As Peter Levine notes, there’s plenty of evidence that prosperous communities are better at civic engagement. What’s harder to work out is whether those communities are prosperous because they’re good conversational places – or whether the conversational habits are a consequence of prosperity. His conclusion – one that I’d concur with based on personal observation [...]
Posts under ‘Thought leadership’
Can you change people’s minds with your arguments?
Another quick pass on the question of relaxing while the internet chatters about you. There seems to be an idealistic argument here – and a more realistic one. On the one side, there are a couple of very high-minded quotes to consider: “..you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into” [...]
Updating websites every day (without too much work)
Got a website? Feeling guilty because you’ve not fed it lately? While it’s probably not the end of the world, unchanged websites soon slip down search-engine rankings. The digital version of tumbleweed doesn’t look good at the best of times. Perhaps, worst of all, if your reason for neglecting it is that you’re too busy, [...]
Is transparency hurting? Maybe more transparency will help…
I’ve posted at the Local Democracy blog about an idea I’m working through with a few friends – encouraging school pupils to take information about their local authority and look at new ways of presenting it. This is intended to help local authorities engage with lots of people rather than the small proportion of the [...]
It’s easy to run an ‘open research department’
I thought I’d write a post pulling together some advice I’ve been giving to a few of my clients recently on how a good research department can be built within a small organisation that doesn’t really have the resources to manage one under normal circumstanes. Firstly, if you’ve got information and data, making it widely [...]
Leadership blogging tips 6: Dealing with conflict -v- getting useful feedback
As a preface to what follows, I’d like to throw in an observation: I believe that most people are more worried about hostile commentary online than they need to be. In the course of my work, I’ve often spoken to sharp, articulate people who work in a position of responsibility. Often people with innovative and unconventional ideas. [...]
Are voters clever enough to vote?
I’ve written a post over on The Local Democracy Blog offering a quick survey of the debate around voters’ capacity to vote wisely (or not). It asks what ‘wisely’ means and then points to a few articles and books that go some way to answering these questions. I mention it here because I cover issues [...]
Leadership blogging tips 5: Downgrade the in-box
Bloggers often teach themselves to ignore their email inbox. In writing the occasional blog-post / tweet / Facebook status update, we learn to choose what message we want to put out today – and the value of grabbing people’s attention with a short classy bit of profundity. And we start to lose patience with others [...]
Can you relax while the Internet chatters about you?
Writing online conversations off (“twittle twattle” – John Prescott) is becoming less of an option. Among the trolls and loons lurk careful pedants. The successful journalist is increasingly defined by their ability to cultivate and harvest the work of such nit-pickers who will find the flaws in your arguments. Such rigorous discussion (notwithstanding the shouty [...]
