Mid-March before the first post this year! But a lot has happened, believe me, including the trip which inspired this – OK, I admit it  - slow-burner of a reaction to some fantastically interesting meetings in Washington and New York last January.

This was a high-quality visit. You  know, the kind of visit where you envy almost everyone you meet their cutting edge, exciting and oh-so-cool jobs.

We were not the only visitors to the US Mid-Atlantic coast in that period, it should be said. It was also the week of the Great Snowstorm, which made for picturesque scenes, heavy sludge, monumental traffic holdups (yeah, we lived it…), endless gleeful it’s-hell-out-there broadcasts on TV and radio and an early departure as we fled the oncoming flight chaos.

Still, curtailed or not, this was a high-quality visit. You  know, the kind of visit where you envy almost everyone you meet their cutting edge, exciting and oh-so-cool jobs. It was a visit of contrasts: we met people from the administration and Congress, people from the media, people from academia, people who had just done extremely smart things. Meeting all these people, we learned a great many things. This post, and those to follow, will outline a few of them, in no particular order.

Lesson 1: We’re not a bad as all that…

Let’s be frank, when we Europeans go to America it’s because there is a fundamental underlying assumption: that they’re better than we are. You know what I mean: everything’s just that bit ahead of us, it’s tomorrow’s buzz today, things are just, well, more advanced. (Naturally, deep down, on the things that really matter, we believe the exact opposite, but that’s another story.) So it was rather disorientating – of course also somewhat gratifying – to establish early in our visit that, measured against our direct counterparts, we are probably ahead in many respects.

The newly-elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner (confusingly pronounced Bay-ner), and Majority leader Eric Cantor, (just Can-tor), whose extremely bright and interesting digital communications people we met, are going very big on an agenda to open up Congress to the outside world. It turns out that they mean, in essence, webstreaming of meetings and – wait for it – the posting of pre-legislative texts online. Erm, but we’ve been doing that for years, in 22 languages to boot. True, they were dead keen on social media too, but we couldn’t actually detect anything much we weren’t doing. To cut a long story short, we spent a good part of the meeting answering their questions.

Thinking about it, it was no real surprise and no great merit of ours. Congress has almost nothing by way of a central administration. Everything is carved up between the parties, according to who has the majority and who is in the minority. In effect, that means everything’s up or grabs every two years and all initiatives work to that timescale. So there is no institutional communication policy, just a succession of partisan communications policies. As some-one else pointed out to us during the trip, the victim is Congress itself, which, for all the reverence paid to the Constitution, is held in very low esteem by Americans generally.  No-one is out there defending the Congress as such.

But anyway, when it comes to websites, you know that supposedly clunky old one we are so keen to update? We are “way ahead”. We were amazed indeed to hear ourselves cited as the example to follow on more than one occasion, not only in Congress itself, but also for example in a meeting with the über-cool Mac-wielding twenty-somethings we met at the impressive Sunlight Foundation, a transparency/accountability NGO.

The High Temple of new media? The White House digital nerve centre

Even at the High Temple of political social media, the Obama White House, we came out almost guiltily thinking that we had not been in the presence of demi-gods, whose every utterance would contain pearls of digital enlightenment, but people who now were not doing anything very different from us, apart from the possibly not-so-minor detail of doing it for a great deal more people. On the big question of the hour, however, on which we were beginning to obsess (indeed, on which we are still obsessing – more of that in a later Lesson), namely how to make more of the comments left on the institutional Facebook page, the Obama people seemed just as far from an answer as we were, perhaps even further.

Most observers now agree that the Obama social media phenomenon was really largely about leveraging social media as a tool for real-world organisation, mobilisation of citizen-activists on the ground to donate, to campaign, to recruit friends and neighbours to the cause. Now installed in the White House, the social media team were open about still trying to find out exactly what it is an executive branch can do with these same tools.

Let’s face it, all things are relative, and we’re not jumping to any conclusions about where we stand (as the other Lessons will reveal). But we did get a kind of a warm, if slightly perplexed, glow from these meetings. But a warm glow was not why we came here, we were pilgrims in search of digital enlightenment, not self-congratulation.

But don’t worry, if that’s what it is, the self-congratulation stops here.

In the next post: why the Panic is Over.