Archives for posts with tag: Conference

Rupert Read has posted some useful thoughts on how the Green Party in England & Wales can build on the historic election of our first MP, and on the rapid growth in membership in recent years. There’s much to agree with, particularly on making the internal systems and finances work. If anything, I think he has understated the importance of finances… even to stay still and retain our two London Assembly Members in 2012, our two MEPS in 2013, our MP in 2015 and over a hundred councillors in between.

Here in London, a lot of thought has gone into our electoral strategy following the near-wipeout in May. I won’t digress into the London strategy here, but Rupert echoes comments from many party members I have spoken to in emphasising the need to blend realism and ambition.

Rupert is also right to ask how we can tighten up our policies, which needn’t amount to a removal of anything radical as Jane Watkinson has suggested. My first concern is that we need to go beyond the dry policy documents to think about how we engage those high-profile elected politicians with changes, so we don’t get (justifiably) bad press like this after so much effort improving policy.

I have provided some advice to Caroline Lucas MP and the office on intellectual property issues, but I can’t be as quick in helping Caroline as I can be in my full-time job supporting our London Assembly members. How can the party provide the politicians with swift responses and germane guidance whilst relying so heavily on volunteers? When researchers employed for the politicians are often restricted in their dealings with other branches of the political party (as civil servants), how can we ensure consistency between offices? More money for researchers in the party office would be a big help.

Though I think Jane’s worries are unwarranted, she is right to ask how we resolve radicalism with realism. My second concern in building on recent success is that our politicians are actually effective, and that we are able to tell the stories of their successes. This is an age-old dilemma for a small party in a big-media world (new/social media are still a bit player when it comes to getting the message out beyond activists).

Trying to be a party of radical politics in Westminster, and one that bucks the “green = environmentalism” label without shrugging off environmental issues altogether, is a tough job. Trying to pick radical policies to advice where there is a realistic prospect of a political gain – i.e. actually changing something – or a prospect of good media coverage to inform the public debate – only makes it harder.

Our Policies for a Sustainable Society run to thousands of words over hundreds of topics. Our 2010 general election manifesto has detailed proposals across most areas of government. Caroline will only be able to notch up limited political gains and big media hits on a handful of national topics; she is only one MP.

Take the Green New Deal, for example, which Caroline is rolling together with an opposition to public service cuts. The current government is going to appear very green to most voters. That is partly because the previous government had such a terrible record; and partly because it is inheriting some fairly radical proposals such as these on energy efficiency. Will Caroline just look like the impossible-to-please nutcase on the fringe, or will she be able to establish a credible line of scrutiny, attack or productive lobbying?

So I am looking forward to hearing at the Autumn conference what she is going to focus on in Parliament, how that will connect with the work done by canvassers and councillors up and down the country, and how the party can continue to forge a distinctive and very focused image for the next tranche of Green voters.

Thea Clay made the killer point in Chris Osborne‘s “What’s wrong with OpenStreetMap” session (video here). It was even better than Mikel Maron‘s observation that people should agree with founder Steve Coast just a little bit less!

Foundation Board member Henk Hoff (a very nice-sounding chap) was describing the classic technocratic argument that in a “do-ocracy”, those who get on with doing things make decisions by default. Steve must have loved it, you just get on with useful stuff and avoid getting bogged down in pointless debates. Right?

Thea pointed out that in a community of tens of thousands, only a few hundred can “do” stuff like making amazing tools and creating useful maps from the tags they’ve invented. I’m in the bigger mass of people who want to contribute data, see lots of good uses and ways in which OpenStreetMap can improve, but lack the skills to “just get on and do” much that I’d like to with the data. I’ve been at it for five years.

I spend a lot of time involved in local groups trying to improve their town centre, grow food on their housing estate, represent tenants or establish a community-owned renewable energy company. They’ve come up with some great ideas for using OpenStreetMap, but none of us have the skills or money to “just do it”. I’ve tried, for two years, to get others to help with this with very little success. So is OpenStreetMap just not for us? Do I leave them to use Google Maps and miss out on the potential of such an amazing open platform?

Henk’s suggestion that the decisions of the “do-ers” are generally accepted is also just plain wrong. Nobody has ever been able to agree on the appropriate difference between marking a feature as a footway or a path, after years of debate. The same goes for wood/forest and countless other features.

That’s a pretty sad inditement as it makes for even more confusing map detail (the map key is absurdly long, and why should the average map user care if it’s a footway or a path?) that also makes applications like routing needlessly complicated.

Anarchy gives OpenStreetMap real energy and the space for innovation by the do-ocracy elite. But it leads to very inconsistent data and the exclusion of all but a technically hyper-literate few.

Most mappers come from countries run by democratic governance; they use software created by communities with clear and functional democratic structures like this, this and this; there’s a great study on Debian that drives the point home. Many mappers have engaged with the pseudo-democratic process of voting on new tagging proposals. I suspect that most mappers – if you canvassed beyond the extremely vocal elite – would support a more democratic approach to basic decisions about core tags, use of funding, etc.

That won’t stop people “just doing” what they want to do, but it will make the data more useful and the project more accessible for the vast majority of people outside of the technical elite.

Finally, just as we let people who prove their technical skill loose on the technology, why not let people with proven organisational and political skills loose on these problems? An audience member suggested OpenStreetMap was going through puberty. Well as much as teenagers hate to admit it, sometimes authority borne of experience and training is worth listening to.

For these reasons and more we need to hear much more from the likes of Thea and Mikel, and a lot less from techno-junkies like Steve.

Hove town hallA couple of days in Hove at the Green Party Autumn ticked all the usual boxes, though this year jokes about beards were given a fun edge by Sue‘s buzzword bingo game. Thankfully a lot of the unfortunate posturing around Green Party Executive (GPEX) elections died down as it became clear that most members couldn’t be bothered with it, leaving space for some good policy debates.

Science and technology finally got its day, with two fringe events giving the nerd core a chance to work out how we can avoid this kind of (quite valid) coverage. I’ve high hopes that we can begin to overhaul some fairly ancient and shaky policy, not least because we got such strong and wide agreement that policy should be – golly – based on scientific evidence, as should decisions about NHS treatments. But never mind that “on the back foot” stuff, I’m most excited about the possibility of putting out some really strong messages around science and technology that should resonate strongly with scientists, technologists and the general public. Read the rest of this entry »