Can Technology Help Citizens Focus On Policies, Rather Than On Squabbling Politicians?

In a time were more often than not, politics seems to be all about people, rather than ideas, one project is trying to help citizens focus themselves on policies, rather than on squabbling politicians.

It’s based in the Uk and is called The Voting Project, the brainchild of human rights expert Will Baker and designer and developer Nick Hurley.

It basically works like this: first policies proposal are collected through a form on the project’s website. Then they are ‘curated’, deleting duplicates, gathering similar discussions under the same headline, and they are later submitted to the general public for voting (polls open tomorrow, Wednesday 27th, the day of theQueen’s Speech after the General Election, and will close on Sunday 31st).

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? So easy that you may wonder why nobody has tried to do something similar in the past. Well, perhaps because it’s not as easy as it seems. First of all: how do you get people to participate? For an established media company, or a party, this could not be a problem, but how do you do that if you’re not a big name?

Hurley and Baker tried to use the virality of social media to overcome the hurdle.

“Ahead of launching the project we did an unofficial sort of collection process, just to get people talking about it. We got people to pose with a selfie, with them holding a placard of a policy that they believe in, and post it on Twitter TWTR -0.22%. And we collected those messages using the hashtag#policiesnotparties,” Hurley tells me.

“We’ve tried to be as open as possible to attract as many people as possible. But, we have had a couple of suggestions that are so deeply contrary to fundamental human rights, that if we were to include them, we would probably in ourselves get into trouble with the law, just for including them as suggestions people put there,” Baker says.This helped the platform, which has received almost no coverage from mainstream media (aside fromRT), capture some people’s attention. Then enters the gatekeeping problem: when all the policies are collected, how to decide which ones to include in the poll?

In those cases, at least, the process was pretty straightforward. In others, things were more nuanced. One suggestion the team had, for instance, wascalled the ‘Mandatory Cat Ownership.”‘

“Somebody said: every person should be made to own a cat, because everyone’s life would be better with a cat. We thought, ‘OK, that sounds ridiculous to me, and it would be almost unenforceable, but who am I to decide that that shouldn’t go in?,” Baker says.

Luckily, most comments, concerned far more serious topics from the reform of the electoral system, to ways to make MPs more accountable, passing through austerity, wages, benefits, and human rights. “One thing that was very noticeable,” Hurley adds, “is how much people were concerned about the National Health Service’s future. There’s been a lot of fear about privatization being introduced.”

One aspect worth mentioning is that due to the way the audience was initially reached, using social media, and things like Google GOOGL -0.34% Ads, and Twitter Ads, and Facebook ads, some sort of liberal bias was potentially introduced. In the future, a next version of the project will probably make use of cross lateral mechanisms to bring different types forward instances and more broad audiences in.

The Voting Project is not the first initiative that’s trying to help ideas regain centrality. An older, still ongoing experiment, is called VoteForPolicies and is also based in the UK. take the parties’ manifesto pledges, anonymise them and ask the public to select which they most agree with.

“Our approach is less of an aid to voting in the General Election itself and more of an experiment in a completely different type of democracy, in which party political machinery does not figure at all. I suppose this means that we have a great deal more to design and curate, as we are not routing people back into established political mechanisms,” Baker says.It’s a great tool to help citizens make informed decisions, but is different from The Voting Project in that the public themselves do not contribute ideas and there are no opportunities to vote on individual policy suggestions – rather a set of policies on offer from an established party.