An interesting showcase of what Parliament currently does online getting underway as I write: the hearings (“auditions” in Franglais) of the commissioners-designate for Barroso’s 2009-2014 Commission. Even with our “old” website, combined with the newer tools we have picked up over last year, there seems to be a reasonable amount we can do.

Tibo commented in the last post on editorial aspects of all this, so I’ll just stick to the nuts and bolts. What are we offering?

I was recently asked to sum it up in an email. Here’s what I wrote:

QUOTE

First we have a special hearings website, where we will be referring everyone for the coverage. All stories and press releases on the hearings will be flagged for automatic publishing there, and all hearings will be streamed live.  After the hearings, recorded video-on-demand will be available via the pages devoted to each candidate.

Heads of EU indeed

The site also contains all general infomation (e.g. on the procedure) and all documentation (e.g. CVs, questionnaires, responses, etc.) anyone could reasonably want.

On the Headlines page we have published a “why you should be interested” article, followed by a “how to follow the hearings” piece as a guide to our online offerings. Today, a little “in numbers” article has been added ahead of the meat of the content on the hearings themselves. There is also be a top page banner linking to the hearings site.

Every day during the hearings we will publish an announcement of the hearings scheduled for the day, with all the necessary links. We will also publish a daily roundup of the previous day’s hearings

The Press Service will prepare press releases on each hearing, to be published asap after the hearing.  Each hearing will itself be followed by a press point with the candidate. These will also be webstreamed.

As I said, all relevant material will be published on the hearings website as well as on the usual Headlines and Press Service pages of Europarl.

EuroparlTV will produce a daily news bulletin on the hearings. This will be online in the original language each evening with all other languages added during the night and during the following morning. We will embed these videos in our roundup stories too.

Meanwhile, EuroparlTV has already produced a range of introductory videos on the hearings:

On Facebook, we have an “event” for the hearings, and publish regular status updates through the hearings process. We have set up a “discussion topic” where we will invite Facebook fans to comment on the hearings throughout the process. We will link to this from all our editorial material on the site

On Flickr, we will publish a stream of photos from all the hearings.

On Twitter, though it is sadly not feasible to twitter the whole thing live (!), we will keep up a steady stream of tweets pointing to the latest news, new publications, etc.

On our YouTube channel, we will publish the EuropartTV bulletins in English asap each day.

UNQUOTE

Give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and they’ll come and get it.

Now you know. But – at least here – it’s not really my intention to market what we are doing (though please feel free to follow the links above), but to provide an illustration of where we are now – our current possibilities and limits. This might help the discussion we’re having at the moment about the future of Parliament’s online presence.

I just checked. The early stats are showing a lot of traffic to the hearings website. Some consolation for Tibo, sometimes just give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and, if they’re interested, they’ll come and get it.