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title: features
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Influence without Surveillance
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## Features for citizens

Ask a question
: Direct a question to a particular MP or committee. Tell them who should have to answer

***Upvote or flick past a question***

Add metadata to an existing question
: Add an explanation or background link,
e.g. to a bill or explanatory memorandum
: Add a suggestion for who should answer
: Add a topic or keyword

Attach a link to Hansard[^1]
: where a question was asked or answered

Search questions
: by keyword

Sort questions
: by timing or popularity,

Filter questions
: by electorate, answer status, committee, MP, etc

Follow another citizen
: who may or may not be an MP.

## Features for MPs

MPs can do everything that other citizens can do, and also respond to questions, whether those directed to them or to other MPs. There are several ways to respond to a question:

Raise it in Parliament
: for example, raise it in Question Time or ask it in a commmittee or other hearing;

Answer a question publicly via RightToAsk,
: which generates a notification to the person who asked it;

Comment on a question
: or on an answer or comment from another MP;

Raise it in a confidential parliamentary setting
: and make a (public) response to say that the matter was raised in a confidential context and will be considered in the committee's final report;

Answer it privately by DM
: generally for private questions only of interest to the individual who asked (see [Direct Messages](#subsec:DMs) below);

Reject / disavow / re-tag the question
: If the question should be asked elsewhere.
MPs generally told us that they would value---and respond to---questions
only if they
- came from their electorate, or
- related to their portfolios (in the case of ministers) and came from the relevant state (in the case of State MPs), or
- related to their committee responsibilities.

The aim is to streamline this at both ends, both making it easy for MPs to identify relevant questions with high support (including high support within their constituency if relevant) and also easy for citizens to understand how to direct their questions in a way that makes them more likely to have influence.

## Accounts and roles

Organisations may also have accounts. These have the privileges of citizens---they can pose and vote on questions, but not answer them. However, the details of their account structure are more like an MPs, in the sense that we seek some evidence that they actually represent their claimed organisation, and allow multiple individuals to speak on their behalf. See [Security and Privacy](/ttDlv_zvT-eufOUZM-LgJA) for more details.

## Sorting, searching and following features

You can *search* the contents of questions, *follow* a person (who may be an MP, organisation or other citizen) or *filter* by question metadata such as tags and answer status. Every MP, committee and inquiry has standardised tags. MPs and citizens may also generate their own tags.

Questions can be **sorted**

- by *recent popularity*, i.e. the number or fraction of upvotes in the last day or hour;
- by *popularity*, i.e. the total number of upvotes;
- by *proportional popularity*, i.e. the total fraction of upvotes per citizen who viewed it;
- or by a weighted combinaton of the above.

Subject to privacy requirements (that there is a minimum number of respondents from the electorate), these sorts can run within a certain constituency, allowing MPs (and anyone else) to assess the popularity of a question to their own constituents.

The default sort order will be by *recent popularity*. This is to ensure users are shown a set of questions which reflect currently relevant issues, rather than questions which were very popular in the past, but which are now outdated.

## Feedback features

The best and most positive kind of feedback will be to have suggested (or voted on) a question that is subsequently raised in Parliament or meaningfully answered by the MP. This can be emphasised in several ways.

- A notification if a question you wrote is raised in Parliament.
- The same, when you upvoted it. (Note however that this would require local storage of which questions you voted on.)

There are also a number of ways we could offer rewards to those who suggested popular questions.

- Electronic rewards or prizes for asking your first question, getting at least 50 votes on a question, etc.
- Notifications when other people upvote your questions.
- Leaderboards for people who have cast the most votes?

## Civics and education features

State and federal electoral commissions and parliaments have online features for helping citizens find their electorate and representatives. However, these can be challenging to navigate for people who are not already familiar with how Australia's political systems work. RightToAsk provides an accessible way for citizens to look up their representatives. The app then remembers their state and federal representatives.

<a id="subsec:DMs"> </a>

## Possible extra feature: Direct Messages

Right To Ask will incorporate end-to-end encrypted direct messages so that MPs can follow up directly with citizens if needed.

Each participant can set their own policy on whether they wish to receive DMs from

- nobody
- people they have sent a DM to
- people they follow
- their MPs
- (other) MPs
- anybody

## Use of AI in searching and suggesting

Our feature that allows searching questions and suggesting questions similar to draft questions uses artificial intelligence. This use of AI introduces an unavoidable bias resulting from the data used to train it.

RightToAsk uses a pre-trained model from John Wieting, Kevin Gimpel, Graham Neubig and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick's Paraphrastic Representation at Scale[^2]. The data used to train this model comes from CzEng, a database of Czech-English translations. It sources include EU legislation, fiction, medical works, Navajo, News, parallel webpages, PDFs from the web, subtitles, technical documentation and tweets.

We do not know what bias are inherent to this model, or how they will affect RightToAsk. Its use will be monitored and reviewed.

Bias in the AI could negatively impact RightToAsk if it is more exposed to certain domains. For example, if the model is trained with a lot of data produced by lawyers, and less produced by information technology professionals, it may lead to better aggregation of votes on legal questions than IT-related questions. This could make legal questions appear more popular than IT-related questions, making them more likely to raised and answered.

[^1]: The Hansard is the report of the proceedings of the Australian parliament and its committees. This includes the Senate, House of Representatives, the Federation Chamber and all parliamentary committees. <https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/hansard>

[^2]: Wieting, J., Gimpel, K., Neubig, G. and Berg-Kirkpatrick, T. (2021). Paraphrastic Representations at Scale. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.15114.