Compass approached Headshift wanting to try something that they felt the political space in which they operated was crying out for and wanted to take a risk that they thought the more established parties were not willing to do. They came to us saying they wanted to open up their policy formation process, have a genuine debate about what goes into manifestos and then promise to campaign on whatever their membership decides the priorities are.

In their own words:

Any organisation or individual can submit an idea.

There is no limit to the number of ideas that an organisation or individuals can submit, but more than one is likely to effect the chance of gaining votes.

Submission can only be made on the Compass website in the forms provided.  If anyone does not have access to the internet then they can request a submission form from the Compass office.

Once submissions are made they will posted on the site for comment by Compass members and others.

Where possible, meetings will be held around the country to discuss the policy ideas.

Organisations and individuals submitting policy ideas can contact each other and re-present merged policies - giving themselves a better chance of gaining votes.

The panel of experts will post their opinion on the proposals.

Submission can then be amended and resubmitted before being discussed and debated for a final time.

Compass members will then be asked to vote on the proposals.

The two top policies in each values basket will then become the campaign priorities for Compass.

We were brought on board to help them quickly and inexpensively get up and running with a site that would allow them to run the 'Ideas for the 21st Century Competition'.

They wanted a site that would enable visitors to quickly and easily submit a proposal for policy, using a form that guided the submissions to a certain length and style. Breaking the submissions into predefined sections meant that they could be easily compared and have focused comments. We liked this and ran with the idea, implementing a commenting system that would allow the sites users to comment on each section of a submission, and easily flick between the overall comments on a section ('block') or the whole conversation around a submission.

This block commenting system allows people with specific expertise to concentrate on and discuss the parts of a proposal they know about. This in turn allows the author of a proposal to get specific, targeted ideas for how to improve their submission. By displaying only the comments related to specific parts we will hopefully foster conversation between authors, judges and other commenters regarding specifically that point. The submitter of a proposal will then have more, and better, comments to work from when revising their proposal.

We aimed to create a system that fostered a depth of comments around the content, rather than the more common linear approach to commenting. Hopefully, this will mean the site has less generic 'this is good/bad' comments, and more comments addressing specific points. As the submitters have the opportunity to adjust their submissions (either through the Wordpress backend, or by resubmitting), we hope that these more specific comments will quickly resolve any style issues within the submissions, and enable the participants to craft the submissions to a uniformly high quality.

The system was based on Wordpress which is free and open source and we utilised several plugins from the Wordpress community to glue together the functionality we needed (we credited the authors of the plugins and the theme in the footer of the site, wary of making the same mistakes made on the number10.gov.uk site!). With a little bit of lateral thinking we managed to get a clever system together which can be managed by Compass and was built quickly using some pre-existing plugins (and tweaking the heck out of them).

So, a site designed for opening up the policy formation process by trusting people to develop high quality content, based on software built in a very similar way.

Open source FTW!