Saturday, 10 October 2009

More on the representativeness of committees

From an Oz blog, North Coast Voices:

'a certain Neighbourhood Watch committee is tentatively considering allowing a person found guilty of criminal offences to join as a volunteer member.'

There is a case for the chair knowing what the offences were, but it's not hard to see benefits for the individual and the committee. However, the post is cynically dismissive. If you follow the link to Neighbourhood Watch Committee NSW, this is the very first statement you come across:

'Committees should reflect the demographics of individual communities.'

No irony intended.

10 Oct 2009 10:26:22 | Citizenship and democracy, Governance and participation

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Of exactitude in democracy It is said that the traveller George Lewis bought a bundle of papers in Kashgar relating to the work of 11th century Uyghur scholars. Among the records of families and distinguished tradesmen of the settled tribes there is an account of a system of governance devised by the people of the Tarim Basin sometime before the sixth century BCE. In that region, the practice of democracy had attained such perfection that the membership of the committee for a single province numbered the population of an entire city, and the committee for the region itself numbered an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive arrangements were found somehow wanting, and so the Guild of Democraters devised a system whereby the committee was required to be of the same scale as the population, and coincided with it point for point. Less sympathetic to the science of democracy, later generations came to judge this system cumbersome, and discarded it unsentimentally. Occasionally in discreet meetings in the houses of scholars along the Silk Road, rumours circulate of the survival of pages from the records of those meetings, but no fragment has subsequently been discovered in the libraries of the world. (Acknowledgement)
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'Be more private with yourself' On PassiveAggressive notes, two tales that tell of neighbours communicating when they'd rather not have to.

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