Every year I help run a course on “e-governance” for the Royal Institute of Public Administration. The course runs for 2 weeks over the summer, and my class is an assortment of civil servants from an assortment of countries – this year we had guys from Oman, India, Nigeria, Zambia and Ghana.
As part of the course I take the class on a magical mystery tour of e-governance projects across the UK, and bring speakers in for added enlightenment. Highlights this year included a visit to Cisco (thanks to Paul Johnston) and a live demo of their amazing new tele-conferencing system, a visit to Islington Council and a behind the scenes tour of DirectGov. Our guest speakers of Charles Lowe, Fraser Henderson and Kevin O’Malley were also very stimulating – with Kevin giving a first sneak-peek presentation on his new concept of Council 2.0.
Kevin also mesmerised the class with a whizzy use of new 2.0 technology by taking a photo of the class and automatically posting live to Flickr (although his photo taking needs improvement, as he managed to miss me out of the photo – see below)
During these courses I invariably learn something new from my class, and this year possibly the most interesting subject of discussion was the various ways each of the countries go about stimulating engagement and turnout in elections. What I discovered from my Indian and Nigerian friends was that by far the most effective tool for stimulating election engagement wasn’t new technologies (as we constantly look for in the UK), but the humble “holiday”. Apparently a nationwide holiday is held on election day in both Nigeria and India, and the Nigerians go even further by giving holidays to citizens prior to elections to help them register to vote too.
Genius! Forget e-democracy, the UK government should be pushing “holiday-ocracy” agenda instead!
