UKGovCamp

The risks of no investment being made in times of cuts is a big one. (Again leaving the justifiability of an iPad vs any other device (e.g. a £200 netbook PC) aside…)

One possibility with spending transparency, is for councils to be really explicit in expected savings – and to challenge papers/public to hold them to account on that – not on the investment spending.

E.g. ”You can see in our transparent spending that we’ve invested £40,000 in iPads (link to spending item in open spending database); we expect this to reduce our printing budget by between £40,000 and £90,000 next year (link to spending category). You can follow the impact of this spending decision month-on-month. (link to graph to do that…).”

With that – there is then both accountability about the spend; and incentives (a) not to over-state the benefit of a new technology (e.g. don’t forget to take into account in the estimate of £90k savings the few iPads that will get broken, and the few councillors who will still want their paper copies; and the costs of training and support); (b) to get the benefits from the new investment.

The big challenge is when the benefit is not easily quantifiable (e.g. ’better engagement’; or ’better decisions with an indirect financial impact down the line’)… and there we need to decide whether we want to go down the numbers route of turning those things into metrics (”£40,000 bought us a 2.3% rise in democratic engagement satisfaction”) or whether we need to assert a narratives vs. numbers: (”we can tells stories of how democracy is working better – which we believe is worth £40k, and you have a democratic ballot box route to tell us you think otherwise…”).