I bet you’ve sat in an exam hall , or been asked to complete a questionnaire or stared at the comments box below an article you’ve read and gone “nah-better not”. The rubric is that “your views matter”, but do they really?

Because on these “one to many” responses, you are going to be judged, and while the upside is unclear, the downside is immediately obvious, your opinion doesn’t matter to the examiner, the pollsters and the readership; nor do you. Best stay quiet – best not show off.

I’ve just completed 31 questions asked by the FCA on a consultation about Internal Governance Committees. I’d looked down the list of people who’d be interested in responding and found I could respond as Pension Plowman (workplace pension holder), Pension PlayPen (workplace pension search engine) or as First Actuarial (workplace pension analyst).

I was asking the same question as you “do they care what I think?”

But to answer that question , you have to know who’s asking it. It turned out that the bloke organising this was someone I know , Jonathan Reynolds – who’s a nice decent guy.

This is what the blurb said

We want to know what you think of our proposals.  Please send us your comments by 10 October 2014 in writing or using the online response form on our website.
We will consider your feedback as we finalise the new rules. We intend to publish the rules in a Policy Statement in January 2015

So Jonathan was asking me (Henry) to feed into the final rules that would govern my retirement savings plan, and those of my colleagues and clients. Oh and to the 1.2m customers who might rely on http://www.pensionplaypen.com and the 6m people still to be auto-enrolled.

Now this is a specialist interest of mine and I wouldn’t be expecting too many clicks on that online response form link . But I thought I’d tweet the link with a bit of encouragement anyway.

Just done @pensionplaypen response to http://t.co/JDuncfMUGm FCA consults on IGCs. Would urge you do the same. Important and useful paper!

— Henry Tapper (@henryhtapper) August 25, 2014

Because whether you’re weighing up whether your company or organisation should respond, or if you’re thinking about whether you’ve got something to say, then you almost certainly have. And even if you don’t say anything original, or say something stupid, you are not going to be doing any harm.

But this is where it gets a bit tricky, because you don’t know who is judging you and you don’t know where it will end. I remember when I was a junior meeting Barbara Castle and telling her that SERPS seemed much more sensible than contracting out of SERPS (to me). And she quoted me in the House of Lords and when the PR firm who monitored mentions of Eagle Star picked up on this , I was invited to see the Head of Government and Industry Affairs who demanded to know what business I had speaking for the company like that.

And of course he was right, I should have said, “the views expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer”.

But that was then. That was when we didn’t have senior civil servants washing up your tea mug , or @greggmcclymont sorting out labour policy on @twitter or Martin Lewis getting PPI redress for 4m policyholders from a link on http://www.moneysavingexpert.com

This is now, and now is Open Government, social media and the empowerment of your voice. Your submission, when it arrives at the FCA, looks exactly like Standard Life’s or the ABI’s. Judging by the feed back published in recent paper (you are as likely to see an individual or at start up like Pension PlayPen quoted as any of the big players.

Now knowing some of the people on the other side of these submissions, I am confident that you will be heard, your opinion will count – and just because you have responded -because you did give a toss- your opinion is that much more valuable.