The app
The Direct Digital Democracy app is where the movement becomes something citizens carry with them and use.
When the platform has sufficient support - through donations and a growing participant base - the app will be built and made freely available. It will be the primary way citizens engage as active DDD participants: deliberating on the five issues, voting, ranking, and seeing the results feed back into the political process in real time.
How it will be built
The app will be built to the standards set out in the Government Digital Service manual - the same rigorous process used to build GOV.UK and NHS.UK, and the gold standard for citizen-facing digital services in the UK.
Those standards cover every stage of development:
Discovery
Understanding what citizens actually need before a line of code is written. Real user research, not assumptions.
Alpha
Building and testing the riskiest parts of the idea quickly and cheaply, with real people, before committing to a full build.
Beta
A working version released to a wider group of users, iterated continuously based on what the evidence shows.
Live
A service that is monitored, maintained, and improved based on ongoing user feedback and changing needs.
At every stage the process is open. Progress will be published. What works and what does not will be shared publicly.
Accessibility is not optional
At least one in five people in the UK has a long-term illness, impairment, or disability. Many more have temporary or situational access needs. The app will meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards as a minimum - the legal requirement for public-facing digital services - and will be tested with real users across a range of assistive technologies throughout development, not just at the end.
A democracy that is not accessible to everyone is not a democracy.
Open source by design
The app's code will be publicly available. Anyone will be able to inspect it, audit it, and verify that it does what it says it does. This is not just good practice - it is a democratic principle. A platform asking citizens to trust it with their political participation cannot hide behind closed code.
When does it get built?
Building starts when there is enough to build it properly. That means sufficient donations to fund a small, experienced team through the discovery and alpha phases without cutting corners.
The GDS process exists precisely because cutting corners on citizen-facing services produces expensive failures. The history of UK government IT is full of them. This project will not add to that history.
If you want to make the build happen sooner, donate. Every contribution moves the start date forward.
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