A tweet from Sam brought me to the Nine Dots Prize. It looks interesting. It asks the question; "Are digital technologies making politics impossible?"
The answer, of course, is to be provided as a 3,000 word essay and then a 'short book'. Which answers its own question. Politics are becoming impossible because huge buckets of words are deemed to be the only way to understand them.
Related: the IFG published a report yesterday (pdf, obvs) that included the words "Ministers need to embrace a new kind of conversation about policy, based on prototypes as well as submissions." *
This is good and true! (Though I'd quibble with the inclusion of "as well as submissions") but it rather begs the question; who will prototype these prototypes? They're not in the skill-set of those who normally suggest or draft policy.
Good news! Doteveryone does prototypes. We'll be pointing at a bunch of them soon. Ooh, and, look, here are some from If.
*Incidentally, you could probably track the increasing digital maturity of a sector by charting the decline of the phrase "not just for geeks anymore" in their press releases.