Category: Uncategorised
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Did the 2017 General Election change our approach to young people in politics?
It seems that last week youth had a great influence in the outcome of the elections. Their turnout was firstly surprisingly high: Labour MP David Lammy claims it reached up to 72%, although a YouGov survey only puts it at 66%. With an overall turnout at 68%, it would mean that under 25s went out…
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How do DUP policies stack up?
The DUP have agreed to support Theresa May without forming a coalition. Their 10 MPs take the Conservatives over the 326 seat line to form a government by 2 seats. But how do their views compare across key issues? Through the general election campaign we analysed all the main party manifestos, and have add the…
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ProgCode network – civictech in the USA
CivicTech is a global phenomena, arguably most coming of age during Obama’s first campaign, and more recently Donald Trump’s campaign has made powerful and inventive use of the resources available in the 2015 election to target and mobilise voters. The Bernie tech movement are building a network of tech volunteers and are creating open-source tools for…
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Do we still need political parties?
This article originally appeared in the New Statesman, 4 October 2016 Technology has changed everything. Apart from politics. When the Uber of democracy hits, will parties still have a role? It’s party conference season. Political parties appear to be doing well – about a million people are now members, and donations have increased. But on both sides…
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Only 3 days left to have your say on the role of faith and grammar schools in education in England
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…
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Have Your Say On The Future Of Schools In England
>>> Ready to have your say? Start here. The UK government has put together a new set of ideas (PDF) for making more good school places available for everyone in England. You may have heard about them recently through the grammar school debate. That’s covered, but also faith schools and the role of universities and private schools in…
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Briefing notes: Devolution in England
An occasional series where we publish briefing notes we’ve put together for our own internal use that we think might be useful to others. What does devolution in England mean? Unlike in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the whole country or principality was given devolved powers, England is being given devolved powers at a…
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Add any question to your Group or Collection
If you have a Collection or are a group admin you’ll know that you can add existing questions to them. This saves the site filling up with lots of similar questions, and adds weight to popular ideas. But you’ll also know it’s been a little frustrating to do. You used to have to go to your…
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Thank you! Your responses on food waste have been sent to Parliament
Thank you to everyone who contributed to questions on food waste! We compiled all your responses and sent a report to the Food Waste in England Inquiry, run by the UK Parliamentary Committee for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. You cast a total of 4,583 votes and made 36 comments. Comments came from across the…
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Putting @you at the heart of what we do
A little quick and nice feature we added a few weeks ago was nicer ways of sharing your profile. With a hat-tip to the tried and tested format of twitter, instagram, facebook, skype, and .. well pretty much every user-centric service, we’ve gone with the represent.me/username format. Here’s mine: https://rep.roundbear.org/eddowding You can find your username on your profile.
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Event notes: Our Future Together – the power of myth and vision
Whether you voted for Leave or Remain, the EU Referendum results have shown we need new ways to work together, to listen to each other, to discuss and debate and vote and take action. With this in mind, we held an open event at our new offices on 27 June: Our Future Together, London. After…
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Behind the scenes of: ‘How do you compare with Theresa May?’
‘How do you compare with Theresa May?‘ is a new collection of questions we launched yesterday. In this post I aim to explain how we went about creating it, some of the challenges doing so poses and how we plan to answer those. What we did To create the collection ‘How do you compare with…
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Introducing… Collections (aka: how to make a quiz on Represent)
Yesterday we launched a collection of questions that allowed users to compare themselves with the views and policies of the, now, UK prime minister Theresa May. We’ve done a few comparison quizzes like this before, for the London Mayoral elections and for the EU Referendum. Crafting these first quizzes was was a little time consuming…
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One X is not enough to determine your future.
So what next? TL;DR: Democracy is being updated at https://rep.roundbear.org — the world’s first online peer-to-peer governance platform. Get involved. Ultimately, after the denial and amazement, this is our opportunity to make Great Britain do bold, brilliant, and inspiring things. We have no one holding us back, and no one to blame. The future is ours to…
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Your UK polling day toolkit – everything you need to get to the polls and vote
Polling stations across the UK will be open today from 7am until 10pm today. We’ve put together everything your need to make your voice count. Find your polling station If you have your polling card to hand your polling station should be clearly marked. But, life is not always that simple. Find your nearest polling…
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How do we make delegative democracy a reality? or “What do points mean?”
Delegative democracy (aka ‘liquid democracy’) is what most people invent when answering the question “How do we make politics better?” We start at “well we should all be able to vote on everything”, but then realise we don’t want to vote on everything and also probably don’t know enough detail to trust ourselves. So we…
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What we’ve been working on: sort by consensus, Android & iOS apps, improved design, and more
It’s been a productive few months for us. With the new design you can now easily access the full power of Represent: location-awareness, topics, groups, comparing to other users, and far fewer distractions. We also added an iOS app to join our Android app, so you can ‘do the citizen thing’ rather than scrolling endless…
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“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
I’ve just been reminded of this excellent snippet from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish “On [this] world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.” “Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.” “I did,” said Ford. “It is.” “So,”…
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Will there be a European Spring? Or an Arab Summer? We’ll find out in 10 days.
How do the attitudes of young people in Tunisia, Egypt, libya, Algeria, Morocco compare to those of young people in the UK? And how do those differ from the older people in those countries? That was the question given to us a few days ago by the British Council and Bootstrap Company for a presentation at…