Disruptive Proactivity

Today was the Labour Leadership Conference in Manchester (this time they closed 3 streets round our flat to most traffic, rather than sealing 2 for the last conference). Apart from the very impressive speed that the security cordon dropped round the venue, it was pretty much a non-event (apart from the outcome).

At an Electoral Reform Society meeting this evening, for the first time ever, I met and had a conversation (more of a monologue from his side, since I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing) with someone who believes strongly that, not only are ID Cards are a very good idea, but he was very strongly in favour of them to cure all society’s ills. While it may just be that I spend time in what he described as “wishy washy liberal” circles where we don’t understand that “if you’ve not done anything wrong then you have nothing to fear”, he was an example of those whom Labour ministers point to as supporters of ID Cards.

So there’s at least one of them in the country; although as one of the few (3?) Labour activists in (I think) John Redwood’s constituency, he seemed used to supporting lost causes.

Someone asked on the mySociety developers’ list about a way to show “how small groups of motivated people can often put the efforts of large (and probably well-meaning) organisations to shame”.

One answer to that is “how many people do you think it takes?” The core of PublicWhip was 2 people, TWFY was a core of 4, FYMP was about 5 people (if that many), mySociety is still only 5 people at the core. UNDemocracy is a core of just Julian. Directionlessgov was… erm… never mind, but is now looked after by just me. theWhitehouseSays.com was 1 person. Planning Alerts was one person.

Without necessarily resorting to Margaret Mead, how would you show it?