Richard has blogged about working with Doteveryone and Resolver to prototype the ‘Online Resolution Service’. The Online Resolution Service is part of Doteveryone’s better redress work on how the public should be able to seek redress in the digital age. The prototype comes on the back of the UK government’s proposals around how to manage online harms.

The Online Resolution Service is a prototype of a shared platform for complaints about online services. It is aligned with the government’s proposals and aims to show how they might work in practice.

Much like fixmystreet.com does with potholes, the Online Resolution Service gives the public a single place to report issues without having to worry about if they are reporting them to the right place. It abstracts away the complexity of different companies having different processes. We also imagined wit would have an API to give companies control over how they manage issues, allowing them to customise how reports are handled.

The government’s online harms white paper imagines a role for civil society organisations to support the public. The prototype shows how, by creating a shared platform to write and manage content and monitor types of complaint, civil society can work in a more networked way.

Shared platforms like this could have interesting applications in other domains too. These are different from the commodity components we see in government as a platform implementations (payments, notifications, etc.). They are more about creating collaborative tools for civil society organisations to meet user needs, together, rather than removing duplication.

Read Doteveryone’s report: Better Redress for the Digital Age.