The platform will have a different interface depending upon if you are an elected official or if you are a citizen.
Elected officials will have an interface with three primary areas. The first will show an agenda of the 'day in parliament' and have virtual rooms in which debates and select committee work can occur. This area will also have an in-built voting tool, thus allowing the work of parliament to continue remotely. The number of rooms you can see will be dependent upon your level of access, for example a cabinet minister will have more screens than an opposition backbencher. The idea facilitates the diversification of personnel within parliament, for example single parents, carers and those with disabilities who have other demands on their time can still be successful MPS, even if being physically present in Westminster every day is unrealistic. We hope this will also improve democratic participation efforts, as the electorate can see officials that look like them, curbing parliamentary elitism.
The second key area will be for questions and consultations with constituents, we hope that via this platform, citizens will be able to engage with their MPS, and not only at election time. This will increase accountability and transparency about officials day-to-day work, and means that citizens needn't physically access surgeries to open a dialogue with their politicians.
The third key area will be an information sharing page. This, for an elected official, will have two settings - information that they wish to circulate within parliament, and secondly information that they wish to publicise to the general public. We are hoping the first setting will foster cross party collaboration between elected officials, and help bridge partisan divides. The second setting will increase transparency between the electorate and officials, allowing for information about government activity to be disseminated easily and accessibly. This is in an effort to decrease media dependency which reports with inbuilt biases, as well as combating the rise of fake news.
The citizens interface will have only two of these primary areas, the question and consultation area, and setting two of the information area. Here they will be on the receiving end of information, and will also be able to propose questions to relevant cabinet ministers and MPS. Questions can be 'up-voted' so that consensus politics is fostered amongst the electorate, and the issues that matter to the majority of the population are brought to the attention of MPs.
Citizens will also be able to create a profile that details relevant expertise - this is so that politicians can draw on the experience of the public and curb the damaging effects of 'career politicians.' We are hoping that in a committee stage of a bill, parliamentarians will use citizen's expertise to consult with the public. This practice will increase accountability, transparency and bolster the mandate of individual pieces of legislation.
Hence, the electorate will experience democratic politics in an increasingly direct manner, with the potential for legislative change to be instigated individually by them (not through the intermediator of an MP) as well as directly receiving government updates and news (not through the intermediator of the media.) This will encourage a more receptive culture amongst the general public - whose experience of the political process will be increasingly first-hand and personal to them.
Ultimately, the platform, taken holistically, creates a digital space where an increasingly inclusive group elected officials can partake in the democratic process, in close consultation of the views and opinions of the electorate at large.