First of all your concept rocks. We are trying to do something similar in the US with local politics. I was reading your website thinking, “Amen to that, brother.”
Second of all, I really like where you are going with promoting civil discussion. Let’s face it there are enough personal attacks and incivility in politics as it is and I’ve learned that not everyone has the skills to conduct civil discourse.
After reading your topic, I am inspired to really brainstorm about how to do this.
You can change the heart icon for likes to a different symbol and promote it as approving the civility of a post but I suspect people might just start using it as they would a like icon as that is so ingrained.
One thought I have is we installed the Q-A (question-answer) plugin, which permits people to upvote one reply per topic. Ideally, some of us would like it if members could upvote more than one reply per topic (or at least be able to set the limit). In any case, the upvoting of replies could be promoted as specifically for the most civil, thoughtful answer.
I am educating myself on tags and don’t know much about them, but wouldn’t a problem be that if every member was allowed to use tags, the tags (where you pick the reason for the upvote) would have to be associated with the upvote mechanism?