A platform and plan for open source democracy; everyone has ideas, it's time we used them.
The world is full of good ideas, and our democracies should be able to take advantage of them wherever they come from. We are creating a democratic platform that allows anyone with a web browser to share their ideas and build a vision together. We started out writing a party-independent political manifesto, but now the tool we've built to run it is available for anyone to use for their own project.
The OpenPolitics Manifesto is a party-independent political manifesto for the UK that anyone can contribute to.
The process is simple, and as open as we can make it. People with ideas can just press the suggest button, make their change directly, and get it voted on. If their proposal is accepted, they get to vote on future changes.
The document has been put in the public domain, meaning that any party or candidate could adopt it. Something New is a UK party formed specifically to promote the manifesto, but does not exclusively own it.
The manifesto is run by a software platform called Votebot. It provides a friendly user interface for editing, voting, and discussion, usable by anyone with a web browser. You can see it in action by looking at the current manifesto proposals.
The system is user-friendly, but underneath it uses git and GitHub to track changes and proposals (using pull requests).
The Votebot code is open source, can be fully deployed using free services, and can be easily re-branded. See the repository README for all the details.
OpenPolitics