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Influence without Surveillance
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## Project Overview

Parliament is meant to represent the people, but it does not
always work as well as it should. Citizens want more input into
the functions of government between elections; parliamentarians,
conversely, often struggle with a deluge of messages that do not
give a clear picture of what their constituents want or how to
represent them.

*RightToAsk* lets people[^1] suggest and vote on questions,
which could be:

- *directed to* an MP to ask for an answer, or
- *suggested for* an MP to raise in Parliament.

*RightToAsk* shows parliamentarians which questions are popular
and relevant to their role. It is *informative*, making
suggestions they may not have thought of, and raising priorities
they may not have been aware so many people cared about.

These questions are meant to be asked in formal scenarios such as
Parliamentary committee hearings and question time, or answered in
written form in-app. We aim to open a channel of communication
between parliamentarians and citizens so that Parliament can be
more directly and immediately responsive to input from citizens.
It is intended to give citizens a way of putting things they care
about on the agenda. It is also a way of aggregating expertise,
allowing large clusters of citizens to amplify and support those
whose insights are regarded as valuable.

*RightToAsk* aims to improve efficiency in terms of time spent at
both ends: citizens can flick through a diverse list of questions
and quickly express their opinion by upvoting questions they want
answered. If they cannot find an existing question that reflects
their priorities, they can suggest a new one. MPs, too, can easily
search for questions directed at them or topics of interest and see
a short, aggregated list of relevant and popular questions.

Votes are private, even from us. The risk of profiling and manipulation is both a vulnerability in
our democracy and a disincentive for participation. RightToAsk uses
additive-homomorphic encryption to add votes without revealing how
individuals voted. It thus defeats political profiling and
tracking, rather like an electronic equivalent of putting
everyone's vote into a ballot box and counting them only when their
link with the voter has been broken.

However, *RightToAsk* does not attempt to hide who wrote which
questions---this is partly to disincentivise aggressive or threatening ones, and partly to encourage connections between MPs and people who ask good questions.

## Example scenarios

Parliamentary Committee Members

: can use *RightToAsk* to get expert suggestions for good questions.
Suppose Senate Estimates wants to examine the effectiveness of a
recently-built government app, but doesn't understand the app or its likely failures well enough to formulate effective questions.
Knowledgeable technical people who have been examining the app can
suggest important questions for the committee members to pose, and
other citizens can vote them up so they receive attention.

: People with important lived experience of a particular issue don't need to organise in advance to make a large impact - one person can frame a relevant question, and others with similar experiences can amplify it.

MPs

: can assess the importance of questions to their electorate. For
example, if someone raises a question about an issue that matters to
them, but nobody else upvotes it, then the MP can filter questions
for their electorate alone and see that most of their constituents
have flicked past it. Conversely, a new question that had received
100% upvotes might deserve attention even if the total number of
votes was small. The MP may answer the question directly or raise it
in Parliament.[^2]

Journalists

: and anyone else can adopt the questions for use in press conferences or any other setting.

: Each MP's contribution and responses will be public, both the
questions they have raised in parliament (as suggested by the platform)
and the ones they have answered. The idea is to incentivise
participation by rewarding active participants with a public show of how
well they are doing their job of responding to the wishes of the
electorate.

: Of course, MPs are also welcome to suggest questions to the electorate
for feedback.

## Goals

The primary goal is *meaningful information flow* from citizens to MPs.
This should be valuable and efficient at both ends.

We step away from the notion of 'voting on decisions' towards raising
awareness and asking questions about issues that are important to
lots of people. We do not aim to distinguish
something with 51% support from something with 49% support - instead, we
try to raise up several issues, in the form of questions, that a large
number of people care about.

The aim is to give MPs a succinct, clear list of most-popular questions,
rather than a deluge of thousands of emails which take time to assess.

Citizens do
the work of aggregating opinions and assessing others' questions. There is some natural language processing for keyword searches and to present possibly-duplicate questions to citizens before they upload a new one.
We use AI only to suggest things to human users, not to make the decision. This certainly does not remove the risk of algorithmic bias, but we hope it reduces it a little.

Final decisions on what to write, whether another question is equivalent, and what to vote for, rest with humans, thus
providing a more trustworthy way of directing the most important
questions to MPs (although, of course, people can be biased too).

[^1]: Participants may be citizens, permanent residents, under-18s or (other) non-Australian-citizens. The term "MP" includes senators and members of state legislative bodies.

[^2]: The Victorian Parliament has recently introduced a special session for constituent questions: <https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/about/news/2458-constituency-questions-introduced>