Simply Understand started nearly a year ago with the not-so-simple idea of making a small corner of the UK’s democracy more, well, democratic!
Everyone know how much of a struggle it can be to get your story heard by government institutions. Consultations are supposed to be one way for us to get through, but so often they’re so complicated and overwhelming. Sure, sometimes they deal with complicated subjects, but no matter how complicated they are, don’t we all have a right to understand and contribute to them?
With that in mind, today Simply Understand’s been given it’s first chance at a 100% genuine, official consultation makeover! The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills are consulting on Credit cards and store cards. Their 100 page original consultation has been reduced to just 10. You can:
- Download the PDF
- Listen to the podcast (voiced by debonair blogger and writer Matt from Ebonics and Irony)
- Or visit the credit consultation website, and leave a comment or vote.
The first step?
Is this the first step on the road to making all government consultations easier to understand? It could be, but only if it actually works. And that means more people replying, more people downloading and more people listening and understanding. And if you read it through, and there are bits you don’t understand — well, I think that’s helpful too, and you should tell them that. Because if you can’t understand it now, how’s it going to help anyone?
Pass it on!
Email, Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, heck even Myspace it, or just print it out and give it to people (double sided to save paper). The more people see this, the more chance we’ve got to encourage more easy to understand consultations!
Corinne Pritchard
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Excellent work, Corrine.
Ah, I saw an article on this on the BBC site and I was so happy! Financial iunformation scared the cr*p outta me as, being dyslexic, I’m scared I’m going to misread soemthign and then get charged stupid amounts of money for it. Having the information in a format that’s easy to read and understand will make it a less scary prospect!
Great work. Wish someone was doing what you do here in the Netherlands!
Thank you very much. This is definitely in the spirit of My Society — something important made simpler and easier, but without the need for Djikstra’s algorithm or the post code database ;-).Keep up the good work!
Thus is genuinely excellent, makes something that I would never normally read actually accessible and useful