I suppose the obvious point is that the decisions were made primarily by other people. The clerks—we don't have any Commons clerks, unfortunately, on this call—who kind of run the division business know who the key stakeholder members are. The most obvious people were those on the Procedure Committee, because they are responsible for making recommendations to the House about what they should do. So the Procedure Committee was the first and most obvious group to show it to.
What we did first was to pick a couple of members—the chair and a couple of others—from that committee, just to have a little look to see where things were, to get kind of an initial view, I suppose both to take away the fear of what is possible and have some reassurance that something was being done and that it was moving forward, and also to get their initial feedback. It was kind of leaning on—perhaps not the right term—a number of clerks to say to us, “And these are the other people..”.
The thing that's kind of missed, as I said earlier, and that was really key to the success of this project, was our partnership with the senior clerks on the Commons side who are responsible for running divisions. There were a couple of them who were heavily involved in this. It was a real, proper, full-on partnership of the procedural side and the technical side coming together to come up with a solution that would work for members. The clerks' involvement was really key to our getting the right people involved.
As well as the Procedure Committee, as I said, we talked to the Administration Committee. We talked to the chief whip and the leader of the House. We also spoke to a number of government ministers.
The other part of this was speaking to some government ministers, whose job it is to get legislation through Parliament. That was a view that we hadn't understood in detail. Say I'm a minister and I'm trying to move this bill through the House, what would I be doing? Because in this virtual world, my whip isn't here saying, right, these people are going to be here at this time.... It was understanding from them what they might need, what are they to understand...because they know how to get their business through.
I guess the answer to the question is that it was reaching out to as many people as possible to give them relatively small personal demos, and giving a more detailed demo at least once to the Procedure Committee. Then we ran drop-in sessions, for want of a better word, on Microsoft Teams, much like a Zoom call. We opened up the invitation to all members to drop in between the hours of 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. We would take their details, call them back and give them a one-to-one demonstration.
So taking it through the key stakeholders, we gave all members the opportunity, if they wanted, to call up and have somebody take them through the system and show them how it worked. It was to build that familiarization, because even though it's familiar, it's challenging and different.