But there are two much smaller ideas the government should look to pilot during the year; 2011 should see weekend voting and increasing the number of polling stations tested out.

Raising turnout in public elections is a widely shared aimed that rapidly runs into two difficulties.

First, though people across parties usually share a general support for higher turnout, when it comes to targeting people living in specific areas or from specific communities, raising turnout rapidly comes with an obvious electoral impact to the advantage or disadvantage of particular candidates and parties.

As a result, state-funded efforts to raise turnout tend to be at the rather general and bland level rather than getting into the sort of individual contact and marketing that you get in other areas.

The second problem is that – courtesy of a long series of pilots tried out during Tony Blair’s time as Prime Minister – we know that an awful lot of ideas do not do much, if anything, to raise turnout. Early voting in supermarkets, voting by text, online voting and many more were tried out – and all failed to raise turnout by any significant degree except for one: mandatory all-postal voting.

That has a major impact on turnout but comes with other questions about fraud and freedom within a household to vote as you wish.

Weekend voting has been once briefly trialled (in Watford a decade ago). It was not a success then, but there are good reasons to try again given the details of how the trial was conducted – especially holding the weekend elections just after the usual national round of local elections, with the result that residents in Watford were seeing in all the national and regional media about how local elections had just taken place.

The Electoral Commission has give the issue a gentle nudge now and again too, pointing out for example that in the 2009 elections, “Thirty-six per cent of non-voters said they would be more likely to vote if they had the choice to vote at a weekend”.

2011 is a chance to put all those beliefs and thoughts to the test with a few well chosen pilots, most likely in council by-elections.

Increasing the number of polling stations is a greatly under-researched area, and has not ever been tested directly in Britain. However, aside from the common-sense thought that shorter travel distance to polling stations may increase likelihood to vote, there is also some practical evidence.

An analysis of voters in Brent over 20 years found: “we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the siting of polling stations”. Research in the US also points to a similar conclusion. (hat-tip Stuart Wilks-Heeg)

It may be that neither weekend voting nor more polling stations raises turnout. But there is good reason to believe that they may – and neither comes with the drawbacks of mandatory all postal voting nor with the well-established track-record of failure of internet and mobile phone voting.

If the government wants to do more than issue vague exhortations to people to vote, it should put both these ideas to the test.

One, which I’ve blogged about previously, is how the windmill not only used to be a key part of the English landscape but also, in its horizontal axis / vertical sail form, is an English invention.

Windmills not only are a British (or perhaps more accurately English) tradition, they are also an example of technical inventiveness of which we can be proud. And yet when in their modern form of wind turbines they are talked about, critics often have been allowed to get away with painting something with such strong English roots as being some sort of alien invasion of our landscape.

The second is the politics of windmill restoration. As has happened with other industrial artefacts, many windmills were for a long time left to decline and decay until a relatively recent interest in their preservation and their history started to turn the tide. A typical windmill open to the public now is once that has been restored in the last twenty years, with the restoration driven by interested locals, funded by a mix of their fundraising and grants, containing historical displays provided by keen local historians and with a small business, such as a cafe or shop, attached.

Whether you want to call it community politics, the Big Society or the Good Society, dozens of windmills display in miniature the mix of public and private that many politicians are now reaching for more widely.

That mix – committed residents, public sector grants in the broadest sense (more likely from sources such as English Heritage than from the local council) and some form of income-generating business – has advantages which rapidly becoming apparent when you consider the alternatives.

An early twentieth century style of municipal socialism that would have nationalised derelict windmills and put them under a command and control structure reporting to the Minister of State for Windmills (Revival Thereof) would have failed to tap the enthusiasm, energy and love for the projects that the mixed model has delivered in so many places.

Nor would leaving it simply to market forces have worked – as it is only the mixed approached of community action and the public sector which has rescued many of these windmills that were previously left untouched and unwanted by private developers. Public sector support provides the funds to value factors which are not priced into the windmill property market.

Above all, the love of their local community that comes from volunteers and residents provides something it is very hard for staff answerable to a management chain that leads off elsewhere to replicate, regardless of whether that management chain is public or private.

It is a benefit I have also seen in other fields, such as in the very successful use of local volunteers to help staff the police front counter at Muswell Hill Police station in North London, providing an information service that is rooted in community knowledge and commitment. It was what you see too in numerous libraries, where the energy of local reading groups extends the benefits of the library. It is what you see successfully supplementing the work of others across many professions.

So seeing what has been done with so many windmills has hardened my scepticism of those who decry attempts to involve the local community in other services.

Rhetoric about involving the public can be used at times as cover for cuts, but as the windmills show – involving the public can also deliver better results than suggested by the narrow minded view that if it’s not being 100% funded and supplied by the state it’s not worthy.

Having a decent relationship between vote share and seat numbers is an important part of what a voting system should deliver (and the failure of first past the post to do that is part of what originally made me join the Liberal Democrats).

However, the votes / seats correlation is not the only factor.

If it was, national list PR would be the best electoral system. Rather, the votes / seats correlation is one of a number of factors, factors which at times can be contradictory – and which therefore help keep debates about the most suitable electoral system bubbling along.

So that’s one reason why my eyes tend to glaze over when another seats projection showing how AV might work appears. It’s not just about seats.

A second reason is that I’m dubious about the value of such projections even in their own terms. You don’t just change the way votes are counted when you change an electoral system. You also change the ways parties, the media and the public behave. So asking someone how they would vote if there was an AV election tomorrow is a rather false question because before any actual AV election we’ll see a different dynamic of electioneering.

It may well also be that when faced with an actual ballot paper the public’s behaviour will change in unexpected ways. We’ve already seen how the number of votes for parties other than the major ones shot up on the list element of the Scottish and London devolved elections – far more so than expected in advance.

The third reason is an extension of this. What really interests me about AV is the change in political culture it can bring about. Personally, I would prefer STV because it both brings multi-member constituencies (thus, for example, usually allowing voters to continue to support their preferred party even if there is an individual candidate they really want to vote against such as because of their record on a local issue) and also because it has preferential voting. AV may fail on the former but it too has the latter.

Under preferential voting most candidates hoping to win most of the time have to have an eye on appealing to the second preferences of those who cast a first preference for another party. That imposes a significant burden on the style of politics where you seek out any difference between yourself and another party and inflate it to baby-eating monstrosity levels.

Instead of politics where everything is black and white, AV with its shades of grey when you vote encourages shades of grey in campaigning.

That does not stop passionate disagreement where it’s justified, but it would be a healthy brake on some of the more juvenile styles of politics that we see all too often.

So whilst AV isn’t my first choice of voting system, what it should do for our political culture makes it a big improvement on our current system.

Their proposal was that in a general election candidates should have to make the same sort of declaration of financial interests as MPs have to make. After all, if the point of such declarations is to have some transparency and let people judge politicians, doesn’t it make sense to provide that information to the public before we decide how to vote rather than only telling us afterwards whether perhaps we should regret our vote?

In an all too rare acknowledgement of the problems of changing election law at the last moment, the Ministry of Justice said it was too late to change the law in time for the 2010 general election. However, rather quietly a few days ago the department instead slipped out a recommended set of financial declarations that candidates, if they choose, can make.

Producing this voluntary scheme so close to the election is not exactly ideal, but even worse the scheme goes significantly beyond what MPs have to declare. Rather than keeping to the Committee’s logic that candidates should declare what they would have to declare anyway if they won, the MoJ has added in some further ideas. All without debate or cross-party agreement.

The Ministry has also rather stumbled both by making some errors in the document and by its means of sending it out. As one recipient pointed out:

Amusingly, in sending the code by email to PPCs (and to me as an agent), the Ministry of Justice broke the first law of data protection in mass mailings, by identifying the email addresses of every recipient!

However the real meat of controversy is likely to be over non-doms as candidates are asked to declare if:

I confirm that, for the tax year 2008/09, I have not claimed to be, or been treated as not resident, not ordinarily resident or non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes.

Personally, I’d be quite happy for MPs or the Committee on Standards in Public Life to have made a decision saying candidates should have to make such a declaration. But in the absence of such a decision – and in the absence too of cross-party agreement in advance of the document’s publication, this smacks far too much of a last moment unilateral political wheeze.

Whether it all matters depends on the level of publicity the document gets and whether there is therefore real pressure on candidates to make their declarations. So far, aside from my coverage over on the Election Law Channel (the only site regularly covering election law matters in the UK) the document has pretty much passed without notice. That may yet change of course and it could only take one local controversy to trigger the media’s attention.

However, much – in fact, nearly all – of the discussion falls into two traps which are common across political journalism in the UK. First, an undue focus on the central, national picture and, second, an undue focus on the novel.

Ask those involved in organising internet campaigning for any of the major parties about what really matters and you’ll get two answers repeated. They repeatedly – and rightly – emphasise the importance of the internet for local campaigning and they also emphasise its importance for the equivalent of plumbing and sewage systems in a political party – that mostly hidden infrastructure which is vital to effective operation.

If you look at the film clips put up on YouTube by any of the main parties, only the most successful get more than 10,000 views. Yet it takes 10 million votes give or take a bit to win a general election. There’s just a complete mismatch of scales.

But look at audiences at the local level and they are often equal to a significant proportion of the constituency electorate.

The balance – or rather imbalance – between local and national audiences also comes through in a calculation I worked out a couple of years ago. In constituencies with well-developed local Liberal Democrat websites, for every one visit made to one of the party’s national sites by someone living in the constituency there were three visits to the local site.

Local is where the online audience is. Yet local is not where the punditry is usually. That is partly for understandable reasons; it is much easier to keep track of what parties are doing online with their national websites than to delve in to the hundreds of different local constituencies and their numerous different stories.

The national media has moved over the last decade to understanding that campaigns are not all about national speeches and Westminster press conferences, and that what happens on the ground in constituencies is key to the results. That same move however has not yet been made when it comes to understanding the internet’s impact on political campaigning.

Returning to the plumbing and sewage systems analogy, there are again understandable reasons why the media give them relatively little attention. It’s harder to get access to the sort of information needed to make such coverage meaningful and we, the consumers of the media’s output, overall do have a love of stories about the new and the dramatic rather than about the boring and the incremental.

Add it all together though, and the reality of how the internet has and is changing political campaigning adds up to a rather different picture, one I’ve sketched in more detail here.

Given the low key nature of the review, and the fact that the new PCC chair Baroness Buscombe has made it clear she doesn’t see any overall crisis in the media’s standards, the best chance for change I think comes from one or two specific, narrow and well worded suggestions which are supported by a large number of people.

There certainly are some much bigger issues that should be at stake – but this isn’t a process likely to resolve those.

So what changes might it be sensible to suggest? My favourite is to lobby for a change so that in future newspapers have to properly acknowledge the source of stories lifted from others, most notably blogs.

There are some good reasons for keeping journalistic sources secret. There is also the rather weird habit of using euphemisms such as “it has emerged that…” to mean “one of our rivals reported yesterday that…”. But far more pernicious is where a story is simply lifted without credit that is wrong.

If a story is taken from somewhere else, the somewhere else should be credited unless they’ve waived that right or secrecy is necessary to protect sources.

Over to you then – is this the change you’d choose? Or something else? And how would you word it?

Sunny adds: Martin Belam earlier this year wrote a good set of suggestions for reforming the PCC.

There is a suggestion by Tim Ireland that we develop about 3-5 suggestions and get as many signatures as possible for them and send it to the PCC in a letter.

Having read her speech in full, I fear I do know what she is going to do at the PCC – and that I’m not going to like it.

It’s a curious speech in several ways. She started off by recounting in some detail her Conservative Party roots. Leading off with the fact that she’s a Conservative, added to the jibes at Labour and the silence about other parties (even though her reference to civil liberties gave an obvious opportunity to mention the Liberal Democrats, for example), leaves an obvious question about what her motives were.

I’m sure she’s a smart person and can’t have been unaware that the message many people will take from her speech is, “I’m a Conservative”. Is that really the right message for the chair of the PCC – which has to deal with complaints about political stories all in an equitable manner – to send? Is it the best way to reassure the public about how self-regulation will work on her watch?

There were also some rather astringent comments about Google and news aggregators:

“Together the press, all commercial broadcasters, film, book publishing and music industries must now work together to find a new business model with the Search Engines. The latter, the aggregators, think it is ok to enjoy the use of all your valuable intellectual property and ad revenues for little or no return.”

Whilst the chair of the PCC doesn’t need to be a technical aspect, I’m disappointed that she should make such an obviously wrong comment. If you look at many news aggregators they most certainly do not “use all of your valuable intellectual property”. Instead they take only the headline (and sometimes a following sentence or two) from a story and then link through to the original source.

It is as if the message was a comforting nod towards newspaper editors that she is on their side: she doesn’t like Google and she’d get on with any future Conservative government (so helping head off any moves for statutory regulation). That may be nice for them to hear – but choosing to stress her Conservative roots and her antipathy to search engines and aggregators is hardly taking the line of putting the public’s interests first.

Somewhat oddly, although she praised the media’s assault on MPs over expenses, when it came to her own chamber – the House of Lords – media criticism was not welcomed by her, for she asked, “Is it really in anyone’s interests for the media to be party to the undermining of our Second Chamber…?”

What was missing in her speech was an answer to the scale of the mistrust which engulfs journalism in this country. The latest MORI annual reputation survey puts journalists as the second least trusted profession in the country. Yet reading her defence of the current system of self-regulation and how it works you could be forgiven for thinking that journalism is one of the most trusted professions rather than scrambling to avoid the wooden spoon at the other end of the table.

In fairness, we did get six sentences about review governance structures and not being complacent. But for a profession so little trusted, simply slipping in the comment “I cannot ignore the strength of feeling that ranges from indignation to rage that exists among some of my colleagues in Westminster. So my priority is to do all I can to reassure politicians, opinion formers and – most importantly of all – the public that we are robust enough and responsible enough to be left alone” is not nearly enough.

Rather than get a plan to match the scale of the public distrust of journalism, we got a lengthy exposition of Baroness Buscombe’s Conservative Party roots. At best, that’s a serious misjudgement. At worst, it’ll let the public and journalism down.

Up against that is the argument ‘but lots of other news is available for free, so why would anyone pay?‘

But there are actually quite a wide range of business models.

The existing model
Both the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have shown how paywalls can work. It hasn’t worked for some, but is there any reason to believe the current demarcation is set in stone with no scope for future changes? No. The Guardian looks to be thinking about a variant on this where the paid-for content is more like the benefits of club membership than the specialist news approach of the FT.

The loss making model
Losses aren’t fun and don’t sound good, but … we’re surrounded by industries that repeatedly make large losses. Some survive because people are willing to put money in for the status, fun and other benefits it brings. Some survive because of fundraising from other sources – such as appeals to support public radio in the US.

Some survive because the state puts money in. The last may sound implausible, but Alan Rusbridger has floated a version that may be palatable – public funding of a Press Association-style system to ensure that there is minimum factual reporting of local public sector bodies such as councils. That would both reducing the costs for newspapers and allow them to give better local coverage.

The Gmail model
Access is free for everyone, but a small group of heavy users pay for extra services to fit their heavy use (you can pay for extra storage space). Possible newspaper version: you get charged if you want to visit more than a certain number of stories in a time-period.

The Flickr model
Access is free for everyone to this photo-sharing website, but a small group of heavy users pay for extra services to have more data and to sort their data (you can have more sets). Possible newspaper version: you get charged for advanced search and sorting facilities. It is easy to see how this would appeal to business users – who are often willing to pay much more heavily for services than the normal consumer, as we see with train and airline tickets.

The (smart) music industry model
For some in the music industry, songs are now the free taster in order to sell more merchandise and tickets to events. Polly Toynbee being a sell-out at Wembley stadium? Hmm… but could there be more scope for the media to organise events for the public at which their journalists are the star turns? Could the star columnists’ writing end up being tasters for events where they turn up in person?

The radio industry model
In the early days of the US radio industry, radio manufacturers paid for content to be produced because that raised demand for radios. The clearest analogy is with Google: they want lots of good content easily available online because that ends up producing more advertising revenue for them.

So why shouldn’t Google pay? It’s hard to see how we could get from here to there, but then looking round at the radio business now, it’s pretty hard to see how that original model could ever have been in place – yet it was.

The DVD industry
It’s littered with boring and bizarre “special extras”, but where done well – such as on the BBC’s range of Doctor Who DVDs – the DVD can add significantly to what is available already through numerous other formats, at lower or no price.

Finding out how a story was put together, the trails that turned cold, the extra background details and so forth – perhaps there could be a market for regular “how the news was made” background information, which again might be of particular appeal to the willing to pay business audience?

The format splitters
It’s increasingly common for goods to be free in one format but paid-for in another. Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, does just this. You can listen to it for free or pay for a printed version. A printed version has sufficient benefits that some are willing to pay. News that you can read on your mobile phone – especially if it works when out of signal range – could provide that sort of benefit people are willing to pay for.

The book industry model
Book publishers don’t employ lots of staff to write books. Instead, they provide the infrastructure for editing, publishing and promoting books. The actual content production is done by a large army of individuals. There are two particular benefits for the publisher: first, they can pick and choose which content they think is good enough to publish and, second, as many authors have non-monetary motivations for wanting to get published, they can offer lower financial rewards to authors.

The newspaper industry could switch to a similar model. It would be a massive cultural shift, though we’ve already seen some hints of what it might be like with The Guardian’s Comment is Free. Although some Guardian staff write for it, it is in many ways a publishing platform to which others contribute – and as the contributors often have non-monetary motivations for writing, those contributions are frequently either not paid for or only paid relatively modest sums.

And so…
What is common about many of the models for getting people to pay is that only a small proportion of people have to pay in order to support a large number of people who don’t pay. The small proportion of people who pay for Flickr, for example, support a large number of people who don’t. Add in that many consumers of media are businesses who in turn make money from their quick and detailed knowledge of the news and there appears to be plenty of scope for getting some people to pay, by some means.