Conferences are like London buses. You go for ages without one showing up, then they all come along at once.  (Actually, I find there are always plenty of London buses, but they are usually the wrong ones and not going anywhere anyway, but I digress.) Suffice it say that, thanks to an improbable number of internet/politics conferences in a very short period, I feel I am becoming something of a connaisseur of the genre.

Some conferences lean more to the politics (and the attendees to the political) while others are decidedly more techie. Though these conferences are billed as being about the conjunction between the two, there is nevertheless a tension. You can sense when the techies have had enough of politics (and, more so, of institutions) and want more geekery, and, conversely, when the politicos start literally and metaphorically to drift off when the alphabet soup thickens too much for them. The Dublin Web Summit (alias #dws) sat in the middle pretty well. The UN-sponsored World e-Parliament Conference in Washington, leaned radically to the political, full of parliamentary speakers, MPs and senior officials. If you want to know how far it leaned institutional, consider (gasp!) that it had no Twitter hashtag, nor indeed wifi in the conference hall!

The Personal Democracy Forum in Barcelona trended geeky, I would say. It was heavily twittered (hashtag #pdfeu), notwithstanding problems with the wifi (which the organisers clearly considered a major disaster – another indication), and was attended by a heavily macbook-using, sub-40, definitely not tie-wearing crowd. Yep, these were seriously online people whose connectivity was both a major theme and major concern of the conference. The odd dissenting voices (“it ain’t necessarily so“, c.f. #dws) were few and muted as compared with Dublin, and no-one questioned the world-changing importance of Web 2.0, with discussion limited to how far and how fast. The conference orthodoxy and underlying assumption was that we need more and better internet (web 2.0) in politics, that the world will be better and more democratic as that happens, and sad headshakes greeted tales of benighted politicians who weren’t on Twitter.  OK, I caricature, but I am just trying to give the sense.

Two more scene setting illustrations for those unaccustomed to such an environment. (That would have been me less than two years ago.) As I said, the whole thing was being twittered, so the organisers arranged that the flow of tweets would be projected onto the display screen behind the podium at times when it wasn’t being used for presentations. So this created a real-time commentary on what the speakers were saying, as they were saying it, appearing behind them. Says something about the web: people’s remarks, and remarks on remarks, both local and distant, were both part of the local bubble and out there in the whole world to see at all times. Am I alone in thinking there is something distinctly freaky, alienating and post-modern about this? The other thing which some might find remarkable was that the whole event was audio-streamed live on the internet, so that anyone interested could listen in. Soon, video footage will be on line too. Again, I ask myself, why be there at all? (The answer of course is that – pace hypothetical Facebook radicals – people still want to meet other people and talk to them. Still, something disrespectful within me can’t help wondering if a Web 2.0 conference isn’t at some level a total contradiction in terms, especially when you consider the cost in terms of dead polar bears of all those transatlantic and European flights…

But again I digress.

I hope I don’t sound negative. I am just trying to apply the quipping iconoclasm which is de rigueur at such events. Actually it was a great conference, which, for me at least, brought many insights and ideas. The speakers were on the whole top-notch, the questions intelligent and incisive, the thinking sharp, and the organisation very professional.

Did these Americans fully “get” Europe? had they really grasped the cultural diversity of the continent?

The venue for the event was Jean Nouvel’s remarkable Agbar Tower on the Avenida Diagonal. Very design. Inside this Barcelona icon, somewhat ironically for a conference placing such emphasis on openness and networking, the conference constituted an energetic English-speaking bubble, inside which one could almost forget where we were. This was English with a marked American accent, moreover. The conference was in fact the first European edition of an already quite venerable US event, the New York based Personal Democracy Forum, which is in its sixth year. The American dimension was significant. Many presenters were American, many examples were American, many lessons were American. There were slight stirrings in the European undergrowth about this: did these Americans fully “get” Europe? had they really grasped the cultural diversity of the continent? was the language barrier sufficiently understood and accommodated? The answer to these questions is probably “no”, at least to some extent. The American examples paraded before the conference – the Obama campaign, the Sunlight Foundation, the social media promotion of Congressman Joe Wilson (the one who told Obama “you lie!”) – would not necessarily translate to the European context, and, indeed, when things got around to the EU specifically, the Americans seemed rather lost and puzzled. “Being an American observing a discussion about whether the Internet will unify the EU is fascinating. Only could happen here”, tweeted one American presenter, David All.

One illustration of this disconnect which occurred to me was a rather inspiring video shown by a presenter on the Obama campaign, featuring diverse citizens from across the United States expressing their hopes and desire for change. I tried to imagine the same video in a European context, with each of those citizens speaking a different language. Where would that emotional impact be then? In America, the political, cultural and linguistic commonalities trump the diversity, from sea to shining sea; in Europe the picture between the Barents Sea and the Mediterranean encompasses cultural diversity of an altogether different order.

If PDF is to prosper in Europe, it will have to carve out a more distinctive identity

All this is not a criticism of the conference, though I suspect that if PDF is to prosper in Europe, it will have to carve out a more distinctive identity. Europeans have an enormous amount to learn from Americans, especially in areas like this, so there is no question of the value of exercises such as this, it’s just that I suspect that what we learn, and how we apply it, will be rather different from what our American friends thought they were passing on to us.

One nice touch during the conference was the screening of well-known online videos to accompany transition periods between sessions. The conference opened, before a word had been uttered, with the Sick Puppies’ “Free Hugs” video (53 million views), just to get us into a bonding mood, and concluded with the wonderful “Where the hell is Matt” video (25 million). Along the way, friends in the Commission will be pleased to note that their famous “porno” film (7.7 million) put in an appearance too (which, incidentally, I am intrigued to see is now guarded by YouTube’s “possibly inappropriate content” barrier, demanding to know that you’re 18 before you can watch). This tone setting was a nice move, and heralded a conference during which many presenters would show videos.

I attended a session on the use of online videos in the propagation of political messages. Two presenters, making quite a contrast, stick in my mind. One was Kate Allbright-Hanna, Obama ’08 video director, who described that what matters in political video is making a connection with your audience, not necessarily trying to “go viral” all the time. Her team made and – significant, this – collected thousands of videos during the campaign. As she pointed out, the ones that stick in people’s minds are not necessarily the high-production-value ones, but often quite easy-to-make, semi-amateur efforts. Some of these can just end up taking you by surprise. An example she used was this one, designed to counter complacency among supporters resulting from positive polls.

The contrast with Allbright-Hanna came from Italian video blogger and political activist, Diego Bianchi, alias “Zoro”, who breaks all the rules with his long, rambling videos, but which clearly touch a chord with like-minded people in Italy. This is a guy who has 2.3 million views for a slow-paced 23 minute video on YouTube. In the session, he was especially proud of his underwater reaction to Silvio Berlusconi’s party congress, which, to be honest, I think left the American moderator somewhat perplexed. Yep, it’s those cultural differences again…

Just for the record, I also myself showed a video, a home-made résumé (by Tibo) of our 2009 online communications campaign on the European elections.  I find people like it.

Online Communication Campaign for European Elections 2009 from Web Com on Vimeo.

There were too many interesting sessions to do justice to them all, and frustratingly, but probably inevitably, excellent breakout sessions were scheduled against each other (ha! – a reason for all that twittering and streaming, even for people at the conference!), so I will quickly pick out a few tidbits which caught my eye or ear.

An early highlight was Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign’s New Media Director, who gave a really interesting presentation on the techniques used in the campaign, but who, I am sorry to report, was memorable for me principally because of his excellent Keynote slides (I’m so shallow sometimes), which almost persuaded me to drop my principled position against handing out slides to all attendees (I still want his!).

In a breakout session about using the social media for political campaigning, David All was provocative (especially to US Democrats in the room) and interesting.  He told us about how his company had used social media to leverage the 15 minutes of fame achieved by Representative Joe Wilson by calling out “You lie!” whilst President Obama was in the House presenting his Health Care policy. A breach of House etiquette, doubtless, and the kind of thing we West Wing fans know you wouldn’t say to Jed Bartlett even when you disagree with him, but also, dixit All, true. (This is the bit which cased a local political flurry in the room, hurried calmed by the moderator.) Apart from the interest of the tale All had to tell, the delightful and shameless opportunism with which he had built on a faux pas and the glee with which he breached the de facto Obama-as-demi-god consensus in the conference, an interesting question came up in questions and answers later. Someone asked about platforms, and raised (to most ears in the room) the oh-so-American question of whether Facebook was for whites and MySpace for blacks and other “people of colour” and how this factor would affect strategies for their use. Europeans stirred uneasily at this question, and a European panelist pointed out that “things don’t quite work like that here”, but the question provoked an interesting set of responses about the need to be where the people are, and whether some audiences are more worth trying to reach via social networks than others. Facebook seems, particularly in the US, to have retained some of the white, college, middle-class aura of its Harvard origins, while other networks contrast with that. From All’s perspective, and possibly “unless you’re a rock band”, “MySpace is dead”, a verdict he later extended to LinkedIn.

For connoisseurs of larger than life characters, this session also featured the irrepressible and instantly-recognisable Ravi Singh, for whom a turban is both trade mark and religious apparel, and who, for me, earns almost unique respect at the conference for telling us about how he had “failed totally” to transfer a great US online concept to Europe, “because Europe is different”, something he said had taught him useful lessons about knowing your audience.

“Love your geeks!” was his clarion call

Another provocative speaker earlier in the conference in a far more downbeat style was Tom Steinberg, London-based founder of MySociety.org and thus behind such “practical democracy” sites as fixmystreet.com and theyworkforyou.com. He had two memorable messages: first, that online “democracy” projects didn’t have to be about grand principles, big policies and charismatic personalities, they could be about “just getting things done, openly“. Second, and probably to the most energetic spontaneous applause in the whole event, he called for recognition for the programmers, the people who really do the work. “Love your geeks!” was his clarion call. “Don’t tell me about managers who have great ideas and hire in some programmers to implement them – it’s the geeks who have the ideas and make the breakthroughs” (my memory of his quote).

Finally, and I’d better wrap up before this becomes the longest post in living memory, I must mention probably the most oft-requoted statement in the conference. Dare I say, this came from the slightly unlikely source of French internet activist Jérémie Zimmermann (La Quadrature du Net), who presented his (successful) advocacy of web freedom in the European Parliament, winning an important victory in the Telecoms Package legislation through creating an effective online lobby. The theme of the session was whether a European body politic can be created online. One questioner asked for a straight answer, yes or no. I heard Zimmermann’s response quoted repeated through the rest of the conference: “Yes, but it will be in English”

Just not with an American accent, right, Jérémie?