I’ve converted some of my recent papers into web pages for easy reading online. I hope that others find them of some use, if only for the bibliographies!

Here is my New Radical Political Economy paper on social, peer-to-peer, participatory financial models. In the paper I contrast traditional banks and interest bearing capital transactions to these emergent models. Here is the web HTML version, and this is the PDF version for download.

For the Liberalism and Its Critics course I wrote a paper on Communitarian criticisms of liberalism. The paper considers the various arguments with liberal theory and liberal practice that communitarian critics hold. My view is that there are indeed a number of strong communitarian critiques of liberal individualism, critiques that are more than an expression of dissatisfaction by disaffected liberals. Here is the web HTML version, and this is the PDF version for download.

I’ve just finished a paper on social, peer-to-peer, participatory financial models. In the paper I contrast traditional banks and interest bearing capital transactions to these emergent models. I’ve been looking at three different examples of these new business models, Zopa, Kiva and Open Capital, considering to what extent these organisations are challenging established practices.

The full paper is available as a PDF. As soon as I’ve got my LaTeX/HTML conversion working I’ll post that too.

With a DCMS Minister urging publicans to challenge alcohol tax rises lobby the Government more effectively on the question of alcohol tax rises, may I present the Sutcliffe defense of : “My comments do not accurately reflect my views.“

UK Citizens Online Democracy’s (UKCOD) main activity is running the mySociety project, building websites which “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives.”

MySociety are the people behind the great web tools TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP and FixMyStreet (a project similar to one comwifinet were hacking up in the distant past…)

I’ve just been emailed about mySociety’s ‘Free Our Bills’ Campaign. Please go and add your weight to the call for Parliament to publish these documents which are a crucial part of the process of making law in a way that is sensitive to the electronic use over the internet.

David ‘web’ Cameron has already endorsed the campaign. But I’m not about to give his site linkage, so you’ll have to find the video via The All Seeing Eye.

I’ve also just found the beta test version of whatdotheyknow.com which aims to provide a public searchable repository of Freedom of Information Act requests made to public bodies. GREAT IDEA! Now the information made public in FoI requests is made public in a much wider sense. The site is open and searchable. The site helps people to make Freedom Of Information Act requests of public bodies, reminds you when the request is timing out (not that it will of course, our public bodies are quick of the mark with these sort of things!) and make all the information in the request public.

Praise is due.

For some feature enhancements I’d recommend adding something that will take any attachments and process them so they are readable. These public bodies, especially councils, have a habit of replying to electronic messages in the fashion of material messages. It amuses me greatly to see a properly formatted letter, typed out in a word processor… attached to an email with a message saying ‘please read the attachment’. bonkers. So if whatdotheyknow.com could process attachments and display them in the webpage as well as giving us the files to download, that would be great!

“I say a lot of things — millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement“

I’m going to use that defense to cover any statements extracted from me using dubious/borderline interrogation techniques.