In Conversation with Anthony Zacharzewski

Last Wednesday saw a new twist at our Spotlight Suppers. Those that were there were treated to a great conversation between Miranda Birch and Anthony Zacharzewski.

 ‘I’ve always loved politics. It was a family thing: my uncle was a staunch bastion of the local Conservative party.  I remember going on a country walk with him one day and him talking endlessly about the Tories wanting to bring people up and Labour wanting to push people down. My dad – who’d left Poland during the war and then come to England – was much more reserved and more to the left… ’   

Anthony went to university in 1992, a few months after the World Wide Web was invented.  ‘Being a keen techie’ it was an exciting time – and the start of his interest in working at the places where politics, democracy and digital media meet.


Anthony’s interest in the internet grew alongside his interest in governance and democracy and he devoted his third year dissertation to political theory.  When he completed his degree he joined the Civil Service, working in Health for four years and then, between 2000 and 2006 oscillating between the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.


He moved to Brighton in 2006 where he set up The Democratic Society with a group of four friends: ‘We wanted to do something online about politics, to get more people involved in democracy.  Social media were about to take off - Facebook had just started to go main stream, Twitter had just been created.  And we saw there’s a huge gap between what people expect from democracy and what they actually get.  It’s the difference between a round-robin Christmas card, where you get a summary of someone’s year in a single letter AND that letter is the same for everyone…and say, a Facebook page, where you can reply to the regular updates you get from your friends.  It’s about having a relationship rather than being on the receiving end of sporadic information.’

At the point of setting up The Democratic Society, Anthony was quite tempted to leave his Civil Service job and go it alone. ‘In 2006, Labour was running out of steam and no longer had the energy to reform things.  I wanted to have the freedom to do some of that.’   Then the Head of Policy job came along at Brighton City Council and Anthony got it and The Democratic Society was put on hold for four years.  When he returned to it in 2010, the original group of five had gone down to two (‘peoples’ circumstances had changed – marriage, jobs, house moves…’)  
So in February 2010 he left the Brighton and Hove City Council to devote himself to The Democratic Society full time and to contribute to other projects, such as CityCamp Brighton in 2011 and 2012.

As The Democratic Society’s website says, ‘Demsoc is a non-partisan membership organisation for democracy, participation and new ways of doing government.’  Demsoc’s core team of five are keen to put these aims into practice.  For instance, they are working with one local council to see how digital media can ‘open up’ the traditional parish council AGM.  ‘Say ‘parish  AGM’ and people think of draughty church halls, a photocopied agenda, having to plough through the minutes of the previous meeting… It’s like buying an album and having to listen to eight songs you don’t want, leaving you with two that you like.’   Demsoc is looking at how digital media can transform these types of meetings into ‘democratic centrepieces’ using platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.   He feels there are already  lots of different examples in the UK of how people can get involved in running their local affairs:  Reading Borough Council uses Facebook in different ways to tell residents what it is doing, including ‘Get Involved Reading’ – which lists anything from Family History Day to a call for Meals on Wheels volunteers.  Harrow Council put a sofa and a standard lamp in an open backed truck and parked it on the corners of different streets.  Residents could hop on and tell officials what they thought of its services – in mobile surroundings that conjured up a comfortable sitting room!

Of CityCamp Brighton, which has just completed its second successful weekend,  with more than a hundred people pitching creative ideas for the city’s future, Anthony says: ‘It’s a sugar rush of innovation and creative ideas.  Our target audience is people who have a passion to come up with something new.’  The challenge is keeping the initial ‘sugar rush’ going and Anthony says that one of the things he’s learned from CityCamp Brighton 2011 is the importance of mentoring after the event – so that initial ideas don’t lose momentum.  Of the fourteen projects that got support in 2011, about 7 or 8 have made significant progress or have been completed – not bad, if you consider that the support for these projects was usually given for free and in peoples’ spare time.  The ideas include ‘Touchy peely’ a project that matches the compost haves and have-nots.  Ie people with lots of compostable waste but no bins team up with other residents who have bins but not enough waste!

The prize fund for CityCamp Brighton 2012 was £20,000 – double that of the Camp’s fund in 2011.   Winners this year include ‘Gig Buddies’ where people with disabilities will pair up with volunteers to go to gigs and a scheme to showcase Brighton’s untold history by digitally tagging memories and stories onto the city’s historic buildings.   Anthony says his focus now is to make sure every one of these wining projects gets the mentoring it needs to move forward.

In June, Miranda will be 'in conversation with...' Tim Cobb of Cobb PR and you can book now!

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