Most membership organisations have the same problem and rarely name it. The organisation has a position. Two hundred members, branch officers, candidates and volunteers speak about that position every week — on a doorstep, on the phone, in a group chat, at a public meeting. Nobody is going off-message on purpose. They simply do not know, at the moment they are typing, what the agreed line is or whether their own wording strays from it.
The usual answers are a shared drive nobody opens, a group chat where the good version scrolls away by Thursday, and a communications officer who becomes the bottleneck, and then the reason people stop asking.
We have built something else. There is a demonstration of it you can open without an account.
Open the demonstration →How a line travels
Five steps, and the demonstration walks you through four of them.
What you can do on it
There is no sign-up and no account. Your draft goes to the check and comes back with what it found; nothing is written to a database, nothing is logged, and nothing is attributed to you.
Find the line
Choose a region and where you are posting, and see the copy the organisation has put out for that place.
Most entries carry more than one version, because the wording that works on a doorstep is not the wording that works on Instagram.
Write your own, and see what it flags
Type a draft. As you type, the check:
- names the conduct clause your wording touches
- quotes that clause back to you
- says which phrase set it off
- names the clauses it has no pattern for, so a clean result is not mistaken for a clearance
It does not block you and it does not rewrite you. It tells you what a reviewer is going to see before you send it to one.
That check is not a mock-up. It is the same code the working app runs, reading the text you type.
See it from the other side
The moderator's view shows submissions with their flags already attached, and the escalation path a contested one would follow.
Approve, return and escalate are on the page and do nothing; the demonstration says so under each card.
See what an approval records
The last section shows the shape of the record: the copy, who approved it, and the fingerprint of every policy it cites.
In the working app, that record is also:
- signed as it is saved, with a key held for that organisation's Village
- dated, where the timestamp service can be reached, by a clock outside our platform
- downloadable, so it can be checked on your own machine with ordinary command-line tools and nothing of ours
One limit worth having in front of you: the signing key is ours. What can be checked without us is a supplier's signature, not the organisation's own.
The demonstration page describes all of this. It does not perform it, because it talks to no database.
The party in it is invented
The organisation you will see is called The Tussock Party. It does not exist. Its policies, its conduct rules, its people and its approved copy are all written for the demonstration, and a notice at the top of the page and again at the foot says so. It is a political party because the problem is sharpest there — the app itself takes no view on anyone's politics, and what it handles is who may say what, on whose authority, and what was agreed.
Not every party can use it either. There is an admission test, set out in full on the demonstration page, and it turns on what a party's own constitution binds it to rather than on what its website says this month.
What it does, and what it refuses to do
| It does | It does not |
|---|---|
| Put the agreed wording where someone can find it at the moment they need it | Write your copy, or have a view about what your organisation should say |
| Name the clause a draft touches, and quote it, before anyone else sees it | Rewrite a member's words. A flag never becomes a veto |
| Follow the escalation chain your own rules already set | Decide who is allowed to approve things. A supplier deciding that would be writing a piece of your constitution |
| Make disagreement visible early, rather than after a screenshot is circulating | Stop anyone saying what they like — with one exception, below |
The one exception. It stops copy citing a policy the organisation has withdrawn — the only case where what a member wrote is refused on its content, rather than for the ordinary reasons any app refuses things. It is there because a member cannot reasonably be expected to know a policy was retired last week. If the policy comes back, the copy returns to exactly the status it held before, recorded as a restoration and never as a fresh approval.
Who can use it
The demonstration is open to anyone with the link. The app is not. For a political party there is an admission test, published in full on the demonstration page, and it turns on what the party's own constitution binds it to rather than on what its website says this month. Whether and how that test should apply to a union or a professional body is not settled yet.
Have a look
Ten minutes with it will tell you more than another paragraph here.
Open the demonstration →If it looks like it would help, or if you try it and it plainly would not, we would like to hear which. There is a contact page, and a "Contact us" button in the footer of this page opens the same form.
And if you have seen enough, there is an application form. It asks about how you communicate now and how you handle disagreement, because those answers decide whether this is any use to you.