Adrian Short

Today the Sutton Guardian has run a story in which I and Bob Steel from the Sutton Green Party accuse MPs Paul Burstow, Tom Brake and the Sutton Lib Dems of distributing deceitful and misleading leaflets about today’s European Parliament election. I stand by that accusation and presume that the Greens do likewise. For the avoidance of any doubt I am not connected with the Greens or any other political party.

The story also says that I reported the Lib Dems’ leaflets to the police as I suspected they may have broken electoral law. This is true. However, the police have recently informed me that having considered the matter and consulted the Electoral Commission they can see no offences being committed and therefore will be discontinuing their investigation.

While it seems that the Lib Dems’ leaflets are legal I maintain my original view that they are indecent, dishonest and untruthful. They may be “within the rules” but they are certainly outside anything I would recognise as honest politics. The leaflets distributed to every household in this borough by Paul Burstow and Tom Brake contain statements which are categorically untrue in the context of this election and which are likely to entirely mislead voters into switching their vote to not on the basis of being persuaded by a political argument but by a purely false tactical one.

I contacted the Lib Dems about my concerns shortly after writing my article on 15 May and the only response I have had was one from Sarah Ludford MEP (London region) saying that she finds no grounds for complaint. The Lib Dems have had ample opportunity to clarify, correct, withdraw or even substantially defend these leaflets but it would seem that they are entirely unwilling to discuss them seriously. While that is their right, the conclusion I draw from that is that the Lib Dems don’t want to defend their leaflets because they’re indefensible.

I would not like anyone to vote today thinking that there is any legal cloud over the Lib Dems in Sutton or elsewhere. But if you have formed the impression based on the Sutton Guardian story or anything I have written on this blog or elsewhere that the Lib Dems have been engaged in a deliberate attempt to steal votes from their opponents through deception I can confirm that that continues to be my honest assessment of the situation.

Today’s election for the European parliament isn’t a “close race” between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems in Sutton. There is no need to vote tactically for your second-choice party because you think that your first choice “can’t win in Sutton”. The European election system distributes seats roughly according to the percentage of votes for each party so that whether you support a major party or a minor one your vote will count towards electing a Euro MP and for many parties will have a very good chance of succeeding. If you live in Sutton, your vote will be added to all the other votes across the whole of London and used to elect 8 Euro MPs to represent the whole of London. There are no Euro MPs specifically for Sutton and the outcome of the vote in Sutton has no particular bearing on who gets elected other than in that Sutton’s votes comprise part of the London-wide total.

The most worrying aspect of this whole business was the conversation I had with a journalist who was quite adamant that “politicians lying isn’t a story”. While I question his news sense the sad fact remains that this is a common attitude among the public and leads to widespread voter apathy in which politicians’ claims are not only rightly not taken at face value but are frequently dismissed as outright lies without further consideration. The sorry conclusion of this story is that some politicians — in this case Paul Burstow, Tom Brake and other Lib Dems across the country — really will say anything to get elected, no matter how untrue it may be.

As the MPs’ expenses scandal continues there is a great deal of talk about changing the expenses system, the voting system and other aspects of our political life. While there may be some merit to some of these ideas, political reform in this country ultimately is in the hands of you, the voter, who can simply decide not to elect theives, fiddlers, liars or other kinds of rogues.

The polls are open until 10pm today. Your vote really does count. Use it.

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This isn’t a party political thing apart from the entirely obvious fact that I think the Lib Dems shouldn’t profit from their deceit at the ballot box in this election. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: If anyone has any leaflets from any other political party trying anything similar anywhere in the country please upload them to The Straight Choice and send me a link and I’ll see what I can do about publicising it if it hasn’t already gained coverage elsewhere.

As the Westminster expenses scandal drags the reputation of all MPs down into the gutter whether they deserve it individually or not, you’d think that politicians would be extra-careful to keep their noses clean during the European Parliament campaign for the election on 4th June.

Obviously no-one told the LibDems. Yesterday they launched their election campaign leaflets in London which stoop to new lows in lying to the public to trick them into voting LibDem.

Three leaflets that I’ve seen all use a similar tactic of exploiting voters’ ignorance of the European electoral system into fooling them into voting tactically as they might in a general election for the UK Parliament in Westminster.

The leaflet from Paul Burstow, LibDem MP for the south London constituency of Sutton and Cheam, is typical.

“It’s so close here” declares the headline. “Elections in Sutton and Cheam are always a close finish between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives.” To the side is a big bar chart showing the LibDems with 47%, Conservatives on 41% and Labour with just 12%. “Here in Sutton and Cheam, elections are between the LibDems and the Conservatives”, a callout box reminds us.

It doesn’t say where these figures come from or give any indication as to why they might be relevant. And the fact is, they’re not just irrelevant but totally misleading. This is the result of the last general election for Westminster where the vote was indeed a close race between the LibDems and the Tories, with Labour trailing a poor third and unlikely ever to take the seat under Westminster’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

What the leaflet doesn’t say is that the electoral system for the European Parliament is totally different and there’s no need for anyone to vote tactically no matter which party they support.

The European election on 4th June isn’t an election “in Sutton and Cheam”. The Euro vote is grouped into large regions which return several Euro MPs each and the system uses a form of proportional representation, ensuring that very few votes are “wasted” on failed candidates that don’t get elected.

Sutton and Cheam voters will have their votes pooled together with all other Londoners and used to elect eight Euro MPs. It doesn’t make the slightest difference how close the vote may be between two parties in any Westminster constituency. People will be voting for a party and not a candidate and any party that gets around 8% of the total vote across the whole of London will get at least one Euro MP.

In the last Euro election in 2004, the LibDems didn’t come first but third. The Tories and Labour both took 3 seats in London each. The LibDems, the UK Independence Party and the Greens took one Euro MP each. And the LibDems’ vote at 15% across London trailed well behind Labour on 25%. So why aren’t the LibDems showing the figures that matter from the last Euro election rather than the ones from Westminster that have no significance at all?

The leaflet from Tom Brake, LibDem MP for Carshalton and Wallington in south London, takes the same trick to even more sordid depths.

We get a misleading bar chart similar to Paul Burstow’s, showing the Westminster constituency vote from the last general election. Here, as in Sutton and Cheam, the Westminster vote is close between the LibDems and the Tories with Labour coming a very distant unelectable third.

But the language of deceit here is even stronger. “This election is going to be a tight contest and every vote will make a difference… With Labour out of the race in Sutton, more and more people are backing the Liberal Democrats to win.”

Did you see what they did there? “Labour out of the race in Sutton”? It’s not a Sutton race, it’s a London race, and in that London race Labour are still in a stronger position than the LibDems even despite the floundering government in Westminster.

And what does it mean that “people are backing the Liberal Democrats to win”? This isn’t a winner-takes-all election like we have for Westminster. All the three big parties are likely to get at least one Euro MP out of eight in London and it’s very likely that smaller parties like the Greens and UKIP won’t come away empty-handed. The real question is whether the LibDems will be able to increase their single current London Euro MP to two or whether large chunks of their vote will get skimmed off at the top by a strong Tory party and at the bottom by people voting for smaller parties like the Greens and UKIP through genuine preference or as a protest against Westminster’s dirty politics.

The theme continues with more lies elsewhere on the leaflet. In a section attacking Labour we’re told that “Labour cannot win in Sutton… voting Labour will only help the Conservatives win”.

Excuse me? This is a proportional representation election. Voting Labour won’t help the Conservatives. It’ll help Labour. And once again the entirely misleading idea of whether anyone might “win in Sutton” totally obscures the relevant matter of London-wide voting.

The Greens get the same treatment. “The Greens have no chance of winning in Sutton”, the leaflet says. Well, in the last Euro election in 2004 the Greens picked up 8% of the London vote, giving them a single Euro MP just like the LibDems. Things will be a little harder for the Greens this time in London as there will now be only eight London Euro MPs compared with the previous nine, but the Greens are still in with a fighting chance. The LibDems’ leaflet is a shamefaced attempt to con Green voters into considering a “tactical” vote for another party even though they have no need to do so. In the Euro election, every vote really does count. Need I say again that it matters not one bit who might “win in Sutton” in this London-wide vote?

The LibDems’ lying leaflets aren’t just a south London phenomenon. Up in Camden, LibDem leaflets in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency use the familiar Westminster general election bar chart to show just how “close” things are between the LibDems and Labour there. In this case it does at least say that these are “general election” results but the complete irrelevance of them is not made clear. In fact, the Tories’ bar is marked with a big box that says, “Can’t win here” — once again trying to trick people into making a choice between the LibDems and Labour and giving up a potential Tory vote as futile. This is bait and switch. It’s no different to a financial adviser showing a client a set of performance figures for one investment while actually selling them another. The text continues the same theme: “Elections here in Holborn and St Pancras are always a close finish between your LibDem team and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party.” This is an outright lie: In the 2004 Euro election the LibDems in “Holborn and St Pancras” (really, the London region) came a distant third to the Tories and Labour.

I’ve been studying and following politics for 25 years and I’m well aware that election leaflets aren’t written under a solemn oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Depending on your affection for the party concerned, election handouts are either good public relations or evil propaganda, designed to put themselves in the best possible light and their opponents in the worst. A party or candidate’s own successes will be amplified and their shortcomings quietly sidestepped. Opponents will be lambasted for the slightest misjudgements and their genuine triumphs ignored. That’s how it goes and it’s hard to imagine that in a vigorous, healthy and above all a free democracy it could ever be much else.

But these LibDem leaflets go way beyond legitimate criticism of their opponents and into tricking the voters to abandon an opposing vote by giving the wholly false impression that there’s a need to vote tactically in the Euro election. That it’s the LibDems doing this — a party that campaigns hard to introduce proportional representation for the Westminster parliament as a supposedly “fairer” system — makes it all the more appalling. PR would give the LibDems a big boost at Westminster, but in an election where PR is already in place and doesn’t appear to work to their advantage in some areas the LibDems try to con the public into understanding less about how their vote works than if they hadn’t read the leaflet at all.

So I’m calling them on it. This isn’t politics but a subtle and insidious form of electoral fraud. These leaflets are deliberately designed to deceive, making statements that the LibDems know will be misinterpreted by almost everyone. The LibDems have been relatively unscathed by the Westminster expenses scandal. If nothing else they have far fewer MPs there to be making claims. But frankly I’d much rather a few LibDems had been caught feathering their own nests than deliberately trying to subvert democracy as they’re doing here. Sarah Ludford MEP, Paul Burstow MP, Tom Brake MP and the LibDems in Holborn and St Pancras have shown themselves completely unable to tell the truth where it counts and therefore unfit to hold public office — and I’ll say exactly the same thing for any party that tries to exploit and increase voters’ ignorance of the electoral system for their own advantage in this way.

There’s no need to vote tactically in the Euro elections on 4th June. Just vote for the party you prefer and there’s every chance you’ll help to elect at least one Euro MP for them. Don’t let the LibDems or anyone else fool you into thinking otherwise.

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With thanks to all the people that have uploaded their election leaflets to The Straight Choice and to the Straight Choice team for making the whole thing possible.

The Sutton Minority Ethnic Forum is running a project called the Shadow Councillor Scheme, which lets people who may be interested in becoming councillors find out more by closely following a councillor for a month. While everyone is welcome to apply to the project, the council says that:

We are particularly hoping to attract interest from Sutton’s minority groups to help improve the political representation of the borough’s minority ethnic communities.

There seem to be two assumptions in this statement. The first is that there aren’t enough ethnic minority councillors (hereafter “ME”) and the second that the ethnic composition of the council actually matters.

So, is Sutton Council too white, and if so, what would be an acceptable number of ME councillors? I don’t think it’s my job to allocate specific councillors into ethnic categories but I expect that the council does this, whether by self-reporting or otherwise. Nonetheless, you can take a look at the current list of 54 councillors and judge for yourself. They do look predominantly white to me.

At what point does this predominantly white council become too white? If the question is meaningful at all it must be possible to quantify the matter. The usual approach to “under-representation” is to consider the chosen ones in the context of the pool from which they are chosen. Sutton had just over 10% ME residents in the 2001 census and it’s estimated that there are now around 13% ME people living in the borough. Should we assume that it is unacceptable for there to be fewer than 13% ME councillors, as seems to be the case at present? If so, what if there were more than 13% ME councillors? Would we then have a problem of white people being under-represented? Could we expect to see council-funded projects “particularly hoping to attract interest from Sutton’s white community”?

Why stop with treating all ME people as a homogeneous group? We might be able to approximately hit just the “right” amount of ME councillors but then find that people from Chinese backgrounds are hogging seats that really should go to Black Africans. Is this all about skin colour or should White Irish and White Other Europeans get a look-in too? What’s their representation like?

And of course, why stop with ethnicity? Plenty of other social groups could make a claim for better representation on the council. There appear to be 17 women on the council or around 31%, far below the number of women in the population which is just over 50%. Women appear to be at least as far behind as MEs in representation — why isn’t a women’s group running this project expressing “particular hope” in getting more women on board? How would we go about getting just the right number of councillors from all these groups (some of which overlap) simultaneously?

If you’ve already switched off by now, you’ll probably have this down as yet another exercise in lambasting “political correctness” through the exploration of a supposed white (male) victimology. So I should be very clear about this: Discrimination is real, it is bad and it should be tackled effectively. But the root of discrimination is the false perception of significant difference and that’s very much what it looks like is happening with projects like this in a place like Sutton. Situations elsewhere may be different, of course.

Why should anyone care about the ethnic origin of their councillor or indeed, the council as a whole, in a place like Sutton in 2009? Is it right to assume that a white councillor here cannot represent a black resident? Is it right to assume that a black councillor here cannot represent a white resident? Should we assume that just because a body of councillors doesn’t appear to be representative of the population in terms of ethnicity, that the population is in fact not represented by them adequately? This isn’t 1930s Alabama or contemporary Barnsley or Barking. Do our 31 LibDems, 21 Tories and two independents harbour a significant number of closet racists?

If this is an issue in practice then I’ll be the first to want to do something about it. Local councillors serve a dual role. In no particular order, they represent their parties on the council and work to advance their parties’ political programmes. They also represent the constituents of their wards and often act in a non-partisan way to ensure that their constituents’ voices are heard and their personal issues with the council are settled. In my experience, local councillors generally do a good job.

To seek to increase the number of ME councillors is really implying one of two things, neither of which are very complimentary. Either the white councillors really aren’t representing their ME constituents adequately. I suspect and I hope this isn’t true. Alternatively, perhaps it’s the case that ME residents feel that they don’t want to be represented by white councillors, no matter how good a job they may try to do. I suspect and hope that this, too, isn’t true. But if there is racism among Sutton’s councillors or in the wider community, why don’t we deal with it rather than assuming that the problem lies with the ethnic composition of the council?

It’s great that Sutton Council is giving local people a chance to find out more about becoming a councillor. I’d be happy to see anyone from any background stand as a candidate for the party of their choice, or as an independent. But the single biggest impediment to large numbers of people getting elected as councillors is not supporting either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties, being the only parties which managed to get councillors elected at the last full council election. If you want to pretty much guarantee failure at the ballot box and exclusion from elected office in Sutton, stand for Labour, the Greens, UKIP, the BNP or yourself. It won’t be your ethnic background that sees you left out in the cold but your politics. That’s where a real and significant lack of diversity on the council is clearly evident.

Of all the differences that one could discern between people, ethnic origin in a place like Sutton is one of the least significant. Most ME people here have either been born in Britain (often to parents that were themselves born here) or have lived here so long that their cultural frame of reference is as much British as mine. The council should act against discrimination where it finds it but should also be absolutely scrupulous about not making even the very subtle implied insinuations of discrimination or unfair treatment where none appear to exist. There is enough real misery in society without having to contrive more — and allocate public money to its supposed amelioration.

We should work towards having a community not where the composition of the council is “sufficiently diverse” (whatever that might mean in practice) but where people of all backgrounds (and not just all ethnic backgrounds) feel well represented by their councillors, whoever they may be. It matters what councillors do, not who they are. If the Shadow Councillor Scheme runs again next year, let’s have it organised by a neutral group rather than a sectional interest one and make it clear that absolutely everyone is not just welcome, but equally welcome.

I welcome your own perspectives and experiences in the comments below.

These are the (slightly modified) house rules I developed for Sutton Chat. If you’re starting a new community forum or blog and would like to use them as the basis for your own rules, please take them and modify them to suit you while giving attribution to Adrian Short under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK licence.

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House Rules for Anytown Chat

My aim is for Anytown Chat to be a place where everyone can feel comfortable debating both serious issues and the lighter side of life. In order for this to happen, there are a few House Rules which will be enforced sensibly.

By registering with this website you agree to follow these rules.

1. Be yourself

(Snip this clause if you’re happy to have pseudonymous members.)

Use your real name as your username when registering with Anytown Chat. Anytown is a real place full of real people, many of whom know each other in real life. Using real names rather than nicknames allows members to identify others that they already know and get to know people that they don’t. It also ensures that members are accountable for their words: If you wouldn’t put your own name to a comment, it probably doesn’t belong here anyway.

You are encouraged but not required to show your face by creating a profile picture of yourself.

2. No bad language

Most of us have a broad vocabulary of swear words but Anytown Chat is not the place to use them. Avoiding bad language helps to keep a civilised and intelligent tone to discussions. Use your imagination and where that fails, just restrain yourself.

3. No personal attacks

Anytown Chat is about sharing information, learning and debating. It’s not a place for personal disputes and vendettas. By all means strongly dispute others’ ideas and arguments but if you make it personal you’ll be asked to stop.

4. Respect others’ privacy

This is a public website and everything you write here can be viewed by anyone. Practically, things written here will be permanently available to the rest of the world. Do not disclose any private or personal information about other people, whether they are members here or not. This isn’t Facebook or your private email. The whole world can see what you’re writing.

5. Avoid discrimination

If you hold any unpleasant bigotries about people on the grounds of their sex, sexuality, age, nationality, ethnicity or (lack of) religion, this isn’t the place to express them. Get yourself a blog if you really must. These topics will inevitably come up in discussions but I hope that everyone is able to debate them without making the site uncomfortable for others to participate.

6. No porn

This is a site for adults, not an “adult site.” Don’t post porn, whether words, pictures, videos or links to any of these things.

7. Respect the law

Hate speech, libel, incitement, copyright infringement and obscenity are all forbidden here.

8. No spam

Don’t post just to advertise your website or business. If in doubt, please ask first [create a link here to your email address or contact page]. It’s fine to use your business or professional web address in your member profile.

These rules will be reviewed and changed if necessary in the light of experience.

Enjoy yourself

While it’s not a rule, I hope you enjoy chatting here and that these rules enhance rather than inhibit that enjoyment.

Article title preserved for posterity but it’s clear now that Ian Tomlinson was not a protester and was just walking home from work. Please see the updates in the comments at the bottom of this post.

Unnamed: The protester who died. Photo: public domain via Guardian

Photo by Alex Watts.

I’m shocked and saddened that a man died during the G20 protests in London yesterday.

Every death potentially related to police activity is automatically investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. But while their inquiry is in progress, the truth about this incident needs to surface, and soon.

Mainstream media reporting has spun this story away from its most obvious potential substance — policing tactics — to the alleged behaviour of the protesters themselves who the police say attacked police medics trying to give assistance to the dying (or perhaps, dead) man.

The Telegraph dutifully repeats the police allegations as fact without troubling themselves with any corroboration:

[A]s officers went to the man’s aid, they were pelted with bottles and other missiles, forcing them to retreat.

The Times at least paraphrases its source:

The Met said that as the officers tried to revive the man they came under attack from protesters who threw bottles at them

The Guardian is also happy to repeat the story without corroboration:

A man died last night during the G20 protests in central London as a day that began peacefully ended with police saying bottles were thrown at police medics trying to help him.

Meanwhile over on Twitter, @jdodds writes:

Talking to eye witnesses from yesterday.protester who died had symtoms related to a head wound.was seen to be hit by truncheon

If true, this puts a wholly different light on events. There isn’t any dispute that the man died within the police cordon near the junction of Birchin Lane and Cornhill between 7 and 8pm yesterday. Did he die from natural causes? Were these aggravated by effectively being detained on the street, possibly without food or drink? Did he suffer a head wound and was it caused by the police? Did the cordon itself prevent him receiving timely treatment? How did the other protesters react? Violently? Helpfully?

We don’t know, but given that the police have been very quick to tell the tale about the “attack” on them by protesters but were wholly unable to give any indication as to why the man may have died, it’s about time we found out.

As I write there is a protest against the man’s death taking place near the Bank of England, where tributes have been left.

R.I.P.

What a squalid mess our system for reimbursing MPs’ expenses is. Whether it’s Mr Jacqui Smith’s much-publicised solo viewing habits, the inevitable confusion among highly-paid, highly-skilled representatives about first and second homes, or the shameless London MPs claiming for a second home despite being within easy commuting distance of Parliament, things have got to change.

Gordon Brown has ordered an inquiry into the whole system. While this may produce useful reforms, former Commons Clerk Sir Roger Sands fears the inquiry itself is vulnerable to political meddling and sabotage. Given the sovereignty of Parliament, this is inevitable.

Parliament is structurally proof against any kind of effective regulation. The final veto on an MP’s behaviour lies with citizens’ votes in the ballot box. But how can citizens be sufficiently well informed to be able to make good choices?

I propose an open database of MPs’ expenses operating in near-real time. The government seem to be very keen on databases for the rest of us so I’m sure they will be keen to commit resources to making this happen.

Every line item from every receipt submitted for reimbursement is keyed into the system. We will be able to see exactly what has been claimed and which claims are pending, approved and rejected.

Every line item is tagged. This will enable people to see not just the claims submitted by specific MPs but to easily make comparisons across the group. Want to see all MPs’ claims for their televisions? It should be as easy as a visit to http://expenses.parliament.uk/tags/tvs

Given that websites shouldn’t discriminate against machines, every piece of data in the system will be available through convenient feed formats like RSS and an open API, allowing programmers to build useful mashups and visualisations of the data.

If the only way to stop cabinet ministers on £135,000 a year claiming 88p for bathplugs in their family homes is to put every such claim online within a week, let us make it so. Given that the historical data is supposedly on sale for £300,000, can we find 300,000 people with a pound each to get it?

I’d like to emphasise a point that Emma Mulqueeny has alluded to in her seven principles for digital engagement and which I also made in passing in my previous article on building local news mashups.

The web is rife with discrimination of the most insidious and socially-destructive kind. It largely goes unnoticed as those that are well-served by the web care little for the plight of those that are not.

I’m talking about the web’s widespread discrimination against machines.

Conventional thinking about “websites” focuses almost wholly on human users. In the best-case scenario, people turn up to a website, find the information they want or do the thing they want to do, then go away again. If the website is useful and provides that information or service, and if it’s usable and accessible, people can do what they want to do with a minimum of fuss and effort and be satisfied.

Many websites are a long, long way from being able to provide a good experience for human users but I doubt many don’t have it as their goal, however ineptly they may deliver on the details.

By contrast, providing for machine users mostly happens either as an afterthought or not at all.

Machine users are other programs, websites or software systems that could interact with your website by extracting data, inputting data, or both.

The simplest example is an RSS feed fetching a list of news articles or job vacancies. By providing an RSS feed, a website makes it easy for other programs to capture that information and re-use it in any way possible. They might republish that information largely as-is, combine it with information from other sources in a mashup or even derive statistical information from it. Or all of these things.

More generally an API allows information to be read from or posted into another system. Can humans search your website? Then provide a search API for machines. Can people place orders and make payments online? Then provide an ordering and payment API. Every form on your website should have an API that makes provision for machine users to post in data and get a machine-readable response. Every sequential collection of information should be available as a feed.

Providing for machine users by building APIs and serving feeds is ultimately about serving human needs. Until machines achieve some kind of consciousness they will neither know nor care about accessing information on other systems. Every program is written by and provides information for people.

APIs make it possible for people to write programs to use your information and services in ways that suit them, in ways that you can’t anticipate, in ways that you don’t have the resources to provide, through systems that you won’t have to maintain. Many organisations won’t like this. It means the creation of infinite new layers of intermediaries, third-party services that provide new interfaces to your information and services or whole new applications that combine your services with others’. If you think you can provide the best interface to your services for every conceivable context you’re a fool. If you think you should be the sole gatekeeper of your services then prepare to lose your customers to other businesses or see your citizens disappear to third-party services implemented through any means necessary.

Let’s snap out of abstractions for a moment and look at an example.

As an activist with Living Streets I’m always on the lookout for maintenance issues and faults on the street, particularly where they affect pedestrians. I can report street faults directly to my local council or I can use FixMyStreet, a national service that ostensibly does the same thing.

I always use FixMyStreet. Why?

• It’s easier. The user interface is better.
• It’s geographically agnostic. I can report a fault anywhere in the country without having to know which authority is responsible for it.
• It’s public. There’s a lot of value for me in being able to see other people’s street reports as I’m interested in looking at the wider issue of urban design and maintenance, not just getting a specific fault that bothers me fixed. I can browse other fault reports and see statistics for each borough.
• It’s flexible. I can get reports sent to me by email or through an RSS feed. I can file a report on an iPhone and soon through many other mobile clients.

Overall it’s just better, and better in so many ways that my council and most other councils will not be able to emulate.

Smart councils would realise this and most probably abandon their local street fault reporting systems. They could put their resources into developing a clean API between their own faults database and FixMyStreet (or any other similar application). They could actually invest in FixMyStreet itself. It’s open source, so why not? It’s not going to disappear, and if it gets superseded by another, better, open-source system, no-one loses.

It’s APIs (and often, ersatz, hacky APIs) that make this kind of thing possible. It leads to better services, greater participation, and more flexibility, diversity. We need to put machine users on parity with human users so that people can be best served.

If you’re building any kind of website or online service, serve a feed for every stream and an API for every form. Let this be your mantra: DDAM, DDAM, DDAM. Don’t discriminate against machines.

Like this? Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my RSS feed.

There are various lists of UK councils which use Twitter floating around. I assume that some are compiled manually and others by screen scrapers.

Given that the rel=”alternate” attribute of (X)HTML’s <link> element is already semantically broken by the widely-adopted RSS autodiscovery spec, is there any good reason why we can’t adopt something like the code below and allow the relationship between a site and a Twitter account (or indeed, any third party site controlled by the owner) to be expressed cleanly?

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://twitter.com/adrianshort" title="Twitter: adrianshort" />

(For HTML newbies, this goes in the <head> section of your web page.)

View source on this page and you’ll see it “in the wild” already.

Like this? Follow me on Twitter: @adrianshort

Francis Maude

Photo from Francis Maude, Creative Commons by-nc-nd UK licence.

As news reaches us that Gordon Brown has shut down his public email address, Conservative chairman Francis Maude goes on the offensive:

Gordon Brown is spending taxpayers’ money on the latest digital gimmicks, from Twitter to Flickr, but can’t be bothered to give out a simple email address.

The beleaguered Prime Minister is literally retreating to his Downing Street bunker, cutting himself off from an angry and disillusioned electorate.

Are Twitter and Flickr “digital gimmicks” that are beneath any self-respecting elected politician? Should government spend taxpayers’ money on such things? One could ask the same question about telephones, television, radio and the Internet more generally. They are communications media whose value for any particular purpose depends entirely what one does with them.

Barack Obama has amassed over 500,000 followers on Twitter and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his prospects much. (Shame he’s been too busy “leading” the “free world” to tweet lately.) Closer to home and somewhat more modestly, a man by the name of Johnson who seems to have found himself in charge of a large city happily Twitters away to a flock of 20,000 Londoners. If I remember correctly, the chap is the Conservatives’ most senior elected politician.

Further down the food chain, CllrTweeps has found 193 councillors from 129 councils on Twitter, including 54 Conservative authorities.

If social media networks are only used by politicans to broadcast top-down messages to a passive audience then they have little value beyond more traditional methods including conventional websites. But Gordon Brown’s Twitter has collected over 270,000 followers which his aides use to engage in an ongoing direct conversation with a substantial chunk of the public. If Mr Maude is right, presumably those 270,000 people — and all those thousands that follow councillors, MPs and aspiring politicians elsewhere — are wrong.

Do you think they vote, Mr Maude? Answers on a postcard (in 140 characters or fewer, please.)

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