I suppose your focus for the moment is the government, MPs and Lords. But I wonder whether (if you could clone yourselves perhaps?!) you might work on the role of the media too, and consider building tools to help citizen media monitoring and campaigning?

In your essay above you wrote: “The institutions that shape our democratic culture often act as some of the hardest checks and balances against which politicians bang their heads. Just speak to a politician who has ever been foiled by a concerted media campaign to understand the power of democratic culture.”

…I suppose you may mean the positive examples of citizen-supported media campaigns against corrupt politicians. But what about the times when the media are as bad if not worse than the politicians. MediaLens ( http://www.medialens.org/ ) and the Glasgow Media Group have done some great research in this area on UK media.

“Helping people to get better decisions made between elections” seems a really clear way to explain our aims. I do worry sometimes though about what “better” means. Is it just whatever “better” means to the person using our tools, or do we taint it with our conscious or subconscious values in some way. How would we know and guard against that?

I also worry sometimes about the power that institutions hold, not because I have any particular feeling that any specific ones are bad, but just because I’m the kind of person who believes in safety features being built in. Sometimes institutions are listened to because they have an explicit mandate, sometimes because they have a lot of members or supporters, sometimes just because they’re perceived to be talking sense.

It would feel better (less dangerous) to me if that could be quantified in some way, perhaps so that politicians knew that they weren’t being misled. I know the idea of a TheyWorkForYou for NGOs has been discussed a few times both in and outside our team, there’s something in that I think.

Looking forward to Pt. 2!