The Government wants to know what you’d like from the education system. Represent.me has made it REALLY easy for you to tell them.
I don’t know if you’ve ever taken part in a Government consultation before (most people haven’t) but they are pretty hard to engage with. Piece-by-piece it’s all very reasonable, but together it all adds up to a very overwhelming and huge experience.
First there’s a 36 page document to find out what the policies are, and then there are 34 questions to answer. The options are ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, and then a text area to type your comments. The result is that to engage at all you have to do a lot of thinking.
We believe there’s a better way for more people to be involved in making decisions about the future of their country. Without further ado, here it is. Find out more below.
Why is Represent doing this?
Represent exists to create a better relationship between citizens, elected representatives, and Government.
It is a people-first voting and deliberation platform which:
- makes it easy for you to have your say on any issue
- works at every scale from local or global
- work with elected officials – whether it’s your MP, councillor, or local authority
- is great for decisions where you live or where you work
- can handle the big stuff, or just settle trivial but enduring debates
- helps you represent yourself more effectively
Why is this better than submitting evidence directly on the Government website?
In short: Represent makes it easier, faster, gives clearer insights, and is a lot easier to get started with.
Take this example question from the : “Are there other ways in which universities could be asked to contribute to raising school-level attainment?”
On the Government website this is a ‘yes / no’ with a textarea. Take a moment to think how you’d answer that.
It’s hard, right? It’s open-ended, and has a lot of assumptions in the question.
We break the question apart to make more questions each of which are much easier to answer. Still want to comment? Each question has its own comments section.
What do we do with the data?
We analyse it and submit it to the Government as part of their inquiry. We have a relationship with them which lets them accept submissions direct from Represent as a channel for public representation.
But it doesn’t stop there: because you’ve answered on Represent it’s automatically aggregated and shown to your MP, your local authority, and other agencies who can help deliver what you want. Naturally you don’t want spam, and your security comes first so no one can contact you directly via Represent until you permit them to.
What comes next?
As regards this Inquiry, we’ll
- write up a report
- submit it to Parliament
- publish the report here on the blog
- make all of the data open so you can use it to show your MP or local authority
As regards our work generally, we are continuing to work with Parliament and Government on other inquiries, as well as local and national democracy here in the UK and abroad.
Like what you see? If you would like to donate to our work developing a model of citizen-first democracy, we’d really appreciate that!
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