SNP beat Labour in Glasgow East – so what?

Well, the implications for the SNP and for the Labour party are obviously quite  important, but for the general public – so what?

With voter turnout being just 42.25%, down on the 48% figure at the last election, with 26,219 votes cast in total, it seems like the winner is once again the couch/tv/gardening/kids….

So I ask for the nth time, just how do we get people to vote? Is it about having time and energy as we see in some of the interesting motivations to participate work done by Michelle Harrisson of IIPS/Henley centre. See ParticipationNation article.

I think there’s something to be said about changing the framing of the task – it shouldn’t be about ‘getting’ people to vote, ie. badgering, cajoling, appealing to guilt, but rather taking a lesson from the charitable sector – should be about inspiring and moving people to make their vote count – to feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

We need some inspiration in British politics, cause at the moment I’m not alone in being far more interested in voting Obama at the next election…

When I worked in the now largely defunct  Youth Outreach division of the Electoral commission we tried to stimulate interest directly with good initiatives such as the Democracy Cookbook – alongside targeted campaigns. It seems clear to me that this democratic advertising simply isn’t enough – and here’s yet more evidence to back that up.

It might be a bad day for Labour, but its a worse day for democracy.

Catalyst Awards : And the winner is…

Catalyst Awards

 

Am just back from the rather brilliant Catalyst Awards  – designed to encourage innovation around social technology for community benefit. There were some really fantastic projects nominated as finalists including:

 

 Rafi.ki  a global citizenship project which partners schools across the world, facilitating connections through the wonder of social tech.

LocalEyes, which provides a platform for citizen voice from a grass roots level up, and aims to connect people at a very local level. (And which was commended for future potential.)

BigArtMob which simply uses interactive mapping to build up a map of public art across the UK

 Yoosk! - an innovative question answering facility which connects public figures with citizens

EnabledbyDesign - an online community whose ultimate aim is to make independent living more accessible through the use of clever modern design

I just wanted to highlight these few catalyst finalists who didn’t scoop one of the main prizes as I thought they were also brilliant ideas. Check out the award winners here.

The only bad point about the morning was having to climb five floors in high heels cause the lift was being held for ‘a senior cabinet minister’ AKA the PM…. Poor plebian Casey.

However, he made up (a bit) for this great inconvenience by chipping in with a decent speech about the future of social innovation and also mentioned future work focusing on the Criminal Justice System.

It all sounds very positive etc. and am looking forward to the follow up at Chain Reaction later this year.

Gordon Brown in successful speech shocker! Plus innovation…

Yes, despite having a rather bad week (again), the PM pulled off a pretty decent motivational sort of speech to the NESTA Innovation Edge  conference today at the Royal Festival Hall. He even told a few jokes! People laughed! Crumbs. Maybe this is the turnaround….

Anyway… here’s a quick summary of the two sessions I went along to for those of you who missed it.

1) Are online social networks the new cities? (Charles Leadbeter, Richard Leese, Jon Gisby, Michael Birch)

(er, no)

2) Are educational institutions living up to the innovation demands of the 21st century? (Julia Goodfellow, Paul Roberts, Nick Starr, Stuart Cosgrove, Andy Powell)

(….mmmaybe… actually, er, no.)

—- the most interesting thing that came out of the first discussion sessions was the idea of a virtual bothy raised by Ewan McIntosh which left me dreaming of some kind of virtual  hipflask sharing arrangement.

—- the most interesting thing for me in the second session was Andy Powell mentioning the ever present elephant in the room – the snobbery surrounding education in the UK that ingrains our two-tier system and prevents social mobility. People didn’t seem so interested in listening to that fact laid bare…

Anyway, gotta go now – busy getting some french responses from this guy, and minor death threats from this guy on Seesmic for being boring and I’ve only been logged in an hour! Actually…  maybe I’ll go and talk to the grass seed again instead…oh shit, maybe I am boring.