Lying to the public: It’s wrong – but is it a crime?

Here’s a really good post by Peter Levine. Commenting on the idea that public officials should be prosecuted if they can be shown to have lied:

“In favor of this reform: Lying is wrong. It can cause serious harm to other people. Lying by public officials can undermine the public’s sovereignty by giving citizens false information to use in making judgments. Although it can be challenging to prove intent, that is certainly possible in some circumstances, as we know from perjury trials.

Against: There could be a chilling effect on free speech, because people who participate in heated debates do occasionally stray from the truth. It would be bad to suppress such debates altogether. Also, criminalizing lying would shift power from the legislative and executive branches to the judiciary, which might therefore become even more “political.” The reform might reduce the public’s sense that we are responsible for scrutinizing our government’s statements and actions and punishing bad behavior at the ballot box.”

Do read the whole thing if you have a few minutes.

Weblog awards and repeat voting

There’s something of a tactical voting campaign going on to ensure that Melanie Phillips doesn’t win a UK blog award. It’s hardly a life-or-death issue and I’m sure that Melanie’s people are doing the same thing, so good luck to them.

The same award scheme is in place in the US, and only one of the candidates (one more than in the UK!) is an ‘elected blogger’.

Heeeeeeere’s Mike – a US School Board blogger. He urges you to vote-early-vote-often (like everyone else in this contest). 

There’s not long to go now though, so you’ll probably only manage one vote….

And why not?

How to get techies to give you what you want (while Doing The Right Thing at the same time)

Here’s a bit of music made using assistive technology to cheer you up. It was sent to me by my old mate and colleague Amanda – the best usability consultant and website project manager that I’ve ever worked with.

What’s this got to do with local democracy? Well, I’ve worked with a large number of local authorities / voluntary sector / membership organisations that aim to promote a greater standard of inclusive policymaking / responsive communications / organisational interactivity.

A well designed set of interfaces is fairly critical to the success of projects like this. Un-useable interfaces … well … don’t get used.

If you are a non-techie, and you are going to work with techies on a web-project in this area, you have to understand the very basics about accessibility. It helps you to avoid the classic cause for IT project management failure: You tell the IT department what you want. They don’t understand you properly and give you something that they think will do, without disrupting their wider set of objectives. They are behaving rationally in doing this – it usually means that they get a slice of your budget to put towards their pet-project.

Even when they do understand what you want, it’s often not good enough…

Left to their own devices, they will give you something that they can deliver saying “I think this will just about do the job.”

For this reason, I’ve found that a discussion of web accessibility between the technical staff (who are often – unnecessarily – the gatekeepers on projects such as this) and the people who are doing the including / communicating / interacting is usually a very valuable way of getting everyone on the same page for the following reasons: