Netroots UK catchup

Other stuff from Netroots UK.

Having chugged through my official Brown Bag Lunch (which actually included Ribena, in a disturbingly infantilising touch), I went to the open space group on the Leveson inquiry. This ended up merging with the one on the LIBOR scandal. I was able to contribute by knowing how the LIBOR panel was meant to work, although we couldn’t get away from the point that separating investment and retail/commercial banking wouldn’t have helped because BarCap was big enough in its own right to be on the panel.

One point which everyone thought would resonate was that the scandal represented an attack on an institution that had relied on its members’ fair dealing. Exactly what to do with it, though, was harder. Could this support the Co-operative’s claim to buy the branches demerged out of Lloyds? Or a Leveson inquiry, but with banks? Of course there have already been inquiries, but then, the original ideal type of this kind of inquiry, the Pecora Committee, wasn’t the first inquiry or even the second into Wall Street in the 1920s.

What else? I went to one of the more tech-centric workshops, run by Blue State Digital. This was pretty good; I liked the point that Facebook advertising was usually a “hopeless waste of £2.50”, but it did have its uses. Those weren’t anything Facebook would want, though. Specifically, the ad-targeting tool lets you get a quick estimate of the size of a potential audience – input the demographics, locations, and search strings you’re interested in, and it spits out an estimate of your audience.

The other one was using it to bait your enemies. If you had a reasonable amount of information, you could place an ad that your target would have to read every time they logged in. This amused me more than a little.

Everyone, but everyone, loves ScraperWiki.

What else? WhoFundsYou scored thinktanks by the degree to which they are forthcoming about their funding. Astonishingly enough, Respublica, the “Not the Other” TaxPayers’ Alliance, and the Adam Smith Institute (no less) got an E. The very, very serious Centre for Policy Studies and Institute for Economic Affairs, and the somewhat less serious but certainly influential Policy Exchange and Centre for Social Justice got a D. You could have mistaken the score-card for a left-right political spectrum, as IPPR, Progress, Resolution Foundation, NEF, SMF, and Compass all got As, while Demos, Reform, the Fabians, and Policy Network got Bs. CentreForum was, superbly, right in the centre with Civitas and the Smith Institute.

It is telling that the distinction between wanktanks like Respublica and TPA and the Very, Very Serious ASI disappears on this scale.

Owen Jones has a lot of good laugh lines. The BSD people are good but self-satisfied. Clifford Singer is funny. I really regret missing the workshop on shooting better video on smartphones as I have zero video skills (even if their live demo was the traditional fiasco). You can’t hear anyone speaking anywhere in Congress House without using a loud hailer.