Democracy, 21st century
Posted in Internet trends, Journal | By tim |
Simon told me recently about a couple of sites I wasn’t aware of which are doing something rather impressive and quite timely. They are trying to open up our democratic processes using the power of the internet – forcing, in some cases, MPs to recognise that in our connected society its possible to have a more open, transparent democracy.
Fax Your MP is a service which takes democracy to the MPs. Set up because some MPs wouldn’t accept emails and, this being patently ridiculous, a bunch of volounteers have created a service which will send faxes to them instead from an email you type on the site.
TheyWorkForYou is a tool which allows searching, viewing and commenting on the archives produced from the House Of Commons. It also provides performance data on every MP in the country – for example how many votes they attend and how often they toe the party line in direct votes. What a great idea.
Perhaps these will enable us to be slightly less apathetic about politics?
January 24th, 2005 at 8:47 am
Don’t forget http://www.PublicWhip.org.uk which tracks the voting record of every MP so you can determine whether they vote with their party or their conscience and http://www.DowningStreetSays.co.uk to find out what the PM’s office is saying to the journalists.
On the way are an update of FaxYourMp called are FaxYourRepresentative/WriteToThem, NotApathetic so you can register to not vote and YourConstituencyMailingList so MPs have less excuse for not contacting their constituents.
Start volunteering through http://www.mysociety.org.