A tool for political engagement
You might also want to read the documentation or the wiki.
A system to enable UK voters to discuss and collaboratively form policies. Created alongside the formation of the UK's Populace party, it aims to allow its membership to engage fully with each other and ultimately -- hopefully -- their MPs in government.
Dialectic (working title) intends to promote rational, measured debate and foster creative decisionmaking. It will also discourage antisocial and intolerant behaviour in order to encourage the widest, most open participation possible.
The system is Open Source and uses an open license, the GPL V3, allowing other organisations to make use of it for open purposes, as well as allowing any interested parties to examine its inner workings, or contribute to its development.
The core of the system will be an interface geared towards dialectical discussion of issues. Rational and evidence-based debate and exploration of related issues, as well as evaluation of sources of information will all be prominently supported.
The intention is for a user new to a policy discussion to be able to quickly see the main points of discussion and get a feel for the general dispositions of the participants. Further engagement should allow the user to explore all relevant evidence and opinion and give their own opinion -- both on the main points and on the evidence itself.
A very important part of the system will be allowing for votes on issues. Voting may happen in both fixed- and open-ended scenarios, such that an open vote issue will evolve over time as new voters join in and existing voters change their minds while a fixed-time vote would be a snapshot at a particular moment, which may be needed to decide policy in practice.
Voting will take place using algorithms developed for fair voting in democracy; where the vote is to decide multiple ‘winners’, STV with Meek counting will be used, while for single-outcome votes the system will use Condorcet voting. Both methods require voters to order their preferences and result in what are commonly seen as the ‘fairest’ results.
The aim of the site will be to foster an active, open community. Light gamification techniques commonly used in popular web forums will be employed, such as a point and badge system for users that can indicate their contributions and commitment to the site, and which may unlock or be spent to perform certain actions.
The aim would be that active community members ultimately carry out most of the moderation and community management that any such property will require.
All general discussion pages, and the site in general, will be widely visible to the general public. Some member information may be restricted.
Members will be required to authenticate with the site before contributing to any debate, and a high level of verification (multi-factor) will be required before committing certain actions such as suggesting debate topics or voting.
Membership will only be open to eligible UK voters and those who will be eligible to vote at the next General Election. This is because it’s important that the views expressed and decisions made relate to the UK as a political entity.
Some areas of the site may be further restricted to users from certain geographical locations, in order to allow further strong regional representation where appropriate - perhaps for constituency-specific discussions.
For all that the internet is an equalising force that can encourage participation in politics in a widespread and egalitarian way, not all politics can take place online. It will ultimately be important to develop a way for offline meetings and discussions to be represented within the overall system.
The ultimate aim of the system would be that voters would be able to debate and democratically decide on every policy that concerns them. Members of parliament would then have a clear mandate for action regarding that policy, and they would be expected to act in accordance with the electorate, or to justify their reasons for not doing so.
A main aim of the system would be to allow users to interact with it fully from mobile devices, in an ad-hoc way, such that it can be casually used at any time.
While any and all topics should be viewable by an interested member, the sheer amount of information and discussion a system of this sort would engender would prohibit most or all people from effective participation.
The interface will ultimately allow users to follow topics and policies to ensure they’re kept up to date, as well as presenting topics to users in a variety of ways, intending to ensure that users have the chance to interact with items in the order that they feel is most important.
Work on this has literally only just begun, so please be patient.
Please feel free to fork this repo. Ultimately we'll want pull requests and contributors, but to start with the aim is to get the structure in place. If you're interested in collaborating, please mail the author (or contact via GitHub), or read up on (and update) the wiki.
Investigate the docs section or read the wiki.