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Local millennial officeholders share the perspective of politicians who aren't yet old enough to be president.
News: Report says everything from passport distribution to healthcare could be improved by the Bitcoin like technology.
With devolution alongside spending cuts as George Osborne’s watchwords, local authorities need to come up with new ideas on how to make finances stack up
A group of social workers has requested to split off from their council and form a mutually-led social work practice, in order to put more focus on early intervention. The Calderdale social workers, many of whom were newly qualified, asked to be allowed to set up a practice outside of the local authority so they …
Redesigning the public sector to work more like Amazon, Spotify and Uber could save billions with no frontline cuts. And only bureaucracy would lose out, writes Mark Thompson
"Rodrigo Davies has thought a lot about civic crowdfunding, first as an adviser to Spacehive, then as an MS student at MIT and, now, as a PhD student in the Work, Technology and Organizations group at Stanford University. Davies is currently on leave from his doctoral research and working as Head of Product at Neighbor.ly, where he is helping build a platform that will allow community members to invest in their cities by purchasing municipal bonds." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/civic-crowdfunding-and-the-public-good)
“This booklet is about how public service workers, with their fellow community members, are not only defending public services but also struggling to make them democratic and responsive to people’s needs and desires. It is also about how these alliances are working at different levels – local, national and international.”
In The Tragedy of the Private | The Potential of the Public, a new booklet co-published by Public Services International and the Transnational Institute, Hilary Wainwright argues that now is the time to turn back the tide of public services privatization. As local authorities around the world begin to reincorporate public services outsourced during the Reagan and Thatcher years, anti-privatization activists have an opportunity not just to accelerate the trend toward public recapture, but also to democratize public services providers from within. Written primarily for union activists, the booklet asks how public services unions can accomplish these goals in the face of opposition from powerful local, national, and international actors. The answer—drawn from real-world examples of anti-privatization campaigns in South Africa, Brazil, Greece, and elsewhere—is at once straightforward and profound: Public services unions are most likely to be successful in fighting privatization when they form meaningful, lasting alliances with the communities in which they operate.
The more valuable data is to users and developers, the more likely it is that a community will form and more active engagement will follow as more value is derived from the data. One notable example in the UK has been the release and multiple re-use of real-time public travel information,from trains to buses. Public datasets are becoming more widely available in machine-readable formats, often in real-time, directly sourced from live systems, or, if not, exported and refreshed frequently when new data become available. Metadata, such as the information presented, collection method, timeliness, quality and other contextual information is crucial to allowing data consumers to not only understand available data, but to put them to appropriate use.
A year ago last May, the Real World Economics Review blog published my post, “Why Aren’t We Talking About Public Goods?” In that article I argued that we need to revive and reframe the concept of public goods. A concept of public goods is immensely important because:
"This booklet is about how public service workers, with their fellow community members, are not only defending public services but also struggling to make them democratic and responsive to people’s needs and desires. It is also about how these alliances are working at different levels – local, national and international.
* Article: Gajewska, Katarzyna (2014): Peer production and prosummerism as a model for the future organization of general interest services provision in developed countries: examples of food services collectives, World Future Review, March 2014.
"We should link up social-public partnership and Commons-Public Partnerships. The important point to highlight is that social or commons must precede the state. Our elected representatives need to become again public servants and arrogant masters need to be rapidly recalled." (email, February 2014)
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"Trade secrecy - the intellectual property doctrine that allows businesses to keep commercially valuable information secret for a potentially unlimited amount of time - is increasingly intruding in the operation of our public infrastructure, like voting machines, the Internet and telecommunications. A growing amount of public infrastructure is being provided by private entities that are holding critical information about their goods and services secret from the public. This Article examines this phenomenon, which is largely unexplored in legal scholarship, and identifies a significant conflict between the values and policies of trade secrecy doctrine and the democratic values of accountability and transparency that have traditionally been present in public infrastructure projects.
Over the past seven years, we’ve helped more than a hundred local and national authorities across four continents think differently about public services
Looie, a new app servicing user-pays toilets, is making a splash. As bottled water did to drinking fountains, are free amenities destined to fight a rearguard action?
Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler gave attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos a dire warning about future instability if the “Uber-ification of all services” continues. In his intense six-minute talk, “Challenges of the Sharing...
Redesigning the public sector to work more like Amazon, Spotify and Uber could save billions with no frontline cuts. And only bureaucracy would lose out, writes Mark Thompson
On 1 January 2015, new VAT regulations came into force in the EU. Could they shape the future of digital micro-entrepreneurship and the collaborative economy?
This is the third in a series of blog posts taken from our talk opening the Ciudad Furor film festival, organised by the Latin American Solidarity Centre in November 2014. In previous posts we examine the neoliberalisation of urban services as a process involving both the acceleration and expansion of the ‘market’ in controlling urban services as well as profound transformation of the state as it is penetrated by the market’s logic. In this post, we examine resistance to these processes, focusing on that resistance reshapes and re-imagines the very notion of ‘the public’.
"The only hindrance to a work system that could include everyone who needs or wish to work, the only obstacle to an economic system that could distribute wealth, is the public work assigned for life. Public temporary jobs activate an harmonic social rotation.
Public services should be redesigned to make mobilising the energy and contribution of the public a core organising principle.
Anne Karpf: Despite its dire record, privatisation is rarely questioned. We must push for our shared interests to take precedence
A new NEF working paper, out today, sets out an alternative to the market that looks beyond top-down control: shifting power away from private companies, towards citizens and frontline staff. These are the people who are most likely to care about securing high quality services, delivered on the basis of fairness and equality. What’s more, when you work in or use services, day in, day out, you get a real sense of what’s working and what needs to change.
"Water has always been considered either a public good (in most cases) or a private one when it is appropriated to generate economic value, for instance in bottled water. Only at very local scales, water users communities have created institutions that manage water as a common pool resource as has been extensively documented by the work of Elinor Ostrom. The basic problem with water is that it is, by nature, a multi-scale resource: water is used for many purposes and managed at many different levels (local, regional, national, international). It is also multidimensional, its management requires dealing with social, economic, hydrological and climatic data, which is difficult to collect and usually not shared and coordinated among different institutions and scales.
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