Social media and local democracy

Paul Evans is forging towards a clearer understanding of how we use social media to contribute to local democracy, not just for citizens but also for councillors. He notes that there's plenty of welcome effort going into freeing-up central and local government datasets for re-use, but 'making data available to clever techies so that they use it in mashups is all very well'.

What about the more qualitative data? The pamphlets that make arguments - the kind of things that politicians really do get overloaded with?

What seems to be needed, he suggests, is for local government to find a way of motivating citizens' groups 'to survey all of the policy information on a given subject and to discuss it in an eavesdroppable way'. What will make a difference is being able to evaluate public policy options. Which may mean

finding local co-ordinators to establish policy discussion groups - using collaborative filtering media to identify information of interest, isolate the useful data, and present it in a way that local councillors can use it.

What this seems to amount to is acknowledging more voices while encouraging them to cluster. Democracy will change with us as we go.