Mary Reid

The leader in today's Guardian....

The government has been so preoccupied with admissions of missed targets recently - such as climate change, lifting children out of poverty and social care that it has also missed out on a bit of rather good news this week. The spin doctors must have been caught off their watch for once. The UK has come 10th out of 115 countries ranked in terms of "networked readiness", an index prepared by the World Economic Forum to measure an economy's readiness to use information technology to enhance competitiveness. This is a marked improvement on 2004-05 when the UK came 12th and on the previous year when it came 15th.

and ... wait for it ...

The two areas where the UK was number one globally were "financial market sophistication", reflecting the pre-eminence of the City, and "e-participation".

The Local e-Democracy National Project may just have had a little bit to do with the latter ....

Later

Interesting comments on this by Andy at Firetail.

American innovation (of which there has been loads) has largely been around electoral campaigning and fundraising, because there is a willing market for that work - lots of candidates, largely independent of party, raising lots of money to reach voters through old and new media. The Joe Trippi book is a good survey of what’s going on there.

Our political culture doesn’t work like that, so efforts in the UK have focussed on policymaking and local government. I think we’re far more concerned with issues of political legitimacy, engagement and low turnout.

Which is why in the US, the Dean campaign raised $3.6m in 90 days and in the UK, we’ve got a senior minister trying out a blog.