Building digital democracy

Following the successful application of the Change lab voting system during the recent TSSA hybrid conference in Birmingham, we took the opportunity to attend the ‘Democracy During Darkness’ fringe event at this year’s Labour Party conference. 

The session was a great space to talk about how unions digitally innovated to strengthen democracy and further drive support through the Coronavirus pandemic. The session also allowed space to discuss what could be next in the journey of digital transformation for labour organisations.

The journey of digital transformation for trade unions is not a new one. But the pandemic has ripped the plaster off and exposed how important it is for organisations to be accessible for all their members. It’s more important than ever to be where your membership is.

E-Democracy tools, such as the Change Lab voting system, allow for remote participation and accurate decision making, and that’s exactly what we found when we adopted this new technology for TSSA conference 2021.

We now need to work on embedding our collective decision and problem-solving processes to drive engagement as well as digital inclusion, and much of this work is already underway.

TSSA’s Executive Committee have given clear direction and mandates for key projects. The union is currently going through an exciting pace of change with the introduction of a brand new more sophisticated website, a new membership system, and a state of the art education platform.

We of course want to hear from our members about ways in which they are using digital to communicate with other members in their workplace or indeed give us feedback on ways we can improve. Simply email comms@tssa.org.uk