This book is about wikileaks, in the same way EastEnders is about the East End of London, or Friends was about New York. It’s mostly about transparency, online activism, and actually achieving a better democracy. Sometimes the best way is to start by knocking hard on the front door, but sometimes you need wikileaks going commando through an upstairs window.
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The Tories are consulting on replacing all Environmental Legisation as part of their Red Tap Challenge.
They’re probably going to completely bugger it up – push more permits to polluters – but a blank sheet of paper is an opportunity, as well as a massive threat. While campaigning groups are starting to mobilise to protect bits of the legislation, and other groups have been moving against it for years (more explicitly in the US).
The PM both claims to be green, and wants to dramatically reduce the complexity of legislation. I’m not sure they are necessarily contradictory positions in theory, even if they turn out to be in political practice.
But as environmentalists, we don’t fundamentally care about text of legislation directly, what we care about is the outcome on the environment. Is the current rules the best we can hope for?
Can we devise a rule, which meets the Government requirement of “less complexity” and does more for the environment?
There are hurdles to be overcome in such a challenge, but the new businesses that will be needed, the new innovations, the new technologies, will create growth, jobs, and all the things that the Government likes to talk about as coming in all other areas of the economy.
With the push for deficit reduction, NHS restructuring, school changes et al, there is an all encompassing push for speed. Environmental challenges are equally as urgent, if not more so; what if some of the political capital, all momentum (and downright political bullying) were focussed in the direction we want it to go?
Even if you don’t believe in Climate Change, consider only the pollution in your local park, and the quality of air on your street.
So, what if it was all swept aside, and the rules became something roughly as simple as these:
It’s eminently doable, simple, understandable, which is the claimed goal of this review; and, as a bonus, it’s sustainable in a Decade. There needs to be careful definitions to avoid loopholes, but all sustainability really means, is leaving the world better than you found it.
So it’s probably a non-starter, but if the intellectual honesty matched the political posturing, it shouldn’t be.
During the recent #ecfdebate, David Babbs of 38 degrees and I had a brief discussion about metrics, and I used the example of inclusion of organisations in their mailout as an example of 38 degrees focussing on the wrong thing. Micah White from Adbusters talked well about metrics, I talked about press releases and substantive content of messages.
I repeated the question I asked on the ECF list: “Did no one else help?”
I generally do anything, be it climate, democracy, transparency, human rights, or the multitude of other disruptions, because it’ll disturb the present to serve the future.
My blog is read by a number of Government types. If you are, and you were at any of the ukUncut demos, or Trafalgar Square, or the TUC march on 26th March, then from you I need a favour: spend the next 4 minutes reading the rest of this post. If you owe me a favour, consider every one of them called in.
There was some talk on twitter about the gulf between the different people who work on “open government” type projects. 
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The slides from my talk at the ECF debate are available here. This is a auto-scheduled post, so notes, changes and anything else will get posted as a separate post in the future.
My talk starts at 5:15 in to the video.
I’m one of the panel at the Activism vs Slacktivism debate on Monday in Oxford as the opening event in the eCampaigning Forum.
There’s a small fee for attending the talk in person (if you really want to come, I can probably bring one friend along as my guest), but there’ll be a livestream and videos online afterwards, but the core of my talk will be based on previous comments here about 38degrees, and other things that have been mentioned in my other place. My slides will autopost here about 6pm on Monday.
Disruptive Proactivity
