“Dynamic Democracy” was my first attempt at building a political website, in this case an experiment in the principle of Direct Democracy, that is, the principle that policy should not be dictated by government but by the people via a series of referendums. It lived at dynamicdemocracy.org.uk.

The site worked a lot like Digg (at the time—as of 2017, perhaps the better comparison is Reddit). Users submitted their own policy ideas, which could then be up-voted or down-voted by the community. The best, therefore, would rise to the top and serve as an example of what the public (or at least the subset of website users) wanted.

It was based on Drupal, using the since-discontinued “Drigg” plugin for its submission & voting mechanism.

It ran for a few months 2010, but ended up with a significant spam problem and very few actual users. It was a nice experiment but, of course, not (yet?) a feasible way of running a government. I closed it down (blog post here) when the government announced its own petition-gathering website, first named “Your Freedom”, now simply named “UK Government Petitions”. Although not quite the same idea, with official government backing, it naturally became more popular than Dynamic Democracy could ever have been.

The Internet Archive captured some front-page content from when the site was live, though the CSS and any sub-page content has been lost.