Labour-leaning ginger-group Compass is inviting policy proposals to be submitted and debated on this site and at meetings around the country.

The site says that the proposals will then be voted on by the Compass membership – forming the policy priorities for the organisation to campaign on. The successful polices will sit alongside the narrative that the organisation will be promoting: How to Live in the 21st Century.

From what I can see, Compass went to a London-based company called Headshift to develop and run with this idea, and they couldn’t have gone to better people. Headshift have forgotten more than most comparable consultancies have learned about the effective promotion of interactivity.

I’d still be interested to see how the voting reflects pre-designed agendas and how valuable that part of the process can be. The key development for me, though, is that the Labour left is getting a little bit away from the formalised deliberations that have always dominated political caucuses.

Surely, in a representative democracy, no membership body can impose policies upon the Parliamentarians that it promotes to the legislature. All it can do is to hold a conversation that Parliamentarians deem to be worth eavesdropping upon? That – at least in part – is what Compass appear to be doing, and that can only be a good thing.