Paul Evans

London, UK.

Paul Evans is a local democracy practitioner with a long track-record of running e-democracy projects at a local level with a particular focus upon the promotion of local representative democracy. Paul’s current projects include the Councillor.info project and the Slugger O’Toole Awards. Previously, Paul helped to establish Poptel Technology Ltd in 2002, and was a director of this successful worker co-op web development company until 2007. Previously, Paul worked as a political researcher to an MEP specialising in broadcasting and media regulation. He was instrumental in establishing the original New Statesman New Media Awards back in 1998.

Paul Evans is at home at http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk.

Recently, Paul Evans...

commented on The Price of Transparency over 2 years ago.

Tiago, I've no doubt that there are well-structured participatory initiatives that are led by governmental bodies. I'm being a bit figurative here. I just think that there is a paradox here - if a consultaton *looks* like it will offer the ability to make actual change, people 'game' it. If it looks just like a conversation, they may not - and that can often have a better outcome.
commented on The Price of Transparency over 2 years ago.

I think that the real answer is to find ways of getting the public to have conversations that include real content and evidence - and often the way to do this is to not have them initiated by public bodies or politicians - when this happens, all you hear is a lot of shouting. Asking people to make predictions, enlisting their help in explaining a subject or mapping it out so that representatives have something more coherent to respond to - those are the forms of civic engagement that we need...
commented on The Price of Transparency over 2 years ago.

"And have you not come across any exercises of this kind that avoid dominance by the Victors?" A lot of organisations don't do them because they can't get people to get involved and they nearly always result in unrepresentative responses. You say that you think it would be a good thing to get more people involved even if they aren't representative - but you don't say why. I'd urge you never to underestimate the degree to which people will get involved in a consultative exercise, or how much...
commented on The Price of Transparency over 2 years ago.

At the risk of rehashing one of the main themes of my blog (there's a tag called transparency - here) I'd like to question whether such transparency is an unqualified public good (I'd argue the opposite) and whether it just empowers the usual suspects at the expense of valuable democratic input. It certainly leaves people who have been elected at the mercy of well-funded pressure groups - and that will undoubtedly damage the quality of governance in almost every way imaginable.