This election needs something different — and that involves you

“You’re joking. Not another one?!”

Brenda from Bristol summed up the views of much of the nation with her reaction to the news that we’re having another election — in just 7 weeks’ time.

Unfortunately for Brenda, this election’s happening whether we like it or not. But it’s not just another excuse to switch channels when the news comes on.

This election will be absolutely crucial in deciding the direction of the UK for decades to come. But meanwhile, politics is crying out for an upgrade.

Anything is possible — but something urgently needs to change

This is the election that brings tactical voting into the mainstream.

It’s no longer just about parties and their policies. Voting will have implications for what breed of Brexit you want. Whatever your opinion on the referendum, it’s clear that public opinion on Brexit lies on a knife edge. Which means that, despite what the pundits tell you, anything can happen.

We should also look at the context of this election, as the fourth big UK vote in as many years. All three of the previous votes (the Scottish referendum, the 2015 general election and the EU referendum) disrupted the established view of politics, not to mention the polls, in increasingly dramatic ways. Again, they showed that anything is possible — and we should not assume anything less this time round.

But the wider context is, if anything, more important. Whatever your views on Brexit, to us at Explaain the idea that “people have had enough of the experts” is a worrying one. Fake news and alternative facts are trends we shouldn’t have to be worrying about.

And the reason is simple: democracy, politics and journalism are all woefully failing to keep up with the modern world.

A whole new replacement is emerging online, with filter bubbles, unverified information, clickbait, targeted campaigning — the lot. The trouble is, nothing is emerging that both competes with these phenomena and actually does the world any good.

When you factor in the falling levels of trust in politicians, politics and even democracy itself, things really don’t look good.

How this election can be different

At Explaain, we’re focussing solely on the election for the next 7 weeks. We may not have been given much notice, but we’re determined to do our bit.

What are we building? Well, that’s partly up to you. But we have some ideas.

Who should I vote for — and why?

“Who should I vote for” apps stole the show in the 2015 election, and for good reason.

We’re designing the next iteration of these, using Explaain’s technology to take the “why” question to a whole new level, with interactive fact cards that answer all users’ questions on any part of the debate.

But we’re also asking an additional question: “Who can I persuade?” Pioneering research from just last month showed that people reading news online are more affected by who shared it than who published it. That means we can genuinely offer users the chance to multiply their vote by 10x — by persuading their friends to vote with them.

Treat ’em lean, keep ’em keen

As you’d expect, we’re taking a Lean Startup approach to all of this — meaning we’re everything will be based around experiments.

That means we’ll be trying out all sorts of product ideas, all in MVP-stage, over the next few weeks. We’re opening this out to the crowd, but ideas so far include:

• “Who should I vote for?” web app: as described above
• Daily election update chatbot: mainly for Facebook messenger
• iMessage/Facebook messenger add-on: suggests relevant fact cards to inform the political topic you’re discussing right now
• Election Fact Cards: from candidate profiles to arguments on either side of an issue, these will be factual, up-to-date and transparent and harvest data from as many of the large number of public datasets available. This will have the specific aim of getting embedded in as many news articles as possible in order to stop false information from getting spread around
• Fact-checking cards: similar to the above, but created ready and waiting to spread around social media and journalists at key moments like the TV debates
• CMS tools for journalists: Explaain is part of the consortium creating Inject, a smart search tool inside journalists’ CMS’s, and will be testing election-related ideas within this
• Information-sharing agreement: once one news outlet has gleaned some information or debunked a theory, it’s in the public interest that all news sites should have access to that information ASAP — perhaps we can help with that

These ideas are only the beginning — we’re looking forward to adding many more from our community of people who care about the state of news an politics.

Who’s involved — and why us?

Explaain’s personnel includes the teams that built Tickbox, LeaveorStay and Referendum.wtf, which between them reached over a million users at the last two votes.

We’re in the unique position of being able to build something at scale in a frighteningly short space of time. Partly because of our team’s experience at doing so, but also because the Explaain framework of cards makes building such applications much easier.

We’re also reaching out to other organisations who have done similar things in the past, because our belief is that the fragmentation of voting advice applications only hinders the voting public, and this is clearly the time to come together.

So… what?

The missing piece of this puzzle is you.

We’re dropping everything for this election, because it’s such a pivotal point in deciding the UK’s future, and we need all the help we can get.

If you think you can spare the time, we’d be eternally grateful for your help, be it ideas, design, web development, content writing, marketing, networking, promoting — or even just testing what we build.

You’ll be joining a network of people who have built tech for the last five elections. And this time we could change more than the last five put together.

So let us know who you are and how you can help by filling in this form, or by simply saying hello@explaain.com. And if you’re really lazy, just enter your email into the form below: