I’m speaking at the Be2Camp session that forms part of Social Media Week on Monday, and I’m working on what I’m going to say.
Social Media Week
In setting up The Centre for School Design, we were helped by Paul Evans – a social media geek with an interest in how interactive technologies may change the way that public policy is formed. He’s posted something on his Local Democracy blog that hints at some of the small-p politics behind the idea:
“As long as the whole debate remains in narrow silos – dominated by higher-up civil servants, the think tanks that they commission and the commercial players that have the resources to gatecrash that conversation – then the quality of policymaking is likely to be lower. The dangers of regulatory capture and of budget maximisation are higher.
Think tanks, after all, do almost nothing to market the work that they are commissioned to do. Six or seven-figure research contracts that are handed out result in publications that are not disseminated widely or publicised effectively. They are rarely written to be read by parents, teachers, school governors or local councillors. They are written exclusively for the tiny clique of budget-holders that see the final result before handing a sanitised version to the ministers in question. It results in bad and expensive policymaking.”
Paul is arguing that it’s important to raise the chatter level around the issues that we care about. By working to build up a large community that is the property of the people that join it (and using LinkedIn and Facebook is consistent with this) we can start to extract the value from all of that expensive thinking that governments commission – and we can make sure that the narrow policy-making circles that often get things wrong can be opened up a good deal more widely.
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