The hairier the better!

Besides editing the German website, I worked on two projects last year. One was a comic strip that should explain the Euro crisis in simple terms. The other was a Facebook application for the Sakharov Human Rights Price. It was meant to give people a glimpse of what Facebook would look like without basic rights.

Both were quite different but had two things in common: they were supposed to go viral & they didn’t.

This post is meant to figure out why this happened or rather why it didn't happen, some sort of elaborate guesswork.

First Assumption: Negativity

This is a time of bad news. Your cousin cannot find a job, your friend’s uncle just lost his and you wonder whether your pension will be a worth anything in 30 years – people simply don’t need more negative messages.

Unfortunately, our video and our application do just that – spreading more bad news. The app let’s you choose among a number of ways to get in touch with friends and they all lead to failure: no birthday party during curfew; no Christmas greetings in an intolerant society; not even the freedom to choose what to do in your free time.

In the same vein our video talks about politicians spending lavishly until the financial crisis delivered a rude awakening. The Commission – the good guys – had warned them about it all along. But no one was listening. In short, we are pointing fingers and passing the blame.

Here is how I imagine the inner dialogue of a potential user:
“Wow, the Euro crisis in 1:03 min! My friends should see this! Whom do I send it first? —- Well, my mates in Greece have the crisis 24/7 anyway. —- My British friends? Na, they would only start fretting about the EU wasting money again. —- The German chaps? No way, I’d have to discuss austerity, honesty and Made in Germany for hours.”

Second Assumption: Outmoded

This one is comparable on the layman’s dream of hitting it big at the stock exchange. Every time you hear or read about a hot stock or a great investment it’s either a con or you are too late anyway, the big money has been made years ago.
Applied to Internet campaigns this means that viral campaigns were a thing of the early days of social media when MySpace was still bigger than Facebook and blogs looked more like your grandmother’s diary than the Huffington Post’s tidal wave of categories & subsections.

Third Assumption: Wrong Means

There is something awkward about a stock broker using gangster slang and a Prime Minister trying to communicate with young voters using vernacular from their text messages. The same here, the European Parliament is a serious and honourable institution that is clad in complicated procedures and jargon. No one “buys” viral content from us; people just don’t expect us to be surprising or shocking.

Fourth Assumption: Badly done

This one is the project manager’s nightmare: it could have worked, if only I had done my job properly. If the app was made of more interesting options, if the posts had been more striking, if the video was only shorter or funnier or greener or whatever…

Fifth Assumption: Wrong content

This is a variation of the one above, but with a happier ending. The problem is that this is politics and whatever we do, in the end we have to talk about tedious things like laws and procedure and democracy. If only we could use cats or babies. Things would be so much simpler.

Sixth Assumption: The Zen Way

Buddhism’s different schools all more or less evolve around the idea of life being a futile exercise and heaven a state where one is freed from ego and needs. Some belief it takes endless lives and constant practice to reach this. For Zen-Buddhists, however, it is more like an accident, a byproduct of meditation and practice.

I am not proposing a new cult of the viral, but I like the idea of it being an accident, something you cannot plan for and – even more romantic – that you cannot buy. A campaign that wants to be viral from the beginning would thus be doomed to fail. People will see the calculation and walk on.

Conclusions

We could simply stop trying to go viral.

We could keep on doing what we do and hope for a miracle.

Or, we look for really cute, young and hairy MEPs and just follow them around as they stumble through Parliament.

I can recall when the idea of promoting EP via social media was a new hot topic in the unit. Those days Obama had its successful web campaign and Web Comm was eager to follow. 

Team of stagiaires, we were responsible for series of election stories promoting EPs elections of 2009 and one of the stories was even dedicated to social media networking and to Obama's campaign.

I think I’m not totally wrong when saying that the idea of creating EPs own Facebook account was then also quietly boiling. People were considering how to serve this idea on higher level to get permission.

Obviously EP has now its Facebook account and not only – there’s active Twitter in all languages, accounts in Flickr, Youtube, etc. And this blog was there already three years ago – being like an example of how up to date is Web Comm in a governmental system like EP.

Around 0,3 million likes in Facebook, frequent daily updates in Twitter, Flickr account with notable archive: I see progress. And I can hear people saying that we have to be in line with whatever modern social networks there will start flourish.  (Another interesting question: is social media developed into a more stable phase or is it still going to grow and change in rapid way. But this is to be discussed for someone else.)

Today there's social media teams in the unit and more specialized people are dealing with special (web)projects. As the unit has gathered some expertise during the last three years I feel that I will get a sip from it. I modestly admit that I like it.

Thus the late great American author Kurt Vonnegut defines the moral of his seminal novel Mother Night.

It's about an American presumed Nazi propagandist during World War II. Only the reader knows he is in fact a double agent, recruited on happenstance by a secret agent for the US war department who approached him in a zoo.

The snag is that besides the reader, this agent is the only one who knows.

The book ends with the American, sitting in an Israeli jail awaiting not just trial, but desperately any sign from his mysterious recruiter that can attest to the true nature of his dealings with the enemy.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I made the infamous WebComm Christmas Video, which I'm sure is already be familiar to you all from several posts already published on this blog.

And here's a confession: I am no more a movie maker than I am a war criminal. I'm simply an ex-journalist – not even in television, but print media – who just happened to waltz in to the zoo known on Rue Montoyer 75 as "The Editorial Room".

In the Land of a Thousand Blogs

Egg on my face? No, just champagne on my shirt.

"What's in it for us?" someone asked.

Oh, they have to write a blog about us.

Now, here's where I should have kept my mouth shut. But as I had not yet learned the philosophy of my boss – known henceforth simply as Le Boss – I spoke up.

Nuh-uh, I said.

No good.

In the Land of a Thousand Blogs, the viral video is king. We should make a movie of their visit.

"Great", Le Boss said. "You do that!"

Growing up in public

I tried protesting most vehemently that I certainly don't have the chops to do it and besides, don't we already have two units with film equipment as well as skill in our DG?

Too late. A semi-cheap camera the size of a matchbox was bought and a pilot movie commissioned.

Oh, and now that we have a movie director in our unit – albeit untrained, untried and, as far as anyone knows, unskilled – couldn't he make the Xmas video? Just a simple matter of organizing and perfectly recreating 15 of the most famous TV show intros in the world, right?

And by the way, those videos you make of Facebook fans visiting Strasbourg? You know, the first movies you ever made in your life? They'll be scrutinized and picked over by 200 000+ Facebook fans and Lord knows how many more on Twitter.

Arthur Rambo and I

Right about now, anybody would start regretting ever walking into that zoo. Perhaps even consider fleeing the country, starting up with a fresh identity as a gunrunner on the Horn of Africa. Dear reader, I was no different.

See, WebComm is a very special place indeed. Whichever meeting you walk into, you are sure to be dumbest guy in the room. I know I am. The colleagues who work here are consistently the best and the brightest.

But this is not all there is to it, as I was about to find out when I sat down across from Le Boss.

I can't do it, I said, well aware of the high standard set by my colleagues, the annoying little do-gooders.

"I don't care if you fail", Le Boss replied, much to my surprise.

"Fail as often as you like. Just as long as you fail fast and you fail cheap."

'Tis the WebComm Way.

My love affair with a small brass man

His gamble paid off. It didn't fail – and it didn't not fail both fast and cheap.

What makes a movie maker? 'Cos after having pretended to be one for a couple of months, I've made four videos, half in collaboration with and colleague and composer supreme, Kurt, making them complete in-house productions. Thanks to some user-friendly fruit-referencing technology and Le Boss' sheer bloody-mindedness, the unit now has extended our working resources into movie-making.

And we'll keep the videos coming, you can be sure of that.

The hero of Vonnegut's story ends up awaiting trial in Israel. My ending is not quite as dramatic, but I don't mind telling you it was with great pride I ousted Mr. Spielberg as Best Director at the WebComm Movie Awards 2011.

Oh, I know it's all pretend. But that doesn't make this kiss any less loving or real:

True love?

You may think this is silly, but even though I don't know Jerzy Buzek personally I grew very fond of him these last few months. You know how sometimes people say they feel like they grew up with a newscaster, a TV presenter or a cartoon character because they would watch him everyday during their childhood? Well, that's a little how I feel. I started my first traineeship in the European Parliament in February 2011, a little less than a year ago and since then I've seen Buzek at the plenary, in videos, and on the news. I've also written numerous articles where I mention him and I've even had the chance to meet him 3 times in person, all of which I am sure he doesn't remember, but that's ok.

Jerzy Buzek at the start of his speech © European Union 2011 PE-EP/Pietro Naj-Oleari

The first time I met him, it was outside the Parliament in Strasbourg during the plenary in May. I waited for what seemed like hours to take a picture with him. A group of tourists, probably visitors in the Parliament, kept on talking to him and shaking his hand. His assistant, I can only presume, told him he was late for a meeting and should start moving. He walked towards me and I seized the opportunity to ask if I could take a picture with him. I really don't know why but my heart was racing and I tried my best to keep my eyes open and have a nice smile. It would have been a shame to screw up a photo opportunity with Buzek. Once it was over, I couldn't believe my chance. The other trainees would be so jealous when they saw my profile picture on Facebook… and indeed they were.

The second time I saw him, it was at a reception organised by trainees and his office in June. The reception was organised on the 12th floor of the PHS building, in the Presidential Salon. This time, it was a different story. There were 150 trainees in a small room excited to meet him. And they all had the same goal: to take a picture with him. It seemed as if Lady Gaga was in the room about to give a concert, but without the yelling and screaming, the trainees TRIED to look civilised but failed. I have a very special group photo to remember this day. Unfortunately, I am the only one who can know I was there as you can only see the top of my head. He gave a long speech about how as young people, we are the future of Europe, but what I remember the most is when he said “I hope that you are enjoying your time here in the Parliament, and in Place Lux!". Oh, so it is not a secret that trainees spend all their Thursday nights/ early Friday mornings at Place Lux? We should do a better job of hiding it next time…

The third time I met Buzek, it was actually kind of embarrassing and some of members of the Webcomm team know what I'm talking about. Two fans from the European Parliament's Facebook page had won a trip to come visit the Parliament's premises at Strasbourg and meet Jerzy Buzek. This was a big deal for the two winners to meet the President of the European Parliament. I hope I didn't ruin their moment nor the video that was recording. The incident is the following: I was standing close to them when they were introduced to the President when suddenly he turned to me and he asked me where I was from, thinking I was also a winner. He caught me by surprise and threw me off my guard. Quick, I have to think, what do I say? I finally mumbled something about being a trainee at the European Parliament. You know when you were a student and you weren't paying attention and suddenly the teacher asks you for an answer, that's exactly how I felt. He smiled, turned around, and I sighed in relief.

Buzek's popularity is off the charts

Don't get me wrong, I am sure that Martin Schulz will be a great president as well. But it just won't be the same… Buzek is Buzek. Why is he so popular? Well, first of all when you take a look at him he just seems like a nice, simple, accessible person. If you ask the EP trainees to describe Buzek, they will ALL say the exact same thing: "He reminds me of my grandpa". I would also like to add that he embodies the "cool attitude".

To confirm that I am not the only "groupie" out there, let's look at some figures.
According to Xinhua, a Chinese news website, "the 72-year-old Polish engineer-turned-politician has at least one mission well accomplished: maintaining his personal popularity, as always and also via trendy channels". "The secret to his accomplishment" resides in the fact that he was the first Parliament president to hold a live chat with Facebook users. I guess now is also the time to say "kudos" to the Webcomm team who make these chats happen. Thanks to them, Buzek is more popular than before.

Chat with EP president Jerzy Buzek © European Union 2011 PE-EP/Pietro Naj-Oleari

Buzek is also popular in the political circles. Xinhua indicates that he was named "MEP of the Year 2006" in the research and technology category and crowned as "Best Polish MEP" in 2008 by Polish media. " Prior to the MEP errands, Buzek had also been a popular and respected Prime Minister back at home, who had initiated Poland's accession negotiation with the European in 1997 and guided Poland into the NATO structures in 1999 ".

Today definitely marks the end of an era.

Where is the web heading? Thanks to Ludwig Gatzke for the pic @ http://bit.ly/tNLmG8

From Nicolas Princen, head of the web unit of the French Presidency

A company called Viewrz helped the French Presidency to tweet live some extracts of the video stream of the G20 meeting in Cannes. The principle is quite easy: you follow a debate, and whenever you find an extract interesting, you instantaneously send a message to the company, which will cut the last 30 seconds (or 20 seconds, one minute… this has to be decided in advance) of the video and send you a specific link to this short video. Then you just have to tweet it.

=> It would be great to use this kind of tool to cover our plenary debates. It's resource efficient (we need only one or two editors) and the format is nicer than a traditional coverage: you have a live tweet (for example one quote for each political group) and right after the debate you put it online as an article (in a kind of a Storify format). You can skip the boring/technical/empty parts of the debate and focus on the main political statements.

From TBWA 365, web agency

It was very interesting to have a look into the way of working and the logic of a private company, and I noted two things:

• They always start the briefings with their customers with a "cold", data-oriented analysis. It allows to assess the efficiency of a campaign/online strategy.
  => Maybe we should try to objectivise the efficiency of our actions in such a way. We do it but it could and should be more systematic: what were the most popular articles on the Parliament website this month? What worked on Facebook, what was the most retweeted? We need an analyst who does not work as an editor – and thus could be impartial. We could gather good practices and improve the efficiency of our coverage.
• TBWA advises to look for editorial partnerships rather than advertising campaigns. In 2014, the Parliament could write objective, neutral stories about the mandate and the upcoming elections and propose it to big newspapers. I know that journalists don't like it, but it seems newspapers do accept it for (obvious) economic reasons…

La Netscouade, web agency

Benoît Thieulin, CEO of this agency that is well-known for its involvement in the French presidential election campaign in 2007, shared his vision of the future of the web. A highly interesting speech from which I'd like to keep only the concrete points:

• The web is now coming back to more "intermédiation". In the last years, the trend was to try to communicate directly with citizens, but now people want to get some analysis. Hence the central role of journalists, bloggers etc. There is more space for indirect communication and we should not (only) aim at targeting citizens directly.

=> All our multimedia products (for example this one or this one) should clearly made available and customisable by internet users and journalists.

=> Our Facebook and Twitter content should be more "MEP-compatible" so that it can be re-used as much as possible.

• He also pointed out the "social television", i.e. the fact that people watch TV to get the news but comment at the same time on Twitter with their tablets.
  => This raise again the question of putting a twitter feed next to the plenary streaming to allow people to comment live.

Slate.fr, web newspaper

The editor in chief explained us how they explained complex issues in an easy, friendly and funny way. For example, for the scandal around French billionaire Ingrid Bettencourt, they put it in the form of a – fake – Facebook stream. It's really worth having a look!

=> Worth trying in order to explain the negotiations on the EU budget or the financial supervision package?

The Choucha refugee camp is run by the UNHCR. It hosted, when we went there, around 4,000 people. During the peak of the crisis, it had to give shelters to 20,000 refugees.

Well, in fact, it’s precisely because of the “Arab Spring” that I went there to get first-hand impressions. Democracy building is now a work in process in Tunisia and the changes brought a lot of challenges with them, not least with a sudden influx of immigrants fleeing the war in Libya. Tunisia shares 500km of borders with its neighbour and generously accepted all refugees, despite its own precarious situation.

No, I was not on holidays!

The reason why I went there is nonetheless not a personal one. An ad-hoc delegation of MEPs visited two refugee camps and met the Prime Minister and several other ministers in Tunis mid-July. This delegation was an interesting communication opportunity because it touched upon sensitive and “citizen-friendly” topics: immigration, humanitarian aid and the democratic changes in North Africa.

Hence it was decided to cover the delegation a bit more in-depth and live: a pilot project aiming at sending a Webcomm editor with the delegation was set up. I had the chance to be chosen, mainly because I was French-speaking, active in our social media activities and following quite closely the Arab revolutions. My responsibility was to underline the activities of MEPs outside Brussels, on the spot, giving a human touch and trying to make use of the possibilities of Twitter regarding live coverage and direct interactions.

A trip into distress and hopelessness

I was quite excited to leave for three days with a delegation and the reality was up to my expectations. From a personal point of view first: of course, we all see images from refugee camps on TV, we all know what happens in certain regions of the world, but it’s totally different to be on the spot, in the desert, talking to refugees whose biggest problem is, in the end, that they “lost hope”. It’s very different to sit in your sofa with a coke and some crisps, watching the news on TV, and to sit in a tent with humanitarian actors and refugees, with 43°C, in the middle of a sandstorm.

I was shocked by the living conditions in refugee camps and ashamed by the absence of reaction from the EU (this is not only a personal opinion, this is also what the whole delegation stated, asking for more resettlement). Reporting back about what I saw was a -small- consolation, but I couldn’t avoid thinking that the same evening, I could sleep in a good bed and fly back home a few days later, to find family, friends, a house, a job and, more important than everything else, dreams and projects for the weeks, months and years to come.

Communicating live on the spot, a track to follow

43°C, sandstorms every day... The hell for refugees. The Tunisian army takes care of the security of the camp since some riots led to several casualties in May.

From a professional point of view, the delegation was also a rich experience. Sharing three days, from 8AM to 11PM with MEPs allows you to develop a different relationship than the one you can have, for example, in a short interview. You’re not only facing a politician (i.e. a public figure), yourself being in an official position. You’re also facing the private person behind. Yes, our representatives are just human like you and me ;)

The communication project worked very well. It seems the Parliament’s followers on Twitter enjoyed the experience a lot. I tweeted about 170 times in the three days, sent live some 60 pictures taken on the spot with my iPhone. The followers got background information, quotes from MEPs, impressions… We also proposed to them to ask their questions to the MEPs. In the end, the feedback was very positive, from the point of view of the followers as well as from the one of MEPs.

One interpreter even came to me the third day (there was a crew of interpreters together with us), telling me that from the beginning he was quite shocked by my attitude, thinking I was taking pictures for myself and sending text messages to friends all the time! I’m afraid that he was not the only one to have this impression and some ministers could have got the same when we met in Tunis…

In conclusion, I think the experience was worth it and could be repeated regularly. The Parliament could identify a few interesting delegation to cover more in depth every year. Would you have some interest following it or would it be too much?

If you want to know a bit more about the delegation:

We published a Focus on the Parliament’s website

You can read all the tweets on the French Twitter feed Europarl_FR

You can have a look at the pictures taken on the spot

You can read the common statement made by the delegation

You can read the debates on Facebook with our fans (here or there) and read the chat with MEP Judith Sargentini

And you can have a look at the announcement Steve made on this blog in July!

Do you rely on Facebook to remember your friends' birthdays?

Emblematic incident for our age in the WebCom team recently.

Since most of us are Facebook friends, it had come to general notice that one of our number was celebrating his birthday a short while ago. Naturally, he was the recipient of the usual cascade of best wishes from his Facebook friends, though, as he was in one of his intense project moments, earphones on, hunched over a steaming keyboard, he had not yet, as lunchtime came round, registered the goodwill of the world at large towards him. He did however register the fact later when a delegation of smiling colleagues, bearing a homemade birthday cake, entered his office.

A look of puzzlement all round. But we saw it on Facebook…

His immediate and gratifying look of pleasure however swiftly gave way to one of some embarrassment as he clocked the fact that was not a simple social call, but birthday-related business. “Um, you know, it’s not actually my birthday,” he explained, “I was born in December…”

A look of puzzlement all round. But we saw it on Facebook…

Our friend and colleague is of course a true digital native, also one (I wonder whether this has a bearing on the case) who spent the early formative years of his life in the tender embrace of the German Democratic Republic. Suffice it to say that, like many others from his part of the world and others, his data-protection instincts had induced him to specify a Facebook birthday different from that recorded in his home municipality. Elementary, sensible, but we fell for it and took him a cake.

Miffed? Well, no. For this was a bona fide WebCom moment, a Facebook non-birthday cake. The tail of the virtual world wagging the real world dog. How appropriate. And the cake was excellent too.

Trouble is, they’ll all want Facebook non-birthdays now too.

I was suggested to write a blog post about my experience here at the European Parliament, inside the WebComm unit and especially about the development of the Facebook Chat Application we just finished.

I don’t feel terribly confident about writing non-scientific content, especially with all those talented editors around me, but I like challenges and I thought it might be an interesting experiment.

So where to start? First of all let’s break some myths here. The European institutions and especially the European Parliament are not only composed of old-lazy-boring-suit-wearing guys. I mean I only discovered a small part of the European Parliament, which is the WebComm unit, part of the DG Comm. and all I could see where young, motivated, dynamic people. This is quite the opposite of my preconceived ideas and I really like to be surprised. Of course we have to face a little bit of administrative slowness for some things but in general I’m able to do my job in a smart, agile and constructive way. So that’s done.

About the Facebook chat application. I can say it has been quite a challenge for mostly 3 reasons :

1. Real-time web application
2. Scalability
3. Agility needed

1) Real-time web application

Maybe it’s time to do a short (and incomplete) history of web development

Traditional web applications are not designed to be “real-time”. By “real-time” I mean that all the users connected to the application must be signaled all the changes as soon as they are made (in real-time) and not only when they refresh the page. Maybe it’s time to do a short (and incomplete) history of web development :

1) Static pages: at first they were static html pages. A guy would write HTML* code in some text files, save those in some directory. Other people could then connect to www.someserver.com, their browser would then start from the index.html file located at the root of the web directory, parse it and display it. The user would typically click a link and would then load another html file eg. contacts.html and see the contacts page of the site.

This had many disadvantages :

1) HTML is not easy to write for anybody, so you need specialists for any page produced

2) You had to write html for each and every thing, if you wanted a gallery with 200 items, you would have 200 html files or 1 gigantic one.

3) Content was really static, meaning static text, borders and pictures**

Trying to ameliorate, server (scripting) technologies were developed. In fact you don’t have to write every line of html of what the user sees. You can write code that generates HTML files. Let say you have a e-shop, you don’t have to create an HTML page for every article, you create an article template, an administration site where men can enter information about the products, you then associate urls to different products like www.eshop.com/products/1 www.eshop.com/products/2 would return an HTML file generated “on the fly” by the server using the template and filing in data from the administration site.

This illustrates Mathieu's point (or so we are told)

But server technologies couldn’t solve entirely the third point (really static content), Content could be generated by the server and customized for the user, it wouldn’t make the user’s experience much richer as the user was still seeing a static HTML file and clicking to the next static text/image page. So “they” came up with javascript which was a way to modify what the user see with scripts. It changed web programming forever because you could now write logic that would execute on users actions to the page.

For example you could have a button that would become red when the mouse was over it, or a panel that would open when clicked. Well I’m digressing a little bit, let’s hurry up. After that they invented “ajax”*** so that the browser could contact the server using javascript and fetch new content to refresh your page, so you didn’t have to “navigate” to another page on every action that required interaction with the server (like viewing other items or submitting a form).

Nevertheless all these evolutions lead to the webpages you see now, well that’s not entirely true, because javascript could make the pages more dynamic but it couldn’t make them more “multimedia”, and the users wanted videos and sounds, that’s were macromedia jumped in and came up with flash, that was later bought by adobe and that we still use to watch videos and sounds on internet, recently this changed because we see a trend to come back to pure html/javascript with the coming of html5 and it’s video and audio tags as well as css3 for the animations.

2°) Scability

To explain my point, all these evolutions didn’t solve my problem, because as I said, a Chat must be a “realtime” application and all this javascript and servers stuff cannot do real time applications, why would you ask me ? Because in this standard model content is send to the clients/users only when the user click somewhere or do something, at this precise moment a connection is made to the server, which responds with required content. But in a multiuser chat, when somebody sends a message, all the other users of the chat must receive this message ASAP.

A solution could be to have each client connect the server every second or so to ask if there is a new message. The problem with this and that’s where we get to the second difficulty, is that “it doesn’t scale”! First let’s explain the term : “It doesn’t scale” is a shortcut for something like : it works for 5 users but it doesn’t scale up to 10000 users.

Why this method of having each client ping the server every second doesn’t scale ? Because if you have 10000 clients connected, that makes you 10000 connections by second to the server just for the “realtime” features, meaning that it doesn’t event include the users loading the page, interacting, liking and sending message and you get those 10000 connections per second even if nothing happen during this time.

After a lot of experimentation and researching I chose the following setup: nginx + uwsgi + python/django + APE =)

The solution needs to be able to send messages to the clients as soon as (and only when) a new message arrives. That’s were “server push” arrived, it’s actually an umbrella term to describe the possibility of sending data from the server to the client when new data arrives and not when the user refresh. Real push is called “http streaming” and is not supported by older browsers aka IE. So tweakers came up with a solution called “long-polling” the browser opens a connection to the server, the server wait to answer, the connections is kept open, when fresh data arrives, the server answer like he should have directly when the browser receives data, it handle it and then reopen a “long-polling” connection to the server. You can visualize all this in the Figure 1.

After a lot of experimentation and researching I chose the following setup:

nginx + uwsgi + python/django + APE =)

What are all these geeky terms ?

Nginx is a next gen webserver that’s capable of handling a ridiculous huge amount of connection on ridiculously small hardware. It is in my opinion a huge concurrent to the fat apache out there.

Uwsgi is a “fast, self-healing and developer/sysadmin-friendly application container server coded in pure C” and it executes python code that runs the django framework.

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. What this all means is that you can be a lot more productive with python than with other low-level compiled languages (because high level means you don’t care about the low level stupid stuff, and interpreted means that you don’t have to recompile the program after every change, it just runs directly)

Django is “The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” or a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

APE is Ajax Push Engine, one of the more mature libraries out there for doing server push, it can be configured to user different transport and is also written in C (read : it’s really fast)

So all the business logic and serverside was developed in django.

Real-times updates are sent from django to APE which send them to all connected users and then there is a lot of HTML/CSS/Javascript/Jquery to hold it together in the browser :)

So now we have enough “nerderies” I think. Feel free to contact me if you have some technical questions.

3°- Agility

That’s were I get to my last point : Agile development. We didn’t want to come up with the “wonderfullest chat on paper” that would turn unusable in practice. So we progressively developed features and tested it among us to feel and touch the thing, changing it multiple times. And that’s what agile is all about : small, realistic iterations that are validated, or in other words : if you do a lot of small steps you can only do some small steps in the wrong direction, but if you try to do a huge step, you can end-up doing a huge step in the wrong direction and lose a lot of time and money.

Agile thus equals programmers not programming wrong, but also not getting crazy during long periods alone in their desks. And small iterations, means frequent tests and meetings, and that’s where we get to the interesting part of all:

Humans working together to share with other humans their dream: democracy and freedom!

As a bonus, here is a video showing the coding process of our facebook’s chat application.

Visualization of the EP-FB chat source code evolution. from Mathieu VDH on Vimeo.

Cheers,

Your fellow Facebook developer.

* imagine HTML as language to layout text, images and frames on any screen

** picture were introducted in 1994

*** Asynchronous Javascript And XML

It all started with this post on the Parliament wall about the situation in Syria, where the government was (and is) cracking down on protesters.  Very quickly, we noticed two things: first, the comment column started filling up with comments by Facebook users in Bahrain; second, there was a jump in the number of fans on the page.

The comments, taken together, were unlike anyhing we have ever had before. They were a direct appeal to the European Parliament for help. They were not light reading. Here are just a few:

Alooy Hassan We in Bahrain, we ask you to help, the government of torturing prisoners and treat them with great violence and sentenced to death for four of them
People are treated harshly and I can not describe the situation here
Please help us.

Om Alsadah help us in Bahrain they kill us

Ahmed T. ALsaeed Before we start speaking about syria lets take a look at BAHRAIN . from the crackdown untill now tanks are everywere mosques are being razed, hospitals are surrounded

سلطان مباركي Bahrain| Death sentences given to pro-democracy protesters: Ali Singace, Abdulaziz Hussain, Qasim Matar, and Said Abduljalil
(Take action please.. Bahraini people want urgent help)

Many of the comments focused in the four death sentences handed down by a Bahraini court, others were a broader cry for help. Over the next few days, the comments kept coming, from many different users, commenting on whatever we posted, drawing attention to the situation in Bahrain and asking for the help of the European Parliament.

The unusual jump in the number of fans, which we would put at about a thousand extra in a day or two was clearly linked to the Bahrain phenomenon. Facebook “insights” data doesn’t provide precise enough detail to be certain, but our regular checks of the latest fans in that period told us that the latest joiners were overwhelmingly Arabic and mostly (where we could tell) Bahraini.

This was something a bit different, a concerted use of the page to call for political action from the Parliament

We have had passionate opinion and debate on the Facebook page before – indeed, we get it all the time – but this was something a bit different, a concerted use of the page to call for political action from the Parliament. It cried out for a direct response, though, clearly, in this case, the only valid response would be a political one. Which is why we turned to the political authorities, in particular the President and the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In the past, we have sometimes found it hard consistently to motivate Members of Parliament to enter into discussions on the Facebook page, though we systematically notify relevant Members (committee and office holders, rapporteurs, delegation leaders, etc.) about ongoing discussions of the subjects that could concern them. It seems that the reflex is not always there yet to use this new channel in a political way. In this case, however, possibly because of the directness and urgency of the appeal, the reaction was immediate and clear.

The President was the first to react, condemning the death sentences in a statement, which we posted on Parliament’s page and the President similarly posted on his. Parliament’s post drew 814 interactions (one of the highest numbers we have had), of which, very unusually, more than half (420) were comments. The President’s post received 52 comments, most of which were variants on “thank you”. (Figures at time of writing.)

“The Bahraini population, especially young people using social networks such as Facebook, turns to the European Parliament for support”

The President is an established presence on the social media, but the reaction of the Foriegn Affairs committee, when they found out about the Bahraini pleas on Facebook, broke new ground. In a statement issued jointly by Foreign Affairs committee chairman, Gabriele Albertini; Human Rights sub-committee chair, Heidi Hautala; and Arab Peninsula delegation leader, Angelika Niebler, the three MEPs noted that “the Bahraini population, especially young people using social networks such as Facebook, turns to the European Parliament for support”, condemned the death sentences, and announced Albertini’s intention to summon the Bahraini ambassador to discuss the matter. We posted the statement in its entirety on the Facebook page, where it has again generated a high level of interaction. At the same time, Baroness Ashton, the EU High Representative on foreign policy, issued her own statement on the death sentences, substantially increasing pressure on the Bahraini authorities on this point. This statement was issued after representations from Parliament, as we have seen alerted by the Facebook Bahrainis. Ashton will be in Parliament for a major set-piece foreign affairs debate next week. Perhaps there will be more from her then.

This episode marks an important landmark in the progress of social media in the life of the Parliament

It is possible that none of this will change the course of history, but, whatever happens next, this episode at least marks an important landmark in the progress of social media in the life of the Parliament. Just as Facebook has played an undisputed role in helping the Arab Spring on its way, we now see it play an unambiguous role in the political life of the European Parliament, fittingly enough in the self-same context.

What, of course, this all underlines is the fact that the social media, unlike many traditional forms of mass communication, provide a genuinely two-way channel of communication and that this fact has potentially important ramifications for the political life of the European Parliament. We still encounter the attitude that communicating via Facebook, Twitter & co is somehow a peripheral activity, useful for talking to the kids, perhaps, but essentially a frivolous, non-serious pastime. Perhaps Parliament’s new Bahraini Facebook fans, who – yes – may even be “kids”, will help spread an understanding that these social media tools will end up being much more significant than that.