Opening up Wales' digital democracy with a flexible online petitions platform

The Challenge

Senedd Cymru (the Welsh Parliament) wanted to offer citizens an easier way to submit a petition to parliament. They were keen to use Unboxed’s experience of building the UK Petitions and States of Jersey Petitions platforms, but needed to adapt this to the specific conditions and protocols of the Senedd. Most importantly, the platform had to be made available in Welsh and English.

Background

Unboxed developed and still maintains the UK Parliament Petitions service. This meant we had a good understanding of how to create an accessible petitions platform. We could also reuse much of the code, allowing us to complete the project in a shorter timeframe. We had built the service to be flexible so that it could be easily scaled to other nations or states without having to start from scratch.

However, the nations of the UK all have different protocols and legislation around public petitions, including how they are submitted, made public and the rules around how they are handled by parliament. Wales has a much smaller population than the UK (just over 3.1 million, compared to more than 68 million in the UK as a whole). This meant that there were different thresholds for when a petition would be considered by committee and when it would be debated in the Senedd.

The Senedd was going through a rebranding process at the time of Unboxed’s work with them, evolving from the National Assembly of Wales to the Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament. We needed to work in a way that would make it easy to update the front end CSS (for example, fonts and colours) once the brand guidance became available.

Our approach

While we had significant experience of building petitions platforms, we knew that a ‘one size fits all’ approach rarely works across the nations of the UK. The Welsh Parliament wanted a highly accessible, fully bilingual and secure service. We also wanted to ‘future proof’ the code, with a view to scaling up to other nations of the UK, so it was important to build features that could be toggled on and off depending on the requirements of each Parliament.

We started by understanding what a petitions service for Wales would need to deliver both in the front end (the public interface) and in the back end (for translators and administrators). We identified several opportunities to create intuitive functionality around language translation, access to historical records and public documents, setting preferences around thresholds for debate and platform availability, and email communications with users.

A bilingual service that works for all users

We created a service that the public can access on two domains, one in Welsh and one in English. Users can easily switch between languages by clicking a single link. We also created a bespoke path for the Welsh site so that the whole URL reads in Welsh: https://deisebau.senedd.cymru/ (on many translated sites you’ll just see ‘name.uk/welsh’ or similar, which doesn’t really support the principle of a fully bilingual service).

Another challenge was around search - we had no existing database of search terms in Welsh, so created a customised localisation tool for translators. This allowed them to see and then edit the translated text in context, for example, with the surrounding text and where it sits on the page. This will affect how it’s translated. Translators can then edit the text within a preview site before it's published to the live site.

We also wanted to make the back end service easier for translators. Commonly, translators for bilingual sites can view a ‘text string’ (in this case, a word, sentence or phrase) which they can then translate. However, for the petitions service, the context is particularly important. The nuance of what the petitioner is saying is very important to getting their message across. It’s not always easy to translate this when you can only see a few words at a time.

Welsh is a beautiful and intricate language. This poses some other challenges for developers. For example, there are more complicated rules around pluralisation in Welsh. In English, we can define ‘plural’ as ‘more than one’. In code, we can easily identify 0 (zero), 1 (a single item) or 2+ (more than one). In Welsh, there is an additional plural category for 2 so we had to create a slightly different means of recognising when something is ‘more than one’ within the code, such as when we count the number of petitions -

Setting preferences

Unlike UK Parliament Petitions, which are open only when the Parliament is in session, people can submit a petition to the Senedd at any time, any day of the year. For Wales, that meant we turned off the features that close the service at certain times, but the functionality is still there should the Senedd change its policy on this.

Administrators can also set thresholds for how a petition is handled. For Wales, the Parliament stated that any petition with 50 supporters would be discussed by the Petitions Committee. Any with 5,000 supporters would be debated in the Senedd. After launch, the petitions service proved so popular that they changed these thresholds to 250 supporters for Committee and 10,000 for public debate. These thresholds can be changed by administrators in the back end, helping the Parliament to manage demand.

Integrated document management

The Senedd wanted to make it easy for members of the public to access Committee papers (agendas, minutes, responses to a petition). As this is not part of the UK platform, we designed and built a means of integrating with their existing document management system (DMS) so that any user can look up papers relating to any petitions that have been to Committee or debated in the Senedd.

We also made it possible for historic petitions (those created before this new system) to be available for the public to search and view at any time, mapping data from the old system to the new, more accessible service.

Keeping citizens up to date

We used GOV.UK Notify to handle emails for the petitions service, for example, telling a user that we’ve received their petition. Notify is developed and managed by the Government Digital Service and makes it easy for public sector organisations to integrate free and secure email management into other services. That helped us get the service up and running quickly and with minimal costs.

A fair and safe democratic process

With the rapid development of communications technology, governments around the world are naturally concerned about fraud within digital services. We need to ensure that all of our petitions platforms are protected from malicious actors who are trying to skew the results of a petition.

For example, we use scanning and blocking processes to prevent people from using ‘disposable’ email addresses to submit multiple signatures. We set rate limits based on IP address to prevent bots or repeated submissions. These measures are particularly with popular campaigns, like the petition to rescind the 20mph speed limit in Wales, which received over 469,000 signatures within a few days.

What we learnt

We learnt a lot about how to design for translators, in the context of creating a user-friendly, bilingual service. It was very important for translators to see text in context to ensure a correct translation. Most developer tools are based on lists of ‘strings’ to translate. These can be hard to use for translators who are not familiar with software development. As Welsh is not as commonly translated as some languages in global software, it would be hard to find a translator who understood both the Welsh political context and the nuances of translation software development. So we needed to design an interface that was intuitive for translators, without the need for training or any particular technical skills.

The outcome

The petitions service in Wales proved to be very successful in engaging the public with parliamentary democracy. The petitions committee went on to commission Unboxed to create a simple visual interface for their petitions data. We built an interactive map that makes it easy to view the geographical spread of support for a specific campaign or issue.

Later, we created a similar map for UK Petitions data, which has proved incredibly popular with citizens, journalists and political analysts.