New Blood Entry — #giffgaffrules

Our idea is to launch a political party modelled on and associated with giffgaff.

It’s called #giffgaffrules.

#giffgaffrules takes a central truth about giffgaff and pursues it. giffgaff is run by its two-million-plus members. It dwarfs membership of the Conservative (124,000) and Labour (540,000) parties. giffgaff is the best authority on – and example of – democracy in the UK. Why should its ‘run by you’ model stop at phones?

Our main challenge lay in advertising giffgaff’s mutuality – particularly online, where any work can quickly become a digital monologue and lack the interactivity and reciprocal nature of physical conversation.

We realised it would be far more valuable if giffgaffers engaged with each other rather than ‘us’ – our advertising, or the corporate persona of giffgaff.

We stopped our initial approach – trying to advertise the virtues of democracy. And engineered a scenario that could show, by itself, democracy’s power. So we created #giffgaffrules.

No political party is transparent or accountable without a manifesto. So we wrote ours.

We really wanted interactivity in our manifesto. But we were wary of unedited user-generated (or member-generated!) content.

We’re excited by recent developments in natural language in AI. We realised we could build AI to compile and write a manifesto from people’s posts about #giffgaffrules on social media. The first ever manifesto written by true collective, free from human bias.

Our manifesto and social posts are a springboard. To encourage people to organise and run #giffgaffrules entirely by themselves.