Compass is an independent democratic pressure group that campaigns and organises on behalf of its members, operating on the centre left of the political axis.
The organisation wanted to challenge existing industry processes for policy formulation by opening up to their membership and actively encouraging participation. The 21st Century Policy competition allowed Compass' members to produce, discuss and vote on ideas which Compass would then campaign on. Our job was to take this very social and community-centric approach of enabling visitors to quickly and easily submit policy proposals, and make it work online without breaking the bank.
We designed a solution on top of the popular open source CMS, WordPress, extended with a number of community plugins and customised theming and functionality. This platform also provides for an editorial layer for quality control and community management. This allowed us to create a well tested and usable site for Compass' supporters to submit their ideas for policy reform in a context which explicitly was oriented to the 'normal' user, not those who have been embedded in policy formation and discussion. The Wordpress platform already has excellent support for commenting, but we were able to extend that, allowing conversations to form around each element of a submission, not just over the entire document. This meant that submitters were easily able to take on board praise and criticism and refine their ideas.
In our view, the project has helped position Compass at the forefront of policy process innovation, whilst also enhancing Headshift's third sector offering. We were pleased to be able to deliver such an open and low-cost solution for the third sector.
The organisation wanted to challenge existing industry processes for policy formulation by opening up to their membership and actively encouraging participation. The 21st Century Policy competition allowed Compass' members to produce, discuss and vote on ideas which Compass would then campaign on. Our job was to take this very social and community-centric approach of enabling visitors to quickly and easily submit policy proposals, and make it work online without breaking the bank.
We designed a solution on top of the popular open source CMS, WordPress, extended with a number of community plugins and customised theming and functionality. This platform also provides for an editorial layer for quality control and community management. This allowed us to create a well tested and usable site for Compass' supporters to submit their ideas for policy reform in a context which explicitly was oriented to the 'normal' user, not those who have been embedded in policy formation and discussion. The Wordpress platform already has excellent support for commenting, but we were able to extend that, allowing conversations to form around each element of a submission, not just over the entire document. This meant that submitters were easily able to take on board praise and criticism and refine their ideas.
In our view, the project has helped position Compass at the forefront of policy process innovation, whilst also enhancing Headshift's third sector offering. We were pleased to be able to deliver such an open and low-cost solution for the third sector.
