Tag Archives: online voting

Members of the public tweeting live from Parliament

By Mary Reid | Tue 10th March 2015 - 3:58 pm

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.

Posted in News | Also tagged digital democracy | 8 Comments

‘Open up!’ – Digital democracy in the House of Commons

By Mary Reid | Tue 27th January 2015 - 5:57 pm

‘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.