HearFromYourMP

Hear­FromY­ourMP is another useful democracy-​enhancing web­site from MySo​ci​ety.org:

Between elec­tions the inter­net is really start­ing to chal­lenge pol­i­tics as usual. As part of this change, we’d like to put you in touch with your new MP. Not for a spe­cific pur­pose, but in order to hear what they’re work­ing on, to debate their thoughts in a safe, friendly envi­ron­ment, and gen­er­ally to build better, more useful rela­tion­ships between con­stituents and their MPs.

If you enter your details, we’ll add you to a queue of other people in your con­stituency. When enough have signed up, your MP will get sent an email. It’ll say “20 of your con­stituents would like to hear what you’re up to – hit reply to let them know.” If they don’t reply, noth­ing will happen, until they get an email which says there are now 100 people; 200 people; 500 people – until it is non­sen­si­cal not to reply and start talking.

When your MP replies, it won’t be one-​way spam, and it won’t be an inbox-​filling free-​for-​all. Instead, each email will have a link at the bottom, which will take you straight to a forum where the first post will con­tain the MP’s email. There’ll be no tire­some login – you can just start talk­ing about what they’ve said. Safe, easy and democratic.

When I signed up I brought the total number of users in my con­stituency to 19, so only one more Glas­gow North con­stituent needs to join in before we find out whether Anne McK­echin (Labour, fairly Blairite voting record) will respond.

Related posts: Write To Them, Write To Them, They Write Back

Posted at 6pm on 19/10/05 by Jack Mottram to the politics category.
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Tags: activism, politics, web