Tag Archives: digital democracy

For the first time today, members of the public who attended a debate in Parliament were permitted, and indeed encouraged, to keep their phones and use social media. Sadly it wasn’t in the House of Commons, where you still have to hand in your phones and tablets before you go into the public gallery, but appropriately it was in a Westminster Hall debate on Digital Democracy (#digitaldemocracy). It’s not clear to me how many of the tweets were directly from the admittedly small public gallery, and how many from people watching it on ParliamentLive TV, but it was an encouraging start.

‘Open up!’ was published yesterday and is the report of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy. Liberal Democrats should pay it some attention, even though, sadly, we do not appear to have had any representation on the Commission itself.

Its remit was to explore how to use digital technology to improve parliamentary democracy in the House of Commons, and increase democratic participation, which is surely something that we care about deeply.