Andrew Rasiej opens the 2010 edition of PDFEU

As conference impresarios Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry put it this week, PDFEU 2009 “rode the wave” of the Obama internet election phenomenon. It was a very American event at which speakers from the Obama team (I confess I did start to wonder at one point just how many people were in the Obama team, as I seemed to be meeting them all year without ever meeting the same person…) and indeed from the opposing team (I’m thinking of the gleefully self-cast villain, David All), lined up to wow us with their cool videos and grassroots social media campaigns. And wow us they did. Notwithstanding the odd remark that PDF Europe would have to become, erm, a bit more European (including by me), we loved it, we lapped it up, we were inspired by it. And duly came back for more in 2010.

The Obama buzz of 2009 was a bit of a one-off

Myself, as much a PDF groupie as anyone, I viewed this as something that the team who works with me on social media just had to experience, so this year there was a six-strong delegation from WebCom to soak up the vibe. So how did PDF 2010 shape up?

I think implicit in the “riding the wave” remark was a recognition that the Obama buzz of 2009 was a bit of a one-off. It was a great, inspirational calling card for PDF’s first European edition, but ultimately represented an unsustainable phenomenon, just us the Obama phenomenon itself seems – sadly – to have abated in the face of the dampening reality of 2009-2010. Moreover, the organisers were right to make a conscious effort to “europeanise” the event, to address more European concerns, to look at the internet in the context of European politics, to connect the thing more with the real lives of your average European politically-inclined geek…

As a result, notwithstanding the rather grander (too grand?) venue of the University in Barcelona, this felt a rather lower-key event. It was a little more local, a little more parochial, with the zeitgeist perhaps favouring a little less pizazz. European presenters (yes, I include myself) don’t have that American chutzpah and narrative instinct which makes US speakers so great to listen to – and this year there were proportionately more European presenters. Generally speaking, TED it wasn’t. In terms of the plenary, there was a marked contrast this year between day one (more European/institutional) and day two (more US/non-institutional). Sentiment in the EP contingent was clear: day two was cooler, the glint in the collective eye brighter, the urge to get out there and do stuff stronger. This is not just a US/Europe glamour contest: ask anyone who was there about the highlight of the conference, and I will guarantee 9 out of 10 will opt for the irredeemably cheeky and contrarian Croatian, Marko Rakar. He was provincial. He was from an obscure corner of Europe (certainly when viewed from across the Atlantic). But, dammit, this guy was funny, he told a story, he did something. He got arrested. He touched a nerve. In this, he reminded me of another low-production-values speaker from last year, Tom Steinberg, who roused the hall with his call to “love your geeks!” We need these people at every conference.

This year, the conference goers felt more like protagonists, there was a genuine sense of being in this together, a sense of a pioneer community with a job to do.

I am conscious that it sounds like I am on a bit of a downer about PDFEU 2010. Not true. It’s just that this was a rather more grounded event. And that’s good too. This could be felt most strongly in the margins of the conference. Last year, the atmosphere could arguably be summed up as a poplace rather overawed, however gladly, by the Obama-dudes. Inspired, but also infected with a sense of inferiority. This year, the conference goers felt more like protagonists, there was a genuine sense of being in this together, a sense of a pioneer community with a job to do. We are maybe feeling our way a bit, a bit more reserved, less brimming with self-confidence, in some cases less self-assured about sounding clever in the English langauge, but also with a growing sense that we are collectively onto something, that there is a job to do and that, possibly, we may be the ones to do it. This was fantastic. This was what PDFEU 2009 did not have.

PDFEU is, I dearly hope, here to stay. We need the inspiration. We love the cool, smart Americans who tell us their stories. It blows our minds to hang out for a cerveza and boccadillo with Randi Zuckerberg as if that were a normal thing to do. Above all, it makes us want to get out there and find our own voice, our own version. We also need – and read this as an EU metaphor if you wish – the outside agent to help us see our own collective interest, our own potential, our own capacity for changing the world with technology… (Good grief, now I sound like an American.)

So what does all this lead me to conclude? First, PDFEU is the biz. Long may it live, and long may it have a European edition (and frankly, long may the European edition be in Barcelona!). Second, the organisers, who I had the privilege to get to know a bit better this year, deserve our gratitude. I have the feeling that they do this, as it were, as much for love as for money. So thanks. Third, as long as I have any say in the matter, this is definitely a place where the European Parliament’s web people need to be.

I attended last year as a rather marginal workshop speaker, making a short presentation of our 2009 online campaign to promote the European elections. Before and after my stint, I had time and leisure fully to enjoy the rest of the conference, which was packed with great speakers, many from America, others from across Europe, all with fascinating takes on the interaction of the internet and politics. I think my appreciation of the event shows through pretty clearly in the blog post I wrote afterwards.

“Would you be interested in doing something?” he said. Duh… “Yes,” I said.

Maybe flattery gets you somewhere after all, as I was surprised and delighted to be contacted by PDF supremo Andrew Rasiej (an individual noted on that occasion, I could add, by some of our number for more than a passing resemblance to George Clooney* – make up your own minds – though I’m told it was more in the voice) with a proposal.  Andrew was of the view that the things we have been doing in the European Parliament over the last year or so merit us a billing on the next PDF programme. “Would you be interested in doing something?” he said. Duh… “Yes,” I said.

Next thing I know, I’m scheduled just after the likes of Alec Ross, Jimmy Leach and possibly Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau. This is exalted company, a fact which partially accounts for the word “trepidation” in my title.  You can take it for granted that I will be sweating hard over the 10-minute keynote presentation I have been lined up to give. Actually I was thinking of dedicating half the Web Communications team entirely to the task from now until the Conference…

What’s the story this time? Last year, we were still looking back at the election campaign and trying to work out where this was all going to take us in “peacetime”, i.e. the period of supposedly normal life outside the liminal space of elections. Two things were very clear to us: first, we had to build on our initial steps into social media as a way of developing day to day interaction between normal people and the Parliament, which meant involving MEPs to a far greater extent; second, we badly needed to upgrade our main website, which was showing its age.

This year, I suppose the story is about how we have progressed on these two things. It can’t be as flashy as last year, an annus mirabilis during which we launched an improbable number of new enterprises in a great rush and had lots of cool videos to show. (Only this cool video since then.) However, what we’re doing now, though far more laborious, will arguably ultimately be far more important and radical in the long term.

Most of all, we have stuck huge numbers of coloured post-its to the walls of meeting rooms and consumed vast quantities of M&Ms in pursuit of illumination…

Over the last six months we have been working on what we call “remaking the web presence” of the European Parliament. What we really mean by that is that this is not only about the central Europarl website, but about all the things we do and offer online: a whole range of other websites, social media platforms, our burgeoning community on Facebook, EuroparlTV and so on. The first stage of this has been to try to get a grip on the concept: what are we really aiming to achieve?

We have talked to each other quite a lot – always a wholesome thing to do we probably don’t usually do enough of – but we have also spent a lot of time with others. A succession of impressive individuals, web gurus at the heart of some of the web operations we admire most, have given us their time for masterclasses and workshops. Some of them hung out with us in the evening too, which has added some revealing anecdotes to the more structured wisdom of the afternoon sessions. We have conducted usability studies too. There’s nothing like that eye-tracking red dot to tell you what people see – and don’t see – on your web page. We have importuned our regular users with satisfaction surveys and our colleagues with internal workshops. We have heard from MEPs, website users, bloggers, Facebook fans, twitterers galore and readers of this blog. Most of all, we have stuck huge numbers of coloured post-its to the walls of meeting rooms and consumed vast quantities of M&Ms in pursuit of illumination…

Yep, that's about it

At the end of all that, we think we at last have an idea what we want and need to do. Doing it is of course potentially another thing entirely, but it’s as well when you’re setting off to have some idea where you’re heading, even if your destination might ultimately look rather different from your imaginings.

Right now, our ideas are taking shape on paper. It would be jumping the gun for me to say much more for the present, but by the time PDF comes round it should be possible to reveal more. I want to, because I feel PDF people could be of great help to us in fixing our long term vision. This is a conference teeming with ideas and it’s always worth trying to snaffle a couple as they fly by. So trepidation, yes, but high expectations too.

So, team, how’s that keynote coming along?

* Apologies to Andrew for this bit, but I’m guessing the George Clooney comparison is one most people can live with?

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?