This pledge has been successful! You can still add your name to it, because the deadline hasn't been reached yet

Yes, I will be going on the Barnet march against cuts and privatisation this Sunday, 30 January. My pledge on Real PledgeBank - not the bowdlerised Barnet council version where pledges are censored before publication - has reached the requisite 20 signatures, with days to spare.

OK, I had to nag a few friends to sign it to get the ball rolling, but I know they will be beside me there on the march. Half my fellow Barnet March pledgees are people I didn't know (although I've met a couple of them subsequently).

Here's my pledge:

Pledge “Barnetmarch”

"I will march against cuts and privatisation in Barnet on 30 January but only if 20 other local people will do the same."

Yes, of course, it's daft, but so is the whole idea of Barnet forking out £140,000 to a company called MySociety for tat such as this:

Value for Money*

MySociety websites are seen as at the cutting edge of redefining the interface between government and citizens. Their expertise and experience will support the council to achieve its corporate aims of providing better services with less money (by supporting more interactions with the council to happen online), and enabling the public and council to jointly deliver services (for example through a local Pledgebank tool).

If, like me, you would rather your money were spent on frontline services than on gimmicks trying to persuade us that something called the Big Society can replace democratically accountable public services, please join me and my fellow pledgees on the march this Sunday. More details here.

* This is an extract from a document that blogger Mr Reasonable alerted us to in this blogpost.

Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine... but only if five other local people will do the same

John Dix (Mr Reasonable blog) has written about the cost of Barnet council's latest social media experiments. Local versions of PledgeBank, FixMyHole, sorry, FixMyStreet, etc. are to be supplied by a company called MySociety, up to a cost of £140,000.

There might even be a local version of TheyWorkForYou, the website where people can keep tabs on their MPs, only Barnet's version will be an attempt to make councillors more accountable (PMSL).

Mr Reasonable says:

Some of the cost is coming from grants, but the costs of the new Barnet Pledgebank website and the petitions website are coming out of council budgets. There still seems to be a culture of spending money on gimmicks while frontline service are being cut and frankly that offends me!

I'm with him on that.

The council document Mr R bases himself on is available here. Among the examples of things that MySociety might do for Barnet, I find something pretty ominous.

- The Democratic Services Team works hard to ensure that good quality agendas and minutes are made for each key committee or Cabinet meeting.

- Unfortunately... the core parts of committee activities – what they actually decide – is lost inside large PDF files, buried deep within part of the Barnet website.

- We propose to make it far easier to access the Decisions and Recommendations from committee and Cabinet and allow people to sign up for decision alerts based on keywords of interest.

What do you reckon? Do you think that the council is going to stop providing access to all their documents, such as the one that I found this proposal in? Are they going to dumb down "Governance and Democracy", and call it democratic?

P.S. Meanwhile, my own pledge on Real PledgeBank is going well.