NEWS

OU graduates building website to change the conversation between Oklahoma lawmakers, voters

Sebastian Tippett (left) and Ben Cooper are the creators of Herd, an online platform that seeks to connect Oklahoma elected officials with their constituents.

In an era where social media dialogue often quickly devolves from talking to yelling, two University of Oklahoma graduates are trying to change the conversation. 

Ben Cooper, 24, and Sebastian Tippett, 22, are working to launch a website to make political dialogue between Oklahoma lawmakers and their constituents more constructive and civilized.

The duo created Herd, a platform that will allow politicians and voters to unofficially poll Oklahomans on political topics and spur healthy debate. 

In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, Cooper and Tippett noticed social media platforms were not the place for productive political conversations. It was exhausting to scroll through social media feeds and read people arguing with each other, Tippett said. 

“These tools that bring us together should be the absolute most powerful tools for our democracy, for bringing up ideas and lending feedback to our politicians, so we decided to try and tackle that problem,” Tippett said.

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Don’t confuse Herd with a social media platform. Cooper said they don’t intend for Herd to compete with popular social media tools like Twitter, Facebook or Nextdoor. Instead, Herd is intended to complement those platforms by allowing anyone to ask their audiences questions and then push out the responses on their social feed. 

As part of a six-week bipartisan beta test that just wrapped up, Cooper and Tippett asked Reps. Forrest Bennett, D-Oklahoma City, and Daniel Pae, R-Lawton, to take Herd for a test drive to communicate with their constituents. A former intern of Bennett's, Tippett was party inspired to co-create Herd after his experiences at the Oklahoma state Capitol. 

Reps. Forrest Bennett, (left) and Daniel Pae

“Our hope is that we can take the lessons that we've learned from this beta test and expand it out into a version two of our product that I think will be focused much more on providing data that's useful and understandable and facilitating more structured but more understandable conversations for people,” Cooper said. 

Over the course of the beta test, Bennett and Pae asked their followers how they felt about bills advancing in the Oklahoma Legislature and polled them on hot-button issues, like whether students should return to in-person schooling during the pandemic. They also asked their followers to ask questions of their own, to see what kind of responses they got. 

“The whole point is to get various perspectives, points of view, and really, have a civil, candid, open line of communication with each other,” Pae said. “Right now in politics in America, there’s a lot of shouting and not a lot of listening going on.”

Bennett described Herd as a town hall-style meeting between legislators and their constituents. 

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Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual communication tools are more important now than ever, but people get emboldened from behind the keyboard to say things they wouldn’t say in person, he said. 

The hope is that Herd can be a place for productive conversations because it’s designed in a way to head off ridiculous arguments, Bennett said. 

“It’s obvious there’s a lot of people that have the same interest in trying to bring people back together, but it’s to get people back to the table to talk,” he said. “It’s obvious the desire is there, across the board, it’s just finding the way to do that now.”

Tippett and Cooper, who live in Austin, plan to formally launch Herd soon, likely in June. 

In the meantime, they will be fine-tuning the platform and trying to recruit more lawmakers and users to join Herd. 

Although Tippett and Cooper live south of the Red River, the duo plans to keep Herd focused on Oklahoma politics and policy.