The Six Acts online poll will go live to the public at 4pm on the 17th August 2019.
To mark the occasion and to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, the Peterloo Memorial Campaign and the Six Acts team will be throwing a public 'Illegal PICNIC' launch party on the site of the massacre – Manchester Central forecourt, Windmill Street, M2 3GX on the 17th August, from 3 – 5:30pm.
The event will kick off with regional marchers and parades arriving at 3pm, followed by a shared picnic with live entertainment and a 'Sedition Corner' a democratic marketplace for trading ideas, votes and arguments over a range of radical ideas designed to reinvigorate democracy for the 21st century.
For more information about the 17th August Illegal Picnic event, including opportunities for stall holders, see the PMC events page.
We will open the Six Acts online poll website at 4pm, 17th August. This is when you will be able to log in, submit proposals and begin voting on them. Remember: Each Six Acts proposal will be strictly limited to 100 words maximum.
Submitting a proposal - We are not limiting the number of proposals any individual or organisation can submit to the poll.
A user can submit a new proposal to the poll at any time during the live period. There are some practical restrictions and guidelines for submissions which we have implemented to prevent misuse and maximise constructive input. Please read our 9 Rules for the 6 Acts and Categories Explained documents before submitting a proposal.
We urge participants to road-test their proposals on friends, colleagues and the Six Acts community social media platforms before submitting to the poll. This will give you a chance to refine, tweak or reconsider your proposal, giving it a better chance of being a contender for the final Six Acts document. It is also important that you are completely happy with your proposal at the time you submit it because once submitted you will not be able to edit it.
Voting - A user can only vote for each proposal once and this vote can be removed by the user at any time during the live poll period, should you change your mind.
While we leave it to the user to decide the number of proposals they vote for, we urge people to treat their votes sparingly, with respect, and only vote for proposals that you believe are genuine, effective and feasible reforms for optimising our democratic practices.
In addition to adding a vote, users can also dislike a proposal. 'Votes' and 'Dislikes' will both be visible to the public as two separate counters. Adding a vote will not affect the number of dislikes, and disliking will not affect the number of votes.
Users can filter the proposals to view by:
The online poll will be live from the 17th August. During this live period we will release regular updates on Six Acts social media of the current version of the document. These will include the leading proposal in each category, along with links to the other 5 closest contenders.
The first formal publication of the Six Acts document will be published towards the end September 2019. The exact closing date for voting and submissions will be confirmed no later than two weeks prior to closure.
After publication of the first Six Acts document in September 2019, we will consult with our participants regarding re-opening the Six Acts poll again in 2020, and the possibility of continuing to run the poll on an annual basis.
The end document will be a single-page mandate from the people which articulates their demands for democratic reform. We invite the media, campaign groups, organisations, individuals and politicians to cite, publicise and adopt these Six Acts as a basis for policy-making or further research.
The Six Acts document will also serve as a position statement or manifesto that groups and individuals can sign up to and endorse, as well as being adapted into a petition to be presented to the Petitions Committee for debate in Parliament.
All of the proposals submitted to the poll will be preserved on the site in an archive for future debate and reference.
Rather than a fixed, rigid manifesto, we want the Six Acts to be a working document which can be updated or reviewed annually and revisited on an ongoing basis... particularly on the 16th of August each year