Interesting talk from David Cameron today on reforming, well, in essence, the way politics is done in the UK. The bit that really caught the eye though was his call for;
“Everything about our political process published online, all the time: the expenses, the spending, the lobbying, parliamentary proceedings, the lot.”
Top stuff, and basically an extension of the American model of ‘e-democracy’ into the UK (we in the UK tend to have been more process driven than information driven with this area to date).
Interesting though, as a while back the Hansard Society ran ‘Parliament for the Future‘, a small project where various people were asked to propose what parliament should be doing online in the future. We came up with a few ideas for it, but looking back, the interesting thing is that all four of them were around publishing more information on parliamentary activities online in a user friendly format. Information about the work of committees, parliamentary questions, MPs’ annual reports and even legislation itself (the final ‘Parliament for the Future’ report is sadly currently offline, which seems an inopportune time for it to be so).
All seemed like a bit of a no brainer, though the detail is in the specification as ever. The odd one was that the legislation tracker came from a conversation with a friend who worked in parliament at the time, who pointed out that MPs had no way of being able to tell is a quick and simple manner what the current laws of the land were.
I can’t think that anyone can be happy working in a situation like this (my friend certainly wasn’t), so for all this may seem like a bit of a thought experiment on David Cameron’s part, I suspect he may actually be pushing at a bit of an open door here.
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