I’ll be giving a 5 minute talk at a really cool upcoming event, Ignite London. The rules are 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide - should be interesting.  Anyway, my blogging activity will be reduced over the next week as a I’ve got to write my talk, and synch it up with the slides…and then practice.  I’m usually an ‘off the cuff wing-it’ kind of speaker, but that probably wouldn’t end well if I applied that strategy to this event!

Anyway, here’s the blurb I sent to pitch my talk:

Giving Real Voice to London’s ‘Silent Majority’

A very small minority of people affect political decision-making at City Hall. They are the elected politicians, civic administrators, members of interests groups, and the several dozen hyper-engaged citizens that regularly show up to public meetings, or organize events like ChangeCamp and Ignite London. Then there are the other 300,000 people that only have voice when they are awoken from their civic slumber – like when your quiet street is being turned into a major thoroughfare, your local school is getting closed, your quiet park is being converted to an off-leash dog run, or there’s an election. But there are a lot of other important issues - how London grows, the health of our water systems, transportation issues, waste management, budget priorities - that aren’t particularly rage-inducing or sexy, but still affect us all in very real ways.

You could shrug this off and say democracy is for the ‘people who show up’ - but I think we can and must do better. So how can we balance the voices of the interest groups, super-citizens, and politicians with the desires of London’s ‘silent majority?’ (And no, the solution is not appointing a local radio host as the official spokesperson of the silent majority.)

That’s the very big question I’ll try to answer in my very short talk.

Hope to see you there!