Being difficult to ‘touch the reader’, as Kriistina righlty wrote, we often struggle between the feeling that ‘we are the best’, ‘WE are social media’  and – depending on the day – ‘we are out-of-date’, or ‘our website is slow, is static, is old…’ .

But what are the others doing? Where do they stand? Far from respecting any website analysis criteria, I here only try to sum up the elements that caught my attention on the different webistes I’ve surfed.

Art collection of the Italian Parliament: Members at work?

My choice of parliaments is completely arbitrary, and I apologise with the collegues that feel underrepresented. Don’t worry: we can write a series of this (and then put them in a Focus of course!). I took in consideration: UK Parliament, Spanish Congreso, Italian Camera and, with the help of Christian and Leszek, German Bundestag and Polish Sejm.

UK Parliament: interactive and connected!

UK Parliament’s page open with a pop-up survey, asking to answer few questions on the quality of the website…WOW!! They even thank you for taking part in it.

Immediately, the feeling is of involvment and interactivity. All the navigation is user-driven. Any section has many layers from which you can choose: basically you create you own home-page according to your interests.
No much text, but factual and accesible information available immediately, for example on meetings, reports and special events.

Scrolling down the page a little, the ‘Get involved’ part of the site becomes central: a direct link to Facebook (double-WOW!) , and then audio and video archive. But that’s not all. Opening the ‘Join in!’ page, you can access Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, FriendFeed (a sharing tool open to comments) and ‘Parliament Labs’ the blog of the Web centre of the UK Parliament (Steve, is it your source of inspiration?).

Finally, you can access online forums where people debate Parliament-related topics. But collegues, don’t worry: I couldn’t find any topic with more than 50 comments! What I also find good is the ‘bookmark’ tool, that allows to share the information on the most popular social networks.

Another important part of the homepage is dedicated to visits and school tools to learn about the Parliament: a website really user-oriented and participative, that should inspire many others!

Spanish Congreso: so transparent and…so international!

Impossible for me to enter the Congreso website in Spanish. The default version is English. Fortunately, only the titles. When you go to the body of the text,  only the Spanish version is available.

Languages a part, transparency seems to be the main concern for Spanish legislators, as acts and bills occupy most of the space on ‘La Une’. But multimedia also plays a role: a nice photo gallery of the building, and link to three different channels of the Congreso web TV.

As a confirmation that transparency matters to Spanish congress, the very effective seach engines: if you look in ‘Publicaciones’ or ‘Iniciativias’ or ‘speeches’, you can search by a key word and a very comprehensive and understandable list of documents appear, with hiperlinks allowing to relate one document to the other.

On the main page, also, contacts for visits and email addresses: an attention to citizens that is never unwelcome.

‘Camera dei deputati’: Youtube and the link…with the past

The remarkable element of Italian Camera’s website is the portal containing an historical archive that collects audio and videos from 1919 till nowadays. Amazing: for example, watch the ‘Camera fascista’ voting for the foundation of the fascist  ‘Empire’! Scary and…hilarious.

There is also a photo album showing the magnificent artistic properties of the House. Feeling like visiting it? Easy. Just send a fax to the security…:)

But please don’t think that Italians only look back to the past. Modernity also has its place on the homepage of ‘la Camera’, linking to its Youtube channel. Opened in November 2008, the channel contains 134 videos, many of them reporting on current activities, special events taking place at the Parliament, debates and interviews. The most viewed has 966 visits. A pity that comments and rating are forbidden.

Bundestag: multimedia and multilanguage

Germans…I’m sorry guys, but they do it better! They have a brand new website, inaugurated in August. First of all, it’s available in French and English, and not only the homepage! You can access activities, acts and general information from the main menu, with a very easy and complete navigation system.

In second place, videos, photos, webTV and multimedia in general have a prominent role on the homepage, that has an appealing graphic and  ‘magazine’ style.

A very easy calendar tool on the right of the main menu links to the activities of the chamber,  while the TV schedule connects you the programs of the day.

On the left, space to interactivity and games: a section dedicated to young people, another to children. Virtual visits, funny widgets and simulations to play ‘the MPs’ make the visit entrataining and useful for the non-specialist public.

Finally, if you want to follow the results of next Sunday’s elections live, be connected!

Maybe it’s the absence of any link to social media, or actually the absence of Bundestag from social media at all, that made a German blogger comment that this is a website from the 90s. I wish all the parliaments’ websites were from the 90s like this!

Polish Sejm: transparency and children at its heart

The website is entirely translated to English, a part from the actuality. Sections are clearly and simply structured, and access to document is intuitive. They even have regulation on lobbyist and list of lobbyists publicly available from the main page.

Polish Parliament bets on children to be better known: an interactive animation shows the history, the symbols and the meaning of the country as well as of its national assembly.

And us?

No, I’m sorry…the exercise didn’t aim at judging who’s better and who’s worse. So, no comparison with OUR website please! We know that we have much to learn, but also that we try and do our best to make our webiste attractive and useful.

Being imaginative, however, why not dreaming of Europarl as a mix between the connectivity of UK Parliament, the content-richness of German, the transparency of the Spanish and Polish and…the beauty of art galleries of the Italian? :)

This minstrel has seen some changes himself

Writing in Prospect magazine this month Steven Johnson and Paul Starr debate the question of whether the changes brought to the media by the internet herald “a golden age of serious journalism” or whether it will bring down standards.

As someone whose job is to write on the web, I naturally hope it will be the latter – especially in regard to political reporting and content. The European elections are just a few weeks away and we are beavering away at all manner of things for the website, YouTube, Facebook – you name it – trying to persuade people to vote. We even have some viral stuff – and I’m not talking about swine flu either.

A recent gift by my Polish colleague, Leszek, got me thinking about how different methods of political communication have changed over the last 200 years.

It was of a reprint of “The Times” after the Battle of Waterloo providing a fascinating insight into news back in 1815. The front page is filled with adverts for lodgings, meetings, Governesses and tutors. The inside pages have a full account of the battle itself by the Duke of Wellington and an “official bulletin” from Downing Street which celebrated the end of “a long and sanguinary conflict”.

This was political communication 1815 style. The date is 22 June, 4 days after the battle – a period of time that would be unthinkable now in the modern news cycle.

This was of course the newspaper age – something that is perhaps still with us – but which faces a serious challenge for its survival from the internet and global recession. It survived the telegram, the radio, cinema and the TV, which have all indelibly shaped politics. Above all TV has shaped modern politics. Famously in the 1960 TV presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy those who listened to it on radio thought Nixon had won, whilst the TV audience gave victory to Kennedy due to hid healthier pallor and Nixon’s perspiration.

A flickr of genius

Traditionally the best way to convince the voters is by making speeches to large numbers of voters. Many tended to be long-winded affairs with the oratorical giant like William Gladstone holding his listeners spellbound for hours as he denounced the policies of his old foe Disraeli.

Recently a lawyer from Illinois has been in the news for getting elected as US President in part due to his speaking skills. It was another lawyer from that State, Abraham Lincoln, who in November 1863 combined oratory and brevity in equal measure with a speech at the site of the Gettysburg battlefield.

Renowned orator Edward Everett delivered a two hour oration before Lincoln – but who remembers that now? After he had finished Lincoln stood up and spoke for perhaps 2 to 3 minutes summarizing the Union’s aims in the Civil War in 10 sentences, which have rightly gone down in history.

Whatever the format I think well chosen words and an effective delivery always have impact. Recently a certain British MEP delivered a pretty blistering assault on Prime Minister Gordon Brown after his speech to the European Parliament. With the help of the old media – namely the right-wing newspapers extolling its brilliance – it has now been viewed over 2.2 million times. Whether or not one shares his views, he has demonstrated is that the YouTube format does work when carrying effective speeches from Brussels and Strasbourg.

Face to Face book

One of the most tried and trusted way to persuade the voters is by meeting them – although as any candidate will tell you this can are a nerve wracking affair.

Being “on the stump” is a good way for aspiring candidates to meet their electorate. My sister, who lives in London, recently told me that a nice old lady from the Conservative party had knocked on her door the other day and asked whether she would be voting for them. Something about this quaint British tradition of canvassing door to door I find really appealing. It gives you a chance to see your candidates and get a measure of them.

Naturally, if they are the party you have no intention of voting for the trick is to keep them talking at length on the doorstep so they have less time to go to other people…

Here in Belgium they have this nice habit of coming round markets and asking if you intend to vote for them – this weekend I accumulated several leaflets from the Green party as I sat having a coffee. The slight irony of the greens giving out leaflets has always struck me but I’m sure it’s recycled paper!

Poster child

The Belgians also erect billboards around the town so that parties and candidates can paste up their pictures it can be quite amusing and parochial, but it’s faintly reassuring.  Election posters are a whole genre in themselves. It also seems the worse the regime – the better the posters. I defy anyone not to be impressed by the visual splendour Soviet posters depicting all manner of Communist “triumphs”.

Politics online

In the 2004 European Parliamentary elections the internet played a part but it is in the last 5 years that it has really come of age with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter entering the lexicon. Given the amount of people who use them I doubt they will fade easily.

Here in the Web Communication Unit of the Parliament’s Communication Department have not only developed a website in the EU’s 22 languages that gets over 100,00 visits a day but have embraced them along with Facebook, MySpace and flickr to try and get the message across.

The good thing about this is that it allows people to communicate with us and get their own message across.