Flexibility was important, with people being able to change their position if their mind was changed by a persuasive argument or new information. Democracy is a skill we can practice with people wherever we are.
Tony Hall’s scheme for the BBC’s future has been widely disdained as a willful desire to put the clock back to the days of ‘Auntie’ BBC, but Brian Winston argues it is more like a return to the brilliant deal that acquired the Proms in the ’20s.
38 degrees aims to bring people together to take action on the issues that matter to them. As part of our series of interviews with practitioners, Participation Now researcher Nick Mahony talked to Becky Jarvis and Rebecca Falcon at the 38 Degrees office in London about their work.
Participation Now is a new Open University web platform that hosts an accessible and expanding collection of over 120 of the most creative examples of contemporary public participation and engagement initiatives. Meet 'the Practitioners'.
In theory, workers in China are promised security through official trade union representation and the rule of the Communist Party. In practice, confronted with the endless churning of a globalised labour market, they are increasingly voting with their feet.
As the Syrian civil war moves into its fourth year, citizen journalists have filled the gap left by professionals denied access to or evacuated from the most dangerous country in the world for working journalists. But they are painfully aware of the growing uninterest of the international media in
Egypt has jailed journalists by the dozen; the Gulf is jailing people for tweets they send and surveillance companies are gearing them up. One does not need a crystal ball to see that repressive states in the MENA region will continue to suppress dissent.
Erdoğan has consolidated the executive, legislative, and the judicial powers under his authority; yet he has been unable to control another source of power— Twitter.
While the literal meaning of utopia is ‘no place’, an OU-topia could be almost any place. Even when physically isolated, an Open University student, engaged in studying, could be part of a ‘public’, involved in learning through dialogue.
Things need to change – there’s no disagreement about that; but the efficacy of starting with the closure of BBC 3 can be disputed. Whatever else is in play, the choice of a less than highbrow channel to chop speaks to a long BBC unease with the ‘popular’.
