interface if their lives depended upon it
• don’t care about specific issues enough to sit through a clunky consultation questionnaire online
• think that saving £2 would make a slight difference to their lives

In other words, exactly the opposite kind of people who normally get involved in consultations in order to provide responses that are unrepresentative (and therefore, often worthless). If – instead of valuing people’s time at £0, we value it at £2 (or whatever figure finds the right equilibrium), we will get a more representative sample of collective wisdom.

I’ve been researching mobile phone multi-question survey platforms and I’d be interested to see if any local authority and government body would consider this approach instead of the usual ‘come to our website and Have Your Say’?

There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent some time thinking about social media in some depth, and those who are in the day-to-day trenches of local government communications.

Certainly, most of the conversations I’ve had around how the internet will impact upon democracy have been around the use of the council website, the need to capture emails for mailing lists, increase traffic to the council site, how we can get our councillors to tweet or blog or other, understandable immediate questions.

People have a job to do. They are finding that all of these annoying geeks are making it more difficult for them with their FOI requests, their defamatory blogs, and so on. They feel that they’re in an arms race that they can’t win. They want to recruit some of these tools and methods to work in their favour: The most common question is a telling one: “How do we use Twitter to get our message out?”

Social media people, on the other hand, have a slightly different definition of democracy. They talk in abstract terms about the need for open data. The need for net-neutrality and the importance of community building. The potential for crowdsourcing intelligence, the need for creative commons resources and so on. They don’t want to read your website – they want to write it. It’s an interesting twist on the idea that government should do nothing about us without us.

I would suggest that there is a real need for local government policy-makers to engage with this subject a good deal more than they do, and to start to model how it will effect councils and the work they do in the near future. The thing is, doing so may solve all of their problems.

I’ll illustrate this point by looking at the vexed question of local newspapers – the need for them to improve, and the widespread belief that this won’t happen.

As Thomas Jefferson said:

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

Yet councils are often in a position where they believe that they may have to choose the former. Many are beginning to despair of ever having responsible local reporters to bounce off, they are – in the short term – increasing their communications budgets and beginning to print their own. On the one hand, they can deal with overworked / lazy (delete as applicable) local journalists who aren’t capable of portraying local issues in a way that is of any use to local people or politicians.

On the other hand, they have to tread a fine line where they have to present the work of the council in a way that doesn’t compromise their obligation not to spend public money promoting incumbent councillors. They have to get further into this constipated argument the hamstrings so much local government communications (none of this is a new theme here). And its all a problem caused by the perfect storm of declining print-profits and competition from the Internet.

But will this always be the case? Journalistic doyenne, Tina Brown thinks not. She believes that the Internet is about to deliver a golden age in journalism – one that she is hoping to mine with her Daily Beast.

Is this true? Well, firstly, the lack of a business model for The Beast does slightly undermine this claim, but – like Brown – I’m inclined to the view that high-quality news coverage may be facing the death knell that the music industry thought I was looking at when it saw the first Rio Diamond MP3 player in the mid-1990s. I suspect that new ways of financing content may create profits that dwarf those that were enjoyed by print-media in its heyday, and a glance at the rubber newspaper may offer a clue here?

The two big questions for me are these:

1. Will this result in a greater degree of centralisation? Will the big media groups that have the muscle to invest in freemium services rapidly steal a march by focussing on high-traffic offerings (International football instead of Accrington Stanley) – thereby concentrating on the very profitable at the expense of the slightly profitable local coverage?
2. Will this benefit the current local media monopolies? Will it create new revenues that will largely fund shareholders dividends without halting the decline that these (very profitable) businesses have already allowed journalism to decline to?

It’s a hunch, but I’d answer no to both of these questions. But to fully explain the reasons behind this, I’d need to write an essay on net neutrality, open source software, open data, creative commons resources and the crowdsourcing of intelligence.

But as a stop-gap, I’d urge anyone working in local government communications to think about the emerging local information hubs such as those promoted by Talk about Local or Nick Booth’s Help Me Investigate - I suspect that they are far more important than they appear to be at the moment.

It’s been around for a while, but here’s Will Perrin’s pitch here – well worth a look:

Benchmarking: Missing the point

Because there are now fewer barriers stopping anyone from contributing their thoughts and evidence, there is a huge potential for web-savvy organisations and individuals to improve the quality of their policymaking.

In the past, politicians, civic leaders and business people have had to rely upon a relatively small group of professional advisors – think tanks, polling companies, civil servants and so on.

But now, to paraphrase Clay Shirky, everyone is here to help you. And contrary to what many web-evangelists may tell you….

• You don’t need to change any of the processes that you use to fix policy
• You don’t have to allow yourself to be dictated to by individuals with an agenda
• You don’t have to be bullied into adopting policies against your better judgement
• You can break the monopsony of advice provided to you by civil servants, pressure groups and think-tanks by going over their heads and asking the public to describe and model issues for you

So put aside those awful experiences you’ve had with e-petitions and make sure you don’t have any more of them. Forget that brutalising experience you had when you wrote something for a weblog and got called all sorts of rude names in the comments thread.

These are not managerial tools. They’re not for benchmarking. Their prime users aren’t the Sir Humphreys of this world. They are, however, good political tools. They are great for creating human connections.

Most of the good ones are free of charge and you don’t need to be a techie genius to work out how to use them either.

Slugger Consults can help you to simply put yourself where the public are already and encourage them to share their intelligence with you in a way that you will be able to make use of it.

The benefits are simple:

• You will make better policies
• You will hear new perspectives that you were unaware of
• You will be able to raise your personal profile
• Your policies will be approved of by the public a good deal more than they are currently
• The public well feel consulted and involved in your thinking

You don’t need to be a geek to do any of this either. Call us – we can help you with this.

I began by arguing that we bloggers have won, or rather we have won the argument over the ‘irresistible message being carried by the medium’. In the process we have changed the behaviour of commentariat. Many Commentators are rapidly becoming substantial bloggers in their own right: Paul Waugh at the Evening Standard; Clive Crook at the FT; Robert Peston at the BBC; and Dan Hannan at the Telegraph.

And on the other hand, people like Iain Dale and myself write for mainstream papers. It was Google that ripped the revenue from news and cut the amount of money available for big journalism. But bloggers started a party that has proved irresistible to the mainstream.  Spread-ability is the new currency, and for that you need both a personal audience and to be ‘pre-connected’ to a larger community.

So what are the main differences? There’s more of us. But, on the whole and pound for pound, they are better writers. Yet, there are many more of us. And wider our networks are a great deal larger than our discrete audiences.

Our sources are not always inside golden circle and are not always the best behaved witnesses. We, the larger of us, tend to be entrepreneurial. And since we are not obliged to fit with someone else’s brand, we are also brand builders.

The ‘Commentariat’ by and large earn a great deal more from their writing. Although Guido says he “couldn’t take the pay cut” of going inhouse to a big media operation, bloggers tend to earn their money in other ways. Iain Dale makes his publishing and other media work. Myself through writing and offering consultancy in strategic counselling and digital mentoring.  But there are also Doctors; lawyers, policemen, and any number of men and women in various walks of life, all blogging, and all earning both transient and residual value in the wider conversation.

Bloggers are less bound by the opinion and mores of the metropolitan elites. For instance, Iain Dale and Tim Montgomery and their Tory netroots’ revolution have tapped into a disgruntled feeling that lies way beyond the norms of the metropolitan consensuses’. For the longest time they were the only backers of Project Cameron whilst the Tory leader remained largely unloved (or at least mistrusted by the National press.

Bloggers, counter-intuitively perhaps, are generally more trusted by their audiences. That’s something Iain Dale disagreed with me on; but in this case I think he’s wrong. It’s not because we are more accurate (even at the top of each game, I don’t believe we are) or even reliable (though speaking for myself, I try to be, and I really don’t mind putting my hand up for mistakes).

But it’s because we are perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be outside the power loop. And, on the whole, we converse, and are challengeable. Our readers have the measure of us; much more than the distant and sometimes aloof members of the ‘Commentariat’.

They’re bringing with them a cultural change. Since the range of raw data and opinion available online is vast, readers are becoming their own navigators. We’re moving away from ‘trust me, I’m an expert? (Or I work for the Guardian)… to a ‘show me’ paradigm. That to some degree explains the bluntness of net communication, which often arises simply because Commentators don’t engage directly with their readers (and sometimes it’s because when they do, there is a concerted attempt to wind public figures up and get them to lose their cool).

For a chunk of the debate we got caught up on the erroneous view that bloggers somehow think they are above the law. My own view, (voiced last night) is that anyone who thinks they are is a fool. The more important point though is well made by Chris Applegate on his blog today:

Letting your lawyers, rather than your community managers, be the arbiters of what is considered acceptable behaviour and participation, is just one symptom of this culture; dismissing blogging out of hand or demanding anonymous but lawful bloggers be unmasked.

Afterwards, chatting to an old friend Adriana Lukas who now works almost full time as a consultant and who rarely blogs these days, noted that what’s still missing, despite all the forward movement in UK newspapers’ online offering, is this sense that they must start from the beginning again to earn new capital with their online peers in this hyper-connected world.

In the real world, people want the inside track, and we’re giving it to them sometimes in real time. Our audiences may be smaller, but in aggregate terms, they are also smarter. Smarter, because of who they are: the media and other opinion formers, and, erm, other bloggers who not only read but share their own opinion with the wider world.

Technologies are driving change in the way things are done. So its not a competition as such. But journalism is already “rebooting” (you know, that thing you do when your computers too tired and overwhelmed to start it over again), and the latest news or insight is as likely to come from a Twitterer you don’t know as a tried and tested blogger or mainstream commenter. As Jay Rosen puts it, we are all participants:

“Culling and editing and trying to find to find out what’s going on?

At the heel of the hunt, this is about disruption of traditional distribution channels. “The medium is the message” wrote Marshall McLuhan during the last great technological one, when TV was taking off in the 1950s. This one is bringing pain to traditional trades of all descriptions, journalism being just one amongst many. Bloggers are not required to come up with an alternative to the traditional means of news gathering because it is not, and in most cases never was going to be their day jobs.

That’s not to say that it will not happen. It would be a puzzle to me that given the appetite people online have for politics and I’m thinking of the way we were able, at a moments notice to crowd source incredibly detailed turnout figures from polling stations across Northern Ireland on the day of the election itself, that that willingness could not be put to good (perhaps, non profit making) use.

David Aaronovitch was dead right when he said during the debate that the bloggertariat would look very different in future to the way it looks now. The unmentioned (on the night at least) second clause of that proposition is that the Commentariat will similarly reform itself (not, I hope, disappear) under the relentless economic pressure of technological change.

These and other matters will be the subject of PICamp London when it convenes at Reboot Britain on July 6th… You can follow news of the next PICamp on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/picamp.

Oh, and if you fancy nominating someone in one the categories for the first Comment Awards, go for it! It’s an opportunity to get some strong nominations in there from the Northern Ireland space since they are asking for supporting materials.

Cross posted from the original on Slugger O’Toole…

As though Ireland was a nation of casuals whose docks were full to the brim with cargo, with no end of work and cash and new and bigger ships ever coming in…

The reality, as Dan O’Brien noted in his commentary on last October’s budget for the Irish Times, was rather different:

A majority of euro zone members have registered a narrowing of budget imbalances since 2006. Ireland has not only bucked the trend, but the deterioration in its public finances has been far worse than that recorded in any euro zone country over the past quarter century.

If this extraordinary failure was a one-off failure, one could possibly make the case that the lessons of today will be learnt and not repeated. But it is no such thing. It is the second time in a generation that the country has inflicted upon itself such harm.

And he made a suggestion that’s been elaborated upon in today’s paper, by Eoin O’Mally. O’Brien pointed towards the fact that the electoral system has a bias towards choosing men and women who are popular members of their own community; but who have more often than not only the slimmest grasp of the higher powered world of finance:

School teachers, publicans and small-town accountants are deeply rooted in their local communities and ensure the political system avoids the kind of disconnection with voters that many other mature democracies suffer. This is the enduring strength of Ireland’s system. But it is also its greatest weakness. Such people are rarely even remotely qualified to run a finance ministry.

How to maintain the strengths while curing the ills? The answer is to depoliticise aspects of fiscal policy in much the same was as has been done with monetary policy across the world. This would allow qualified people to have a far greater input into the management of the public finances and curb the sort of “If I have it, I’ll spend it” insanity that has led to the current predicament.

That Brian Lenihan is a lawyer ‘by trade’ does little to blunt the argument. O’Brien goes on to make three suggestions which he argues would not interfere with the essentially political balancing of setting tax and expenditure rates; and all of which boil down to outsourcing key analytical functions currently be carried out inside the Department of Finance. He suggests: moving forecasting out to ESRI and evaluation of spending to a new independent institute. Then beefing up the powers and resouces of the Comptroller and Auditor General in the auditing of spending afterwards.

O’Malley continues the theme today when he argues that Cabinet oversight of increasingly complex and intertwining policy areas may now be obsolescent. So, he asks:

What could we do to ensure that policies are exposed to a thorough interrogation by a diverse range of interested parties and experts? Well, sponsoring departments could be required to publish their memorandums in advance of government meetings, not 30 years after! If these proposals could state the purpose of the policy change clearly, and why it would be expected to work, this would remove sole governmental control of policy analysis. Poor policies would be less likely to sneak under the radar.

In fact there is another means of beefing up the wider interest in the hard core issues of government. That is to simply free the data. In Britain a political revolution has been taking place simply because one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, got hold of 1.5 million documents relating to the expense claims of MPs expenses. It’s a genii that will not now go back into the box. In fact, George Osborne’s office has been poring over of volumes and volumes of data from National Audit Office reports looking for things they can cut when they come to power, and promising when the Conservatives come to power they will publish every single item of expenditure over £20,000.

But it does not have to be that radical. Nor does it have to be argued for by trenchant Opposition politicians or newspapers with the immense resources of the Telegraph.

Anthony at the Public Enquiry blog, highlighted details of the massive spend on the private property market by local authorities around the Republic. Then Gavin (Anthony’s nephew and along with John Handlaar the moving spirit behind Kildare Street), chips in a Google graph generated data gathered from the Central Statistics Office which demonstrates just how madly central government has been spending public money, allegedly fulfilling social housing need, whilst in fact throwing good money after bad by buying housing stock at the full market rate…

The extent to which many of those costly properties still lie empty is an indication of just how pressing the need was in the first place. That they bought them off developers rather than as a planned policy of clearly identifying and then tackling real housing need serves to bolster O’Malley’s point that “much of our current monitoring of government strives to discover that monies weren’t misappropriated, not whether they were spent wisely.”

It seems to me this is a case of new wine bursting old bottles. The share scale of the boom left Ireland’s plodding bureaucratic government, civil servants as well as politicians, a long way out of their depth. But the capacity of new technologies to smarten the public debate can only be grasped by a government which has sufficient confidence in its own abilities to allow the public into areas they’ve never been allowed see before… Yet it’s not an alien concept either.. The art of the Meathail is the sharing of the ownership of common problem.

And the time for sharing has to be sooner rather than later…

I love the Radio 4 producer who put the one presenter who knows nothing about blogging (John Humphrys) to the task of interviewing two bloggers (Robert Hamman and Kate Bevan about the difference between Twitter and, well, er, blogging. It sort of made Humphrys quaintly endearing rather than stirring the other emotions he regularly provokes around our neck of the woods. Rory Cellan Jones sparked the talking point by picking up a piece from Wired suggesting that blogging was so over.

Here’s the money shot from Paul Bouton at Wired:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths.

Now, to some extent this is true. The still relatively small band of Twitterers are having the kind of unfettered conversations that first impassioned the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto (“Don’t tap on the glass because it just annoys the animals”) to outline the principles of the flat market over 10 years ago.

In truth, blogging was first taken up by those who understood its potential for interactivity by individuals who were not themselves particularly interactive as people. Early blogging was, undoubtedly, more dominated by geeks than it is today. As the market has grown, it is slowly being populated by people who wouldn’t know a piece of computer code if it sat up and spat nails at them, but who are both intelligent and genuinely interactive. It’s an increasingly socialised, as opposed to a socialising, technology.

Take my own blog Slugger O’Toole. In recent months we’ve attracted talent like Brian Walker, formerly a reporter and editor on Newsnight. Understanding the freedom and the mutuality of the blogging form, he’s quickly learned to exploit his own capacity for human interaction in ways that many in the mainstream seem reluctant to.

And this rising intelligence is replicated amongst the less well-read denizens of the online world. During last year’s Northern Irish election campaign, the one resource that had experts feeding from it time and time again was the anonymous blog, Sammy FB Morse has a posse which delivered 18 constituency guides unsurpassed in their quality and depth by anything the Irish MSM could reproduce.

Absolute numbers matter much less than the quality of the engagement. Though one is likely to follow the other, numbers are not always a pre-determinant of a good blog, and neither is a good blog always guaranteed good numbers. And as Niall Harbinson points out, the mainstream media is not always the best place to draw readership from.

Slugger is a case in point. In absolute terms it is large in Ireland, tiny in the UK. Yet in terms of penetration of its base market, Northern Ireland, Slugger has stolen a march on all other UK political blogs.

Slugger may be cross-party and multi-denominational, but over the last six years the blog has fumbled its way into a political mission of its own: making politics in Northern Ireland work. That means avoiding the dysfunctional relationship that blogs and newspapers have with politicians elsewhere. The increased political decentralisation that we see everywhere is, at least in part, the product of a media that is obsessed with the politics of personality, gossip from the “Westminster Village” and a focus on politics rather than policy.

At Slugger, we’ve promoted projects that are designed to raise the profile of local councillors and make them more interactive. Our reader-driven awards aimed to encourage good quality local journalism. Where elsewhere blogs are seen as a force that is antagonistic to representative democracy, we’ve tried to position Slugger as its candid friend. Not a fawning acolyte, but not a jaded oppositionalist either. As a result, more Northern Ireland assembly members read Slugger than any other media (including Northern Ireland’s newspapers) – precisely because of its interactivity, and the absence of the compromises that the mainstream media has to make.

Such penetration has enabled Slugger to do things that are as yet almost unimaginable in larger polities. For instance, our reader driven Slugger Awards handed prizes (hand-drawn cartoons by this paper’s excellent political cartoonist Martin Rowson) to those whom they considered the best MP, MLA, councillor and local journalist of the year. All but one of the 10 prize winners (the first minister had to be in Westminster on parliamentary business that evening) came in person to collect their awards.

But the real value of any and all of these interactive tools lie in making real connections and making things happen out in the real world. This is getting better and it’s happening more often.

Thus the blogger Slugger readers deliberatively chose this year is one I expect few people reading this blog will ever have heard of before: the North Antrim Local Interest List (Nalil), written by a retired teacher with a sharp eye for highly local detail and which despite its diminutive size and profile played a critical part in one of the biggest political stories of the year: the resignation of Ian Paisley as first minister.

Cross posted from the original at Comment is Free

There’s a potentially highly educative spat in progress over an article in this month edition of the NUJ’s off line house magazine, The Journalist. The author of Web 2.0 is Rubbish, Donnacha Delong, has made the original available here. Martin Stabe has more detail of the research it was based on.

Shane Richmond then picked it up with an equally combative piece entitled The NUJ doesn’t understand Web 2.0. But the most spectacular outcome from the orginal article, is the departure of Professor Roy Greenslade from the NUJ. Greenslade is not resigning over one article, but because he sees it as the NUJ making itself redundant. Jeff Jarvis expands his argument:

…it occurred to me that if you’re a union representing journalists today, you probably don’t know which way is up and who’s the enemy and what you’re fighting for. All the old reflexes and relationships are archaic. Unions are structured to fight The Man but now that Man is no longer all-powerful, requiring the joining together of its workers to balance his might. Now the Man is quivering in his loafers, less powerful, poorer, smaller, unsure where the world is headed. Battling The Man could weaken the only guy who is, if not on your side, at least in the same boat with you. Do you really want to go throwing the deckchairs overboard at a time like this?

Suw thinks the NUJ’s intervention is unhelpful to its members. There is also an excellent and lively discussion over at the Media Guardian hosted by Matt Wells And there are round ups from Shane and Laura.

For my own part, it is worth saying that I don’t believe that Web 2.0 is a doctrine, although some of its ‘adherents’ may come over with the smug and irritating zeal of a convert. Rather it’s a rough and temporal attempt to describe what technology is doing to human communication.

For instance, I found out about this article from my news feed on Facebook. Shane’s one of my friends. I then did a 6 degrees of separation search on Donnacha and it turns out we are connected at just 2 degrees of separation through four different people. It’s an order of knowledge you might have had to wait years for before the invention of such sharp applications.

Another Facebook story. I wanted to speak to one of the candidates running for my local Westminster seat, to get an idea of how the ‘ground war’ was going in a key marginal. On Tuesday, I bumped into the local chair of that party as I was going into the paper shop, and told him what I wanted to do and promised I would email him my details.

I was snowed under and didn’t get a chance. Tonight, through a friend on Facebook, I was introduced to someone in the candidate’s party, and lo, the local candidate turns up as a friend of this new Facebook friend. I messaged him via Facebook, and now we’re having coffee in the local Costa next week, when I get back from Belfast.

That is web 2.0. It’s not about journalism. It is about how technology is helping people meet, converse and do commerce, in the widest possible sense of that word. At huge speed. As a professional that speed has some implications for the aesthetic of how and the speed at which some things get done. Although not everything has to be cast in that time frame.

The problems the NUJ research highlights, at least according to Martin Stabe’s critique of it, constitute a failure to understand that if you don’t engage with these technologies, audiences will just talk past you, and accordingly getting their news quicker. And from somewhere other than your paper.

These are problems of newspapers which have not worked out what’s happening. Stoic endurance is not a useful response.

I’ve been blogging for over five years. In that time nothing has happened to blunt my appetite for good journalism. In fact the capacity to pick and choose what I and others of the ‘great unwashed’ want to read, rather than have an editor make that choice for us has sharpened rather than deadened my appetite for journalism.

Good journalism that is. And that’s where the professional competition is coming from. Not the newly articulate and increasingly intelligent ‘commons’ itself.

Cross posted from the Original on RSA Networks blog…