Is he our new guru?

The meeting was, in my opinion, very interesting since the guy knew very well what he was talking about and gave straight answers to the questions we brought up – even if he was perhaps a tad less unambiguous on privacy issues. But I won’t blame him, he was representing his company, was up front about that and we shouldn’t forget it. He gave useful insights on how Facebook is going to develop, what other institutions do and what we, the European Parliament, could do to improve our Facebook-presence.

I picked up some facts and statistics to give an overview of where we stand in the Facebook-galaxy (some of them come from our boss, Steve).

I was sitting next to Fred, our graphist, during the meeting... This is the way he takes notes. Well, my notes are so boring compared to that...

We can be proud of what we do on social media, for sure:

• As far as we can tell, the European Parliament is Europe’s highest ranking public political institution on Facebook
• The European Parliament page brings together the largest online community interested in EU politics – the second one being an unofficial EU page with about 43 000 fans.
• In the world rankings of public political institutions on Facebook, the European Parliament seems to be second only to the White House
• The European Parliament is the indisputable world leader in the use of Facebook by a parliamentary institution

But, nevertheless, we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too much and forget going on… because our 75 000 fans are nothing compared too:

• 272 000 on the Democracy UK page, which was launched to debate political issues at a national level.
• 455 000 fans/friends of all MEPs on Facebook (It’s even probably more than 500 000 now)
• 9.3 millions fans for Obama
• 9.6 millions fans for Lady Gaga
• 400 million Facebook users worldwide
• 500 million EU citizens
• 500 billion minutes spent on Facebook every month in the world

This Tweet by Kattabel made my day:

Should you apply?

Two big joys. Fist one: Obama is looking for a Social Networks Manager. Everybody knows that the American President used the social media tools trough all his campaign and continues to feed them actively, with over 7,5 Million fans on Facebook and more than 3 Million on Twitter.

Kattabel made a direct connection between Obama and the European Parliament, suggesting that the vote on SWIFT really affected Americans politics and politicians.

I’m very impressed by this Tweet and I dream of the day when, let’s say Mr. Barroso, or Lady Ashton, who, so far, are still a bit behind, will publish a similar annoucement.

Now… please don’t rush away to go and send your application, stay here to read the rest of this post!

Mia Cambronero, on the left, has been Obama's Twitterer till now

The lucky one (till today a young lady) will be working “closely with the rest of the New Media department” but has to be “ready to work hard”, since ”this isn’t a 9-5 sort of job”. The motivation is important: you should be “passionate about engaging millions of Americans in advancing President Obama’s agenda and changing the country”.

But there is a second thing which makes me feel even better. Kattabel made a direct connection between Obama and the European Parliament, suggesting that the vote on SWIFT really affected Americans politics and politicians.

This might sound a bit provincial (“Uh uh…Obama is talking of us…”). But wait. What if this was really the beginning of a new leading role of the European Parliament on the international stage, a role that the EU never gave to our institution before the Lisbon Treaty?

It will be very interesting, in the years to come, to see how the Parliament will be able to stretch the powers granted by the Treaty to play a role in the world. This was for sure a strong start, whether Obama does actually care or not of what will you write in your application.

China and the US stand for no less than 41, 7 % of all world emissions. (c) Photo: Ruy Vasco on Flickr

But why is it so important when Obama will attend the conference? What difference does it make whether he comes this week and meet with negotiators or he comes next week and meets with all the heads of states? Well first all, the US is the second largest CO2 emitter in the world, and the Americans emit more CO2 per head than any other country in the world. Secondly, the last climate deal, the Kyoto protocol, did not lead to satisfactory results from the US (When Kyoto was agreed, the US committed to reducing its emissions by 6%, but instead its carbon dioxide emissions have increased to more than 15% above 1990 levels). So this time it’s absolutely crucial that the US President takes a personal responsibility for whatever is decided in Copenhagen.

Finally, if the Americans decide to commit themselves to ambitious CO2- targets, there’s a good chance that China, the world’s biggest emitter, will be forced to do the same.

US and China: The biggest polluters on earth

According to the United Nations (2006 figures) China and the US stand for no less than 41, 7 % of all world emissions (China 21, 5 % & the US 20, 2%) -  China produced 6,200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2006, compared with 5,800 million tons for the U.S. The 2 countries are by far the biggest carbon dioxide emitters in the Wold.

A couple of weeks ago Head of the EP-delegation to Copenhagen Mr. Jo Leinen said that it would be a severe setback for world climate protection efforts if the US and China do not commit themselves to specific greenhouse gas reduction goals. “The biggest polluters can turn out to become the biggest failures for climate protection”, he said.

A month ago when two colleagues from our unit interviewed Mr. Leinen, he defined binding CO2-targets for industrialized countries and the financing of climate aid to the developing countries as the two main obstacles to success in Copenhagen.

Will Obama’s participation change anything?

Obama’s decision to attend the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in the last crucial days means that the US President will stand face to face with more than 100 world leaders, who have already confirmed that they will attend the final stage of the conference.  ”Based on his conversations with other leaders and the progress that has already been made… the president believes that continued U.S. leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference” the White House said in a statement.

But was does it mean in practice? Will there really be a legally binding agreement in Copenhagen? Probably not.  Obama knows that such objectives must be approved by the US Congress, where negotiations on a new American climate law have been postponed until spring 2010.

But what it probably does mean is that Obama doesn’t expect a huge failure in Copenhagen when the world leaders meet to sign some sort of “political agreement”. The prospect that there may actually be concluded a reasonable agreement in Copenhagen is improved! The dynamics surrounding the summit seems to work. With the most important players present in Copenhagen – The United States and China – it would be associated with an enormous loss of prestige for all, if the negotiations end in failure. As the Chair of the UN panel on climate change Dr. Rajendra Pachauri said: “Obama’s revised travel plans represent a very significant development, both in substance and in symbolism, and vastly increases the prospect of a satisfactory agreement in Copenhagen.”

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?

I say the “happy position”, because it is great (and easy) to be the cool guys constantly bidding for an idea and able to moan virtuously when the ol’ fuddy-duddies didn’t get it. Trouble is, they did! 

We are on MySpace!

What changed? For us, three factors. First, the world changed (not just for us, but for us too). The internet became what it is, technology moved on and we entered an era where NOBODY could ignore strange phenomena like MEPs’ speeches getting a million views in two days on YouTube or improbable Scottish singers becoming 50-million-view sensations…

Second, Obama happened. Politicians everywhere saw tangibly, and in the highest-stakes democratic contest in the world, how clever use of the modern internet for political communication can mobilise and motivate in ways hitherto unsuspected. Rightly enough, suddenly all politicians want a piece of that particular action.

How many times have we girded our loins, prepared our pitch, convinced that our latest scheme for something dangerously hip on the internet would be a tough sell to our flinty-eyed superiors, only to find the door wide open and be told to get a move on?

Third, the European elections loomed. Let’s not beat around the bush, EU people are worried that turnout could decline once more and the elections fail to receive the attention they are due. So the moment is propitious for trying new ideas, heading in new directions. Turnout is not determined by EU communications campaigns, but the cry went up nonetheless “we have to do whatever it takes!”

So, in a short space of time, we have an environment where suddenly the seemingly impossible, or, better, unimaginable, became urgent, where ideas which had hitherto been pushed in vain sailed through with barely a squeak. It was disconcerting: how many times have we girded our loins, prepared our pitch, convinced that our latest scheme for something dangerously hip on the internet would be a tough sell to our flinty-eyed superiors, only to find the door wide open and be told to get a move on? Will it last? Maybe not, but these are good times for innovation and it is hard to imagine how the internet genie can now be persuaded back into the bottle.

So why a hint of nostalgia for those sunny days when we banged our heads against a wall of seemingly implacable web-scepticism? Well, we’ve gotta do it now, haven’t we! 

Someone once said be careful what you wish for… I sympathise. Once upon a time, the web team of the EP spent its days researching and writing articles for the headlines page of the EP website. It was a full time job, done well. It still is.  (A full-time job, done well). But today your friendly web editors have one or two other things to keep them out of mischief:

+ moderating comments for our interactive features on the elections website

+ administering a MySpace profile, blogging, posting videos and photos, making friends, moderating comments

+ from today, very much the same for a Facebook page

+ managing a Flickr account, uploading photos, responding to users (and a separate “Guest photographer” photstream)

+ blogging on this blog (no, that’s a pleasure!)

+ getting out there, spreading the word, linking, commenting, posting, networking

+ and (soon) managing a new YouTube channel (part of EUTube)

Meanwhile, we’re not out of ideas yet. More projects are in the pipeline, but  a degree of suspense about those for the moment.

It’s great, of course, and there is SO much more to be done (as a rather intimidating encounter with a man from the UK Central Office of Information recently brought home to me), but it’s also rather a lot of work in the meantime. It’s all very well to set up cool new social networking sites, to finally “get it” (thanks Nosemonkey), but once you’ve started there’s no going back. Social networks, by definition, need daily input, a truth the EP web team  is discovering by doing.

So sooner or later, recognising a reality that public administrations traditionally feel hard to deal with, our strategy will have to be as much about what we are going to stop doing as about all the new things we can find to keep us busy. Just for now though, those elections continue to loom, all hands are on deck and there are seven weeks to go (it says so on MySpace) and, dammit, we’re enjoying it!

Not everyone who sees this may be familiar with the notion of “estates” in society – this may be an Anglo-Saxon thing, I’m not sure (though it also exists in Italian, as the illustration shows). Originally, in the feudal world, the three estates were the clergy, the nobility and the commons. You can see the remnants of this concept in the British parliamentary system. Professor Dutton points out that the idea morphed into the US notion of the legislative, executive and judicial branches. The essential point here however is that the press and media have long been identified as the “Fourth Estate” (the idea goes back to Edmund Burke, it seems) which have become a de facto fourth centre of power in the land, an essential part of the system of governance.

It is the capacity of individuals to network and, crucially, thereby to become collectively actors in the political process and the system of governance, which allows the creation of the Fifth Estate.

Prof Dutton’s thesis is that contemporary society is seeing the emergence of a “Fifth Estate”, enabled by the internet and, to a lesser extent, other information and communications technology (e.g. mobile phones). In this vision, it is the capacity of individuals to network and, crucially, thereby to become collectively actors in the political process and the system of governance, which allows the creation of the Fifth Estate. This is more than just saying that the internet allows for new forms of political communication and mobilisation – à la Obama – and more too than pointing to the emergence of what has been called “citizen jounalism”. Both of these ideas are encompassed in the notion of the Fifth Estate, but, as I understand it, the idea is that networked individuals operate as new power centres in society, able to challenge and hold to account the other “estates” in society. In his words:

“Networked individuals can move across, undermine and go beyond the boundaries of existing institutions, thereby opening new ways of increasing the accountability of politicians, press, experts and other centres of power and influence.”

Quarto Potere (Fourth Estate) - Citizen Kane film poster from cliff1066 on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/people/nostri-imago/

He goes on to use the interesting example of how the authority and expertise of medical doctors is being undermined by individuals being in possession of inforamation about their conditions gained from the internet and online support groups.  So it’s not just politics in the restricted sense, but expertise, authority and power more widely:

“What distinguishes the Fifth from the Fourth Estate is the ability of the Internet to enable networked individuals to hold other estates to account, creating a relatively independent base from which to challenge the media, politicians, government officials, business leaders, educators, physicians, researchers and the conventional wisdom of the crowd.”

What is so appealing about this thesis? For me, the interest derives from its mixture of feet-on-the-ground reasonableness (this is not utopian geekery) and extremely radical implications. Ultimately it is not really about the technology, but the actually quite ordinary uses to which it is put.  It is about human beings doing what human beings do.

What I also like is the concept that the Fifth Estate is precisely that – the fifth. Reports of the death of the media are much exaggerated. The Fifth does not replace the Fourth Estate, though it may challenge it, hold it to account and eat into its territory, but provides a new factor in our political and social systems. It seems to me that this is one of the crucial lessons that members of the other estates will have to learn, especially politicians. The lesson goes well beyond absorbing the immediate Obama experience about internet networking as political communication and mobilisation, this is about long term governance and the relation between institutions, electorate and society. European Parliament take note.

All this begs a question, of course: who holds the Fifth Estate to account? Or is the Fifth Estate somehow the end of the line, an expression of society itself? Hmmm.

Meanwhile, where does all the power come from and where is it going in the world? This very clever and possibly very scary video caught our eye in the office this week. Worth a watch.

By the way, a longer exposition of Professor Dutton’s ideas here.

Barack Obama's Facebook profile (www.facebook.com)

Today, I find myself in downtown Brussels in a hotel, surrounded by people without ties but all sporting the inevitable conference badges, where in a moment I am participating in a panel discussion entitled “What won it for Obama?”, alongside journalists, broadcasters and someone from the Obama campaign team (of whom we are all duly in awe). It is difficult to approach such a discussion without a feeling of deep inadequacy. The Obama campaign has set standards which online communicators across the entire world currently aspire to. In the case of the European Parliament, as I have had occasion to note, the effect has been to create a broad, perhaps rather vague, wish to get a bit of the action. I remain personally convinced that people who want their piece of the Obama magic don’t necessarily know what exactly they’re asking for and may be quite surprised when they find out.

The first thing always to say about the Obama campaign (the online component) is that it is not simply transferable to the European context. An electoral battle between two individuals, with charismatic candidates, pots of money, a clear choice and at stake the government of the world’s richest and most powerful nation, is not, shall we say, the situation we find ourselves in as we contemplate our communications campaign on the European elections. Nor are we supporting a candidate, able to take partisan positions and deploy the passion inevitably unleashed by a US election. Passion may well exist for European politics – it should – but it does not find the straightforward bipartisan outlet that a US election offers.

So, as I say, humility. But humility does not mean that our job is unimportant. Our task is a more than honourable one, to encourage and generate interest and participation in a democratic process which, for all that people may not realise it, does matter hugely to everyone living in Europe. So let us look at Obama’s campaign and see what inspiration it does have to offer.

Social networking in particular allows people to make the campaign as much about themselves as about the candidate or the political party to which he belongs.

For me, the crucial point about Obama’s online campaign was its effectiveness in involving people in the campaign, making it about them as individuals. The campaign was able to make people feel that the election was about them: their concerns, their work, their families, but crucially also about their voices, their efforts, their contribution. Part of the genius of Obama’s small contribution strategy – whether or not that is really where his funding mainly came from – was that it gave contributors a part of Obama, gave them a direct personal stake in his campaign. Illusory perhaps in many ways, but this sense of involvement also found an outlet in the online tools deployed. Social networking in particular allows people to make the campaign as much about themselves as about the candidate or the political party to which he belongs. It also means that people get the message not necessarily from distant institutions, organisations or even candidates, but from their friends and neighbours. And as any advertiser will tell you, word of mouth, or its digital equivalent, works SO much better than any organisation telling you what to do or think. Perhaps this is also part of the oft-denounced atomisation of public opinion.  Sure, but if all the atoms are heading in the same direction, you get a tidal wave which results in the astounding gathering we saw in Washington DC’s mall on January 20th. (Ahem, I know, mixed metaphor…)

…

So what do we conclude in a European context? After the panel discussion, which has just taken place, I see many things we can’t do, but most of all I believe that we are at least right to do what we are trying to do, which is to involve people in the election, to make it about them. This, according to my fellow panelist, Ruth Spencer, who runs the Thinkaboutit competition, is also what that exercise seeks to achieve – to get people to think about European politics in terms of how it impacts on their lives. Even more, what the Obama campaigner, Jodi Williams, said made it clear that the Obama campaign was thinking in terms of people passing the message to other people.

How are we, in our modest way, hoping to achieve some of this? Some is already online: our elections website, online debates, this blog…, but much more is to come. Coming to the internet soon, your friendly neighbourhood European Parliament (maybe not as you know it) on social networking sites and much much more.

Who knows, maybe we’ll inspire the 2012 Obama re-election campaign :-).

Call it the Obama Effect, call it the Tide of History, call it about time, but whatever it was it happened this week.  A big week for the web team.  We got the go ahead for a series of new enterprises we have been working on behind the scenes for a while now.  

The first was this very blog, hidden behind a password for months as we trialled it internally, but now opened up to the critical eyes of the world.  (See Time to go, two posts ago).  Now we’ve actually got to do what we say we want to do – face our public.  What will they say?  Up to you, gentle reader. (Comments below)

Now we’ve actually got to do what we say we want to do – face our public.  What will they say?

Second, we got the green light to pursue two big projects for Parliament that would have seemed inconceivable less than a year ago: in the fields of social networking and viral tools.  I can’t give too much away, as we are still working on the projects and don’t yet know how and when they will come to fruition. Suffice it to say that it’s all part of our efforts to raise awareness about the European election next June, so if it’s happening, it’s happening soon.

Third, (OK it was actually the week before), we got our new special election website up and running, complete with interactive features, of which more anon.

Obama, Obama, Obama

“Hope for the political web? Obama”

So it’s our job to deliver them a slice of the Obama pie.  They want to “be on Facebook”, they want to do, er.., “Web 2.0″, they want to be “viral”.  OK, we’ll see what we can do – let’s hope they are not too surprised by what this all actually entails.  And one minor point: we’re in the market for a charismatic candidate with a gift for soaring rhetoric, tens of thousands of willing volunteers, pots of money, fortuitously favourable political circumstances and the world’s most devalued brand to fight against. These things would help, not inconsiderably. However, even without them, there is probably a fair bit we can do. Watch this space.  Actually, link to it.

Meeting the people

When elections come round, political candidates “meet the people”.  We don’t have to do that.  Nevertheless, when election websites come round, we too meet the people in our own small way.

The election website we launched on 19 January is supposed to fit with the overall look of the EP website.  It is actually published as a new section of the existing site. Behind the similarities though there are many novelties, the greatest of which is that we’ve opened up two way communications with the real world.  Each week we publish a poll, seek reactions to a question and open debates on specific subjects.  Nothing very extraordinary perhaps, but a small earthquake in terms of our organisation’s communications policy.

“2009 EP elections logo”