I absolutely agree – but I think the fear is out there. I’d like to be able to agree with Steven that it’s unfounded, but I don’t. (Can Issues Forums guarantee that nobody will use them for one-way publicity?). I am *not* saying it’s illegal for councils to fund Issues Forums; I’m saying there’s a small risk that it might be, as a side effect of rules that were certainly intended for a very different context.

So I think the right way to deal with this issue is to encourage councils to understand the risk, face the fear and do it anyway. The benefits are clear enough, and (IMHO) councils should not always be as risk averse as their lawyers might recommend.

Pete, since Issues Forums are fundamentally about two-way dialog and not one-way publicity and the code says:

8. The Code does not affect the ability of local authorities to assist charities and voluntary organisations which need to issue publicity as part of their work, but it requires local authorities, in giving such assistance, to consider the principles on which the Code is based, and to apply them accordingly.

… I think council interested in funding this voluntary sector-based model are in the clear. The last thing we want is the fear of what lawyers *might* say stopping an in-depth exploration of local council funding for e-democracy models that actually work and save the taxpayers money compared to government-only solutions.

One of the reasons E-Democracy.Org needs to firm up a path for ongoing council support is that our UK participants made it pretty clear in our participant survey they think council funding is essential and were much cooler to the idea of giving voluntary individual contributions. With UK funding of the BBC it does follow that British citizens have high expectations for what government supports in terms of promoting an informed and vibrant democracy.

Fraser, thank you for the clarification. When our Brighton forum leaders applied to the Ministry of Justice’s democratic Innovation Fund, they cited the evaluation in follow-up questions to us. So they words written there matter.

Steven Clift

Shane did a very thorough job and it makes for interesting reading. Afterward the board decided to publish the findings for transparency sake’.

I thought I saw that emailed somewhere, but I seem to have deleted the mail, can’t find it online and can’t seem to login or do a password reset on the forums site.

Steven says that on the Issues Forum model the council is not liable for what happens in the forum. In the UK context that might not be true, for a forum that accepted council funding.

The legally backed code of recommended practice on local authority publicity says that councils funding others to issue publicity must impose the same rules on them as would apply to the council itself, and monitor their compliance. It’s not clear in law whether what goes on in an online forum is “issuing publicity”, but it’s not surprising if many councils are scared of finding out the hard way.

If it’s feasible to launch the forum without council money, then simply telling the council that it’s happening, as Shane suggests, looks better to me. I can’t think of a good reason for a council to be scared of taking part in that context.

Any implicit criticism of Issue Forum in the report was minor. Our criticism was mostly reserved for the lack of understanding that councils had about the role that community discussion boards could play.

Now we simply tell councils that online discussions will take place. They only have to decide whether to take part in them or not.