I’ve recently been following Tony Curzon-Price’s essay The Liberty of the Networked (and part 2 and part 3) published over at the excellent openDemocracy.net to coincide in with The Convention on Modern Liberty to be held in London and across the UK on February 28th. Tony’s paper considers the social role of technology with regards to political thought and activity, comparing the liberty of the Ancients with the liberty of the Moderns to discover the liberty of the Networked.

With regard to TCPs use of  Nozic’s Anarchy, State, Utopia to interrogate the hyper-individualised networked society I had this to say (emphasis added):

Amongst the libertarian Nozick’s many failures in Anarchy, State, Utopia is his failure to properly deal with conflict between his ahistorical individuals. It is the abstraction of the individual and the social order in Nozick’s work dislocates individuals from themselves, from the choices they make and the communities they form that is the source of conflict. What the neo-Kantian Nozick fails to recognise in demanding the priority of individual rights over the common good is that this “can only exist in a certain type of society with specific institutions and that it is a consequence of the democratic revolution.” (Chantelle Mouffe, 2005, The Return of the Political, p.65) That is to say that neo-Kantian liberals fail to recognise the historicity of liberalism, for some reason missing the very context of the emergence of liberal political theory from the struggle against arbitrary and absolute authority.

So what then of politics in our liberal age? Do we really have to choose between the liberty of the Ancients and the liberty of the Moderns? No. We do not have to accept a false dichotomy between individual liberty and rights, i.e. the choice of the neo-Kantians, or between civic activity and a strong political community. As Mouffe argues “Our choice is not only one between an aggregate of individuals without a common public concern and a pre-modern community organized around a single substantive idea of the common good. To envisage the modern democratic political community outside of this dichotomy is the crucial challenge” (ibid).

The project of the networked liberal is then to defend extend and deepen the liberty of the networked and to democratically build meaningful institutions to articulate and resolve conflict.

The problematic of what sort of institutions - through which claims, of rights or otherwise, can be articulated and conflict mediated - would work in a networked society is often underthorised at the expense of an over-emphasis on the negative spectres of Orwell, Kafka and other writers on totalitarian politics. I’m not trying to play down the dangers to our socio-political relationships, threatened by the database state or the surveillance state. I’m simply more interested in the challenge from Mouffe (2005) to find meaningful frameworks beyond the institutions of modern liberal democracy. These are themes continued in Dean, Anderson and Lovink (2006) ‘Reformatting Politics’; a collection of papers on the notion of post-democracy, information technology and global civil society.

I’m going to post again on this topic with regard to the current fluttering around ideas of new localism in the UKs political settlement as the themes of liberty, democracy and the nature of politics in network society remain open and contested: hackable. Investigating the positive possibilities rather than imagining dark nightmares is my contribution to the Convention and to civil society.

It’s been a busy fortnight for open-information projects and campaigns. Widely announced and re-announced were the winners of the Show Us A Better Way (SUABW) competition, sponsored by the Government, which sought new solutions to perhaps unknown problems. SUABW asked people what web-based tools they would build from public data-sources that would  improve the way public information is shared and presented.

The winners are:

• Can I Recycle It?
• UK Cycling
• Catchment Areas
• Location of Postboxes
• Loofinder

The BBC PM report referred to a court case being thrown out because a piece of law that the case was built on had been taken off the statute book. The codified law of the British Isles is a huge chunk of public data I’d like to see freed up, so I’m hoping for great things from the Free Our Bills campaign: wide open and accessible Parliamentary Bills… searchable and remixable legislation… a wiki statue book?

Sarah Teather wrote back to me this week concerning EDM2141, saying

The Liberal Democrats believe that Bills ought to be published in such a fashion that they can be accessed as easily and as early as possible by the public.

Sarah will be adding her signature to the EDM which currently has 76 members of Parliament supporting it.

Today I’ve accessed three different MySociety websites: TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem and WhatDoTheyKnow.  I honestly don’t know what I’d do without these powerful tools: MySociety are indespensible and we’d all miss them if they weren’t here.

I was using WriteToThem to contact Sarah Teather to urge her to support Early Day Motion (EDM) 2141 that her parliamentary colleague Jo Swinson has tabled.

 FREE OUR BILLS CAMPAIGN, 22.07.2008, Swinson, Jo

That this House believes it has a duty to publish Bills in such a fashion that they can be accessed as easily and as early as possible by the public; notes that the non-partisan Free Our Bills campaign is urging the House to publish bill texts in a new electronic format to improve accessibility and public scrutiny of legislation; further notes that the changes requested would have no impact on the content of Bills, nor upon the process by which they are currently made; considers that the new format could be delivered cheaply and quickly; acknowledges that the Leader of the House’s office did not accept a prior request for new formatting from mySociety, nor provide an explanation of why the changes could be made; and calls on the Leader of House to ask House of Commons Clerks to work with Free Our Bills campaign staff to commence publication of Bills in the new format.

I wrote to Sarah

“As you will recall from previous meetings and correspondence, I have a strong belief in the enabling potential of new media technologies in mproving accessibility and increasing timely access to information. The opportunities of new media technologies are being ignored or locked by parliamentary authorities, preventing public scrutiny of legislation by the widest possible audience.”

“EDM 2141 calls on the “Leader of House to ask House of Commons Clerks to work with Free Our Bills campaign staff to commence publication of bills in the new format.” I urge you to support this EDM and to give as much support as you can to this proposal.”

Why don’t you write to your MP about Freeing Our Bills using WriteToThem today too?

currently working on some mapping extensions to the Brent East Campaigning website. I plan to show a map of the Borough of Brent and to overlay various political informations such as the elected representatives for the wards both at local and national level. I’ll begin with a map and just mash in some datasources that I will build myself. I need to build them by hand as Brent Council supply only a limited amount of information in machine readable format and what is made available in not geo-coded so it is unknown where the information refers to.

when I’ve done with the basic overlays I’ll drag in other information from places such as QPARA, brenteast.net brentbrain and display headlines from those sites as news feeds.

I will look at the wirelesslondon tools for building such a spaticalinformationportal and see if I can get them running.

brent council collect and publish lots and lots of information. i’m not talking about informtion that is about a person, like say census or tax information. I’m interested in the information that Brent Council spend a lot of time and money on collecting and verifying and organisaing and publishing about local organisations and projects, events and activities. and I’d like to get at it !

Brent Council publish the Brent Magazine and also the Brent Brain website. There are also lots of other directories of businesses and services scattered around Brents interfaces with the public.

At present community groups, residents associations and other organisations need to collate information from Brent Councils many websites and printed publications and work out by hand how to store and sort it, manage and display it. I’m hoping that Brent Council can improve this situation.

For every list or directory or calander that Brent Council produce I’d like to see them produce a feed of that data for third sector organisations to connect to so that they can reuse the data that has already been computerised and sorted by the Council.