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?

A while ago, in February to be precise, I wrote a post entitled “Sex, Porn and Britney Spears“, at the end of which I wondered “whether an article titled and tagged as this one is, especially when these terms appear in tempting conjunction with “European Parliament”, gets any bump in traffic?”. Well, since we’ve been in the mood for number crunching I went and checked.

Thanks for the traffic, Britney

And the answer is: since records began (as they say) “Sex, Porn and Britney Spears” is our “most read” page on this blog – homepage excepted – by a street. The page has been viewed over 3000 times, which is roughly six times the number of the next most popular page, the Team, and over seven times the score for the next real post. What’s more, it maintains a constant flow of readers, so, yes, some search terms are, well, timeless.

People are looking for sex and go away the moment they realise they’re not getting it

It amuses me to imagine the disappointment of hopeful teenage internauts* who find themselves confronted with my earnest musings on search engine optimisation. Actually, I don’t have to imagine; I can see the disappointment in the 94.95% “bounce rate” on this page, and the average 1.34 minutes people spend there (so, actually, some-one must be reading it!).

What do we conclude? Well, the obvious I suppose: people are looking for sex and go away the moment they realise they’re not getting it. (You didn’t need me to tell you that, perhaps?) Oh yes, and that if you want your comments section spammed by a world-full of internet sleazeballs, just publish a post entitled “Sex, Porn and Britney Spears”. Now I know why Tibo looked heavenwards when he saw what I’d done. But he found a good spam filter, so all’s well that ends well, right?

Anyway, what about our real top posts? Here are the top five “real posts” on our blog so far in 2009 (in reverse order, of course):

no. 5

“Moderation in all things“. My own best scorer (without cheating), with some thoughts about moderation v. censorship on Parliament’s website.

no. 4

“New technologies: keeping up without being killed in the attempt“. A “guest blogger” piece, this, by Jaume, a.k.a. The Director, about how to deal with unruly WebCom subordinates. A recent publication, so probably has the legs to move up the rankings.

no. 3

“The importance of being normal” by Manja. This one involves Manja meeting her friend and normal person, Ola-dele Kuku, and getting a bit of real-world perspective on what we call Europe.

no. 2

Are people looking for love as well as sex?

“P.S: I love you“. Eirini talks about meeting real people at the 2009 Open Day. (Actually, honesty dictates that I reveal that this one has a highish bounce rate too – are people looking for love as well as sex?)

no. 1

“Europe is nothing but a big bad wolf“. Eirini again, this time priming her readers for the European elections. Well done, Eirini! A few more people reading our blog and we might even have got turnout to go up…

And finally, quality…

Since we are believers in quality, not only quantity, a “special mention” here also for the post with the longest average time spent by readers reading it. This goes to Tibo, for a post (alternatively cri de coeur) called “Living in a world of meetings“. It’s good, so why not go and read it, but be sure to spend at least 4 minutes 42 seconds doing so, so you don’t depress his record-winning online stamina.

So there you have it. Totally scientific and statistically rigorous, of course. By the way, do you think I got enough dodgy search terms into this article to make the top five?

*****

PS The Irish said “Yes” to Lisbon today. Should I have blogged about that? Never mind, the EP reaction is on Parliament’s website (on a Saturday!!!), thanks to our friends in the press service. Besides, blogwise, there’s always our soon-to-be new friend Julien Frisch to do the heavy lifting (looking forward to meeting you, Julien). I keep checking for the inevitable post.

PPS and * English language readers may have enjoyed a great new word: “internaut”. Yes, the French have this great neologism for internet users. I has always amused me. Just thought I’d share that.

Frankly, I find all of this a bit of a shame. From a communications perspective it’s tragic.

It’s not that there isn’t real politics behind all this. The fight for positions and influence has been tough, the deals which result in the outcomes to be formalised this week come after tough negotiations and sometimes bitter fights. Heads of government across Europe even get involved. There are winners and losers. Some are in, others are out. For the well-informed observer, the process is a fascinating one. Yes, it’s even fun to watch.

Trouble is we can’t talk about it. At least not to our readers.

From the outside, it can be hard to tell what's really going on. (Photo EP)

In house, the rumour mill has been in gossip-fuelled overdrive. Unsurprisingly, the Parliament is full of people with a taste for political gossip, who love nothing better than to trade stories, even where they have no direct stake in the outcome, which, of course, in our little hothouse, they frequently do. Acquaintances in the political groups with titbits to offer about, say, what latest trade of a chairmanship against a vice-presidency is in the offing take on the aura of oracles, their delphic utterances propelling a new story into the heady swirl of speculation. For those thus inclined, the hard-core political geeks and anoraks, it is also possible to add some judicious number-crunching into the mix. One can for example immerse oneself in the arcane delights of the d’Hondt mathematical formula for the attribution of positions in a system of proportional representation (Parliament even has its own variation on this fiendish calculus: “d’Hondt continu“). Empirical Britishers, brought up on cricket stats and an unwritten constitution, may prefer to delve into murky precedents, long-standing gentlemen’s agreements and case law.

This is the messy end of democratic politics, at the same time highly technical and deeply human.

There’s no question that the whole thing is highly entertaining. This is the messy end of democratic politics, at the same time highly technical and deeply human. So it’s a pity we are unable to share the joy of politics with the outside world. I fully understand of course. It would be – from an institutional perspective – a highly risky enterprise to communicate on the ongoing shenanigans, to speculate on outcomes and to report the latest word on the street (word on Place Lux, in our case perhaps) to our avid readership.

Risky but fun. There is a serious point here. The fact that so much of the real politics takes place off camera produces the impression among uninformed outsiders (i.e. most people) that everything just carries on in the Parliament as if the elections never happened. Most of the cliffhangers, the battles, the political realignments and, above all, the personal stories linked with them remain invisible to the public, leaving the impression of a dull, technocratic parliament, where everything appears to be pre-cooked and most elections to positions of power seem to produce  North Korean style majorities endorsing the will of the men in grey suits. It’s not the reality, but it could stand as a metaphor for the EU as a whole: impermeable and technocratic seeming from the outside, fascinating if you can get under the surface. Perhaps, as many have remarked before, we need a European West Wing to tell people what this place is really like.

Meanwhile, I look forward to the week to come.  It’ll be interesting, but maybe not as interesting as it should be.

Stuck with unequal representation in the five years to come (c) abbyladybug on Flickr

Next week the newly elected MEPs will flock to Strasbourg for the inaugural session of the Parliament. Among them approximately 35% female Members. A slight increase compared to the previous legislature (until recently Parliament had 31% female MEPs) but way too little to be able to speak of an equal representation, after all 52% of  EU’s inhabitants is female. How will this make them feel?

Commission Vice-President Margot Wallström wrote on her blog : “Elections are about representation and if voters don’t see themselves reflected in who represents them, then they will be seen as distant.”

What lessons can be learned? Countries who did worst and will be sending less than 30% female MEPs to Strasbourg are Malta (male Members only), Czech republic (18% female Members), Poland (22%), Ireland, Italy and Lithuania (all 25%) and Slovenia (29%).

Women need to be like G.I. Jane

Consensus between my Czech, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish and Slovene colleagues is that politics are traditionally dominated by men in their country, difficult for women to get in. According to my Polish colleague women need to be “like G.I. Jane“. He adds that these bad gender results may also be due to the right and centre-right being the biggest parties in his country and they are “not champions in equal treatment”. My Czech colleague thinks many people in his country would like to have more women in politics like in Scandinavian countries but in order to vote for a woman you also need women high enough on the voting lists….

“The women on the list were highly qualified for the job…..!” says my Maltese colleague about the female candidates in her country. In Malta there is the situation that the candidates on the voting lists appear by alphabetical order, although it is by proportional representation and single transferable vote. Nevertheless if people do not know who to give their second, third preference etc it is advantageous to be higher up in the list. That is why the second person and third persons on the both EPP and PES lists happened to be men and the women were further down in the list due to their surnames.

But for future elections Maltese women have a big advantage men do not have: they can change their name! So if you are a Maltese woman and you want to go into European politics and you are not married yet: try to find a decent guy called Abela (preferably) Attard, Borġ or Buttiġieġ to increase your changes of being elected.

My Slovene colleague says having two female MEPs among the seven Slovenes needs to be interpreted as  ”super”, given the participation of women in politics in her country. Finally our Italian photographer explains that Silvio Berlusconi was confronted with too little public support regarding the number of women he wanted to place on the voting lists.

Silvio Berlusconi was confronted with too little public support.

Most Nordic countries did well: Finland (62%), Sweden 56%), Estonia (50%). and Denmark (46%). I asked my Scandinavian colleagues how come. “It’s natural” says my Swedish colleague. If only Iceland and Norway would join the EU……

Other countries with more than 40% female representatives are the Netherlands (48%), Bulgaria (47%), and France (44%).  In the Netherlands there is a tradition of women voting for women. Dutch female social-democrat Judith Merkies was 4th on the voting list but still will be in the three-person team of Dutch social-democrats thanks to preferential votes.

My Bulgarian colleague thinks that the good result for Bulgaria may be thanks to many very good and well-known female candidates on the voting lists (e.g. Commissioner Meglena Kuneva). She also mentions the communist tradition of women playing equal roles in society and occupying higher posts. Perhaps, but how come some other former communist countries did so badly then?

As for France since the introduction in 2000 of the loi sur la parité, there needs to be equal representation between men and women on the voting lists. The result is there with 44% female MEPs. According to my French colleague, often the even numbers on the voting lists are reserved for women and the odd numbers for men: hence no real equal representation but in any case legislation that deserves to be followed by other countries.

So here we are, stuck with this unequal situation. Is there anything that still can be done? Yes,  Wallström writes: “Now we need to focus our efforts on ensuring parity in the European Commission and for top jobs within the European parliament!”

To be continued….

Oh well, as hardships go, it’s not as bad as some, let’s be honest.

The emerging consensus is that the elections awareness campaign went well. Speaking parochially, we believe the online part of it particularly so. Several members of the team report approaches from journalists eager to find out about our ventures into the social media. Students of communication visit us to find out more, and I personally find myself invited here and there to present the online campaign to a surprising array of audiences. I was most amused by one inquiry, which reached me via a colleague, asking who was the “web guru” in charge of the campaign. I’ve been called many things, but never that. If only he knew…

What will be on their screens this autumn?

Of course, indulging in a feelgood factor for a while is fine, but the time is coming now for some serious evaluation. What worked, what didn’t, what did but wasn’t worth it… We need some number-crunching and bean-counting. At the end, we’ll have to decide, in the first instance, whether we stick with all the platforms we have opened or not.

However, it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, while we’re busy thinking, the internet is moving on. As I write, Twitter is turning out to be one of the major collateral stories of the unrest in Iran. The US State Department reportedly intervened to reschedule routine Twitter maintenance to avoid critical downtime in Tehran. This is the same Twitter that plenty of normal people, in my experience, hadn’t even heard of two or three weeks ago. So who knows what’ll be hot when the European Parliament gets down to work in earnest after the summer break?

Parliament will be working, going about its business, legislating, doing politics… Whither our  social web tools in this context?

Second, we have to consider the purpose of what we are doing. All of the really new things we have done – interactivity on the website, social networking, viral tools – have been launched in the context of a pre-electoral communications campaign. We were people with a message: “Parliament matters to you, so vote!” From now on, we’re in a new context; Parliament will be working, going about its business, legislating, doing politics… Whither our  social web tools in this context? Is it still about communicating a message, or, by its  very nature, more about participation and interaction in the political process? (“e-democracy”?) What does that imply about how MEPs are associated with what we do? And what does the answer to that question imply about our all-important institutional ethic and status: communicating for the Institution, not its component parts?

Third, entry barriers have tumbled. Suddenly everyone wants to be in on the act. It is safe to predict that, before long, most Members, all political groups and many others in the EU political-institutional world will be venturing forth on the social networks. What will this mean for us? How will this ecosystem develop? What will be our place in it? How will the expectations of users be affected?

So much to think about. Moreover, as politicians often say in a different context: never forget your base! All the flash-harry social stuff is all very well, but we have a day-job too, maintaining an online information and news service worthy of the name. This has to mean a serious upgrade to our flagship website, in the direction of the kind of multimedia, multichannel, interactive service users now expect. All this in the full range of languages and, of course, with top quality content.

“Now what?” is therefore a pretty big question. To answer it, we need some serious thinking. I hope we are granted the time and the space to do it.  I also think we need help. We may like to see ourselves as trailblazers – in our perhaps undemanding peer group we probably are – but others have been in similar enough situations to have a thing or two to teach us. So we need to strike a balance between following our instincts and some good old fashioned professionalism. We need feedback. (Some on our Facebook page here – 18 June). We maybe need to go and find a real web guru to talk to.

Yes, maybe only 10% of projects make it, but that doesn’t mean the other 90% fail.

Talking of which… Guess who was in Parliament yesterday. No lesser figure than Google co-founder and ubergeek Larry Page. He had many fascinating things to say. I was most impressed by his remarks on how you foster innovation and come up with the Next Big Idea. In part, his message was about money: it has to be freely available and available to be lost (as in Silicon Valley), but it was the other half of his answer which caught my ear in the context of what we do. It’s about the attitude to risk taking. Yes, maybe only 10% of projects (or start-ups) make it, but that doesn’t mean the other 90% fail. Most of the 90% don’t get where they intended, but lay the foundations for Another Big Idea, create networks which end up creating unexpected results, or simply teach their protagonists how to get it right next time.

In our modest way, perhaps we need most of all to heed that message. Just try; if it doesn’t work out, there are plenty of other ideas that will. We just need the investors who are prepared to lose their (in our case) metaphorical “million bucks” in the process as an investment for the long term gains.

It's difficult to find new challenges after the elections... Photo by Koshyk on Flickr

And now? What’s next? After the tension of the election night (“Here are the first results! Tweeeeeeeeeeeet please! Asap!”), we’re coming in what I call a “post-electoral depression”. Nothing matters any more. Day-to-day work seems quite boring. What’s the aim of the articles we write, if not to increase the turnout in the elections?

On top of that, after having been in the “centre of the world” – or the “centre of Europe”, with hundreds of thousands of visits (i.e. readers) each day, nobody cares about us now. The stats are going down. We will become anonymous again on the web. No banner campaign, no Google adwords. Well, is that strange to be a normal citizen, waking up each morning for going to work instead of changing the world!

Retrospectively, overmotivation is probably dangerous. We should now wait five years until we can experience again an electoral campaign. For the time being, I will go on holidays. Just to forget a little bit the work, just to remind me that there are some wonderful things in the world which have nothing to do with my job. And when I will come back, I will be highly motivated for the next challenges. Because fortunately, we will find new goals, new projects, new deadlines … La vie est un éternel recommencement, en somme…

Majority of MEP´s unfamiliar with social media

According to a survey (carried for euobserver.com), the European elections have not resulted in a boost in the MEP´s use of social media tools. Only 33 % of all MEP´s use social media networks extensively, while 29 % do not use them at all. Furthermore 62 % have never heard of Twitter and have no plans to use it, and only 25 % are blogging extensively.

These numbers are quite surprising, since average Europeans spend more than 9 hours a week on the internet and 66, 8 % are connected to social networks.  The survey concludes that the large majority of MEP´s “do not take full advantage” of social media tools as a mean to engage with voters and “drive them to their websites”.

From “digital immigrants” to “digital natives”

In our unit we have worked intensively with social media up to the European elections. We have tried to engage and inform voters and “drive them to our website”. Our social media campaign has been centred around a total of 8 online platforms: The European Parliament website, the special election website, EuroparlTV, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.

Like my Bulgarian colleague, I’ve never been an IT-nerd (!), at best a “digital asylum-seeker”. Ok, I have a Facebook profile, but before the election campaign started I mainly used it to check my emails. It has therefore been an educational experience to participate in the online election campaign, where we have tried to act like “digital natives” – meaning twitting, uploading videos on YouTube, moderating comments on the election website, post election updates on Facebook…

And the best thing about it all is that our campaign seems to have been very successful! In less than seven weeks we have gotten more than 50.000 friends on our Facebook page, over 105.000 visits on our MySpace page, 283.000 views on our most popular election video on our YouTube channel and hundreds of comments on our interactive election website.

All in all a very exciting experience. We are in contact with “real people” who can comment and react directly on what’s going on in the Parliament. We’re trying to make the Parliament more visible, especially for younger people. Looking forward to become a “digital native”.

Fireworks as fiery as the Maltese people DOI Malta

Dear reader,
our team is coming up with a lot of new antics to ensure that our website is attractive to the reader and to make sure every European citizen is informed about what the European Parliament is doing for him and her!

Hence, we are all looking forward to the eve of 7 June when the results are announced but MOST particularly when the turn-out of voters is announced. We simply hope you are one of them! Now the hitch is this. I come from a country which is hyper political. We eat, we think politics, we see red, blue, green…wherever we go and whoever we meet.  As a Maltese friend on Facebook said “The election campaign in Malta is not about ‘Use Your vote’ but rather who to vote for!” People think we are arguing when we are simply debating….hotly…about something political issue we are passionate about! What am I coming to? That may simply be too much for other temperaments but you may want to check electoral turn-outs. We are NOT obliged to vote against a fine like some countries but participation is high. What is the secret? We were simply trained to think that participating in the political and civil society is a sacred duty….because politics is about man and about seeking the common good. Democracy can only be democracy if we make use of our choice. Now if my reason tries to persuade you to vote and your reason says otherwise we are in a tight corner. However if we both try to reach that higher common good mountains can move and one can see that one vote counts and as that wise saying goes…if you light a candle in the dark, that one vote will count. The EU will be presenting one person less and democracy will suffer a bit more. Let us not forget what Churchil said of democracy:

“ Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Twitter HQ - the team gets its briefing

So we are finally there, and some of us are trying to come to terms with the concept of life-without-elections. I know this must seem strange to an outside world on whose consciousness these elections impinge as just one of several matters to which they might dedicate a moment’s attention, but in our professional universe they have been pretty much the only story in town for a while now.

However, there is still the grand denouement to be played out. For us, this brings with it a little bit of extra (self-inflicted) upheaval, as we have decamped en masse to temporary accommodation close to the heart of the action on Sunday night – “results night“.

For the kind of coordination this will require, the old methods are the best – someone will stand up and shout.

Amid the clamour of ongoing construction – TV sets being set up, screens for results, special facilities for journalists, spectacular lighting - we have taken possession of our little piece of prime real estate. That’s 50 square metres just off the plenary chamber (the epicentre of results night), now occupied by 31 people, 31 PCs, one allegedly networked printer, two small TVs to follow the news, nine telephones (some of which actually work) and a smattering of wifi-equipped personal laptops for the would-be footloose and fancy-free. A Belgian fire officer came by, grimaced a little, but gave us a clean bill of health as long as we make sure our chairs are stowed under the tables when we leave our desks.

Yes, it is quite tight…  So just as well we get on.

All this adds up to “Twitter HQ”. We wanted to be in the thick of it, so that, as events unfold on Sunday night, we are in the midst of the action, twittering merrily in 22 languages, giving our followers a blow-by-blow insider’s account of election night. We also took the view that, for the kind of coordination this will require, the old methods are the best – someone will stand up and shout. No-one will be out of earshot. 

Meanwhile, we’ll get to know each other a little bit better, especially perhaps as night follows day on Sunday and we plough on into the wee hours relaying the outcome of the poll in remote Finnish provinces or little-known Greek islands.

I expect us to get through election night without serious outbreaks of violence.

I will blog another time about the team and how magnificently it has risen to all the new election-related stuff asked of it. Suffice it to say for now that this is an outfit with a high capacity for intensive teamwork, that I expect us to get through election night without serious outbreaks of violence, and that we will doubtless look back fondly to this as a positive group bonding experience after we return to our usual offices.

So we’re set. Next stop Sunday night. Follow us on Twitter!

Voting from Bali or....quite© Luci Ferrero.

Joanna throwing her vote in Jakarta

Finnish citizen Joanna Chellapermal was basking in the sun along Bali beaches, not even intending to use her right to vote in the EU elections. When suddenly….here she is in Jakarta using precisely that ONE….

She writes:

I had not intended to vote in the EP elections originally. Had I been in Europe it would have been a different story but I was going to be enjoying the beautiful sights of Bali at the time.

Once I arrived in Indonesia I observed how Indonesians were caught up with their own elections. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, had just finished its second democratic parliamentary elections and was preparing for the first round of the presidential elections. Everyone is following the elections – tv stations and newspapers provide daily analysis and debates. My taxi drivers, the people’s political analysts, would have long discussions on the state of the nation and strength of the candidates. My friends in Jakarta would provide me with the latest behind the scenes gossip on the candidates.

I guess it made me question how I as a European take for granted the right to vote in free and fair elections be it on national or European level.

In the end I decided to abandon the sunny beaches of Bali for a few days and to travel to Jakarta to vote at my embassy.

Why? What nudged me? In the end I got caught up in the EP election fever. It did make me feel still connected with Europe somehow although when I talked to European friends abroad I would get mixed reactions. A Finnish friend in Canada said ‘ but the elections are in Europe, what does this have to do with me?’

I tried to find out how many Finns are expected to vote in Jakarta. However for Finnish citizens it was not necessary to register, just to show up at the nearest Finnish embassy with a passport or other I.D document. This can only be to the advantage of such like me.

As I delved into the European election fever, I spoke with NGO activists and representatives of Indonesian parliament to find out if they were aware of what was happening on the European continent or about the biggest trans-European elections. However, I am afraid to say that they were not aware that the EP elections are taking place now. This said many did know that elections will be held this year and some even had read about the low turnout at the last EP elections; all which led to an  interesting discussion comparing the two election processes.

Regarding who my vote went for, once I decided to vote in the elections I was able to find all the information I needed……in a serene wi-fi café in Seminyak called “Grocer & Grind” where I spent considerable time over an espresso searching information on voting and candidates. Finnish websites such as

http://www.vaalit.fi/teksti/index.htm

http://www.europarl.fi/

gave me all the information I needed and the Finnish embassy officials in Jakarta were also very helpful with the information on election times and requirements.

I had a clear idea who to vote for from the beginning. I have seen how dedicated my chosen candidate was to protecting human rights and the environment during her two previous europarliamentary terms.

What struck me in these elections was the use of Facebook and internet in general. My chosen MEP has a facebook site and I was able to share the link with my Finnish Facebook friends some of whom joined her site. To crown it all I was even motivated enough to post a comment on her site. I am dying to tell you who I voted for…..