Parliament recently passed the 150,000 fan milestone on its Facebook page. We now see a sharply increased level of interaction. In fact, we felt there was a “critical mass” at about 100,000 which turned us from mere dabblers in Facebook moderation to hard-bitten full-time pros.  We are now accustomed to seeing both “likes” and comments well into three figures and recently experienced our first 1000-interaction post (this one on Turkey, now at 1,243 interactions).  So we’re happy, right?

Right. We are happy.

"Like us." Is it enough?

But it’s a bit like that mid-life, mid-career thing: it’s all going swimmingly, but you start to wonder what it all adds up to. Where do we go from here?

The obvious answer is more of the same: 200,000, a quarter of a million… Yesterday, our keen new Facebook tweaker extraordinaire (he of our cool new Facebook chat app), who’s on a bit of a roll right now, said he would like to stay around until we got to the million mark at least… Let’s be clear, I’m not sneezing at the big numbers, indeed I feel rather humbled and privileged at the numbers of people who take an interest, but, without forcing the comparison too far, it’s a bit like your third or fourth billion dollars in the bank, n’est-ce pas, Mark? – you start looking for something more.

Though the Parliament’s Facebook fans give all indications of being quite happy, we can’t help worrying about them. Are they really satisfied? Are they getting what they really want, what they really need? Is all that amazing Facebook energy serving some higher purpose? What do we do with all those comments?

Obama’s thousands

It turns out we’re not the only ones asking ourselves such existential questions. We’re in very eminent company. Macon Phillips, White House social media supremo, is similarly wondering what to do with his 931,641 fans (though I bet he’s obsessing about the millionth one too!). As previously mentioned, we went to see Macon in the White House social media nerve centre, somewhat (I’ll now admit) disappointingly located in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Building next door to the White House (damn! another dream that’ll have to wait). Our conversation was largely about what happens to all those comments that people leave on the White House page. In their case, the numbers are frequently in the thousands.

The White House's social media nerve centre

To look at, the White House social media operation was not the teeming glass and steel, glitzy, Google-esque techno-mecca one might feverishly imagine. It was a rather old-fashioned, cluttered open space office populated by about 15 staff (most of whom had gone home, this being the early evening, thereby busting another fond West Wing myth of mine.) Fifteen staff. What can 15 staff, who are presumably also tweeting, blogging, commenting, emailing, and so on, do with thousands of comments every day? The truth is they barely have time to look at them. So is the White House page an exercise in digital democracy and engagement or a place for Americans to speak to thin air?

I took a bit of time to scan the comments on the White House page. They actually remind me of those on the European Parliament page. Most people have something to say. They say it coherently and concisely. They are broadly on-subject. There is a conversation going on between the users. In other words, there is value in these comments – not all of them, of course, but certainly more than enough for anyone in the business of democratic politics to want to leverage that value somehow. And yet, Macon Phillips frankly conceded, they haven’t really worked out how. Campaigning was one thing, social media were a tool of real world organisation. Government is quite another.

“Ten email addresses are worth 250 Facebook fans”

The search for enlightenment on these issues found us standing before two strikingly similar entrances in Washington DC, similar because they were simple, discreet glass doors, giving very little indication of what lay within and which proved remarkably complicated to get though. The first such door belonged to a consultancy company called Blue State Digital.

Blue State Digital is not just any old tech consultancy. It was created by Joe Rospars, formerly social media strategist for the Obama campaign and inspirational speaker on the tech-politics circuit. As its name indicates, it was set up to specialise in political communications strategy for people and organisations of a left-leaning “liberal” bent, but in reality seems to have moved far beyond that meanwhile.

So cool. Chez Blue State Digital

First thing to say about the meeting in Blue State Digital is that we swooned over the offices. Once we got through the glass door and up the stairs (broken lift), we found ourselves in the coolest industrial design open space any of us had ever encountered. All exposed brick and steel, trestle tables, splashes of strong colour, glass meeting rooms, the soft hum of sleek aluminium computers – you get the idea. Needless to say, the strongest take-away from the meeting was a fantasy about turning our beloved Rue Montoyer rabbit hutches into something like this. (You get a glimpse of Blue State’s offices early in this video postcard.)

Once we were over the swooning bit and had munched on some excellent sandwiches thoughtfully supplied for this lunchtime meeting, we found out what Blue State Digital think about social media.

“Embassies” was one word they used. Social media, in the Blue State world view, are about promotion and “early engagement”. Different networks work for different target groups: MySpace is still big in the Latino community (translate that into EU terms!), Twitter is for middle aged professionals, Facebook is for young and old… I love these confident and sweeping generalisations, which though clearly offered slightly tongue in cheek point to the importance of knowing who your target audiences are and using the right means to reach them.

This is where Rospars revealed that Blue State Digital is the only political consultant in town sending faxes. “Believe me, no-one sends faxes any more, so when you send one to a Congressman, it’s so unusual it gets read!” Nice.

The secret is to get those people beyond Facebook to your own website

But I digress. Social media, whichever group and whomever targeting, offer a way to “start a relationship”, “join a discussion already happening” or to “convene a conversation”, but – and this is the key point for Rospars – the secret is then to get those people beyond Facebook to your own website or blog (albeit quite likely still using their Facebook identities). That’s the place where you can leverage the early engagement and really do something with it, organisationally and editorially. Your own website is a place where you provide the structure, transform the loose emotional engagement of an open social network into something more personal, direct and useful.

It was easy to believe that this was Obama’s former campaign director for new media. The vision was all about getting people to act, donate, join the team. As we saw again and again in the US, the collective obsession of political online communicators is getting people’s email addresses, seen as a qualitative step up from looser forms of contact. Hence the “10 email addresses are worth 250 FB fans” quote.

Maybe it’s not quite the same thing in our world, but there are interesting lessons here, in particular the simple fact that social media are not an end in themselves, but serve a purpose (or range of purposes) as part of an integrated communications and engagement strategy.

Tomorrow's WebCom HQ, Rue Montoyer 75?

We talked for a while about how that might work. One thing that works well, we were told, was to get people to tell stories about themselves and their own experiences. Invite them to do so via Facebook, but then take the best stories and develop them on your site, add editorial value, give the storytellers flip video cameras and ask them to make videos (an idea which came back, quite separately, in New York with Rachel Sterne of GroundReport), and then spread the content out again via the social networks.

It’s all food for thought, based on the notion that social media operate as intermediary channels, contacting, spreading, convening, inviting, disseminating, but that ultimately value must be added in a more structured “editorialised” environment on or off-line. One can also see how this principle might work in the sphere of e-democracy, where a useful deliberative process almost certainly requires a more structured environment than a Facebook comments column.

So part of the answer to the question of “what to do with all those Facebook comments” is to take those comments elsewhere. But I fear the existential quest cannot end there: all that Facebook energy most have immediate and direct value in its own right, surely?

Facebook knows best

The people behind our second rather anonymous glass door were probably less interested in getting people beyond Facebook – though they are doubtless more than happy to be the intermediary between Facebook users and the rest of the web – than in keeping them there, for this was Facebook’s Washington DC office.

Discreet presence: Facebook's former front door near Dupont Circle

Again the dodgy lift (though this one was – sort of – in operation), again the exposed brick and pipes post-industrial design. But here it wasn’t as slick and glitzy, this is not an organisation which is particularly worried about impressing a client. Seven or eight people work in what is essentially a single open space, and five of them joined us at a table in the corner to give us of their time. (Note: they now have a new office in DC, with a “funky Facebook sign“. We need to go again, it would seem.)

Over the last couple of years we have got to know Facebook people a little, mainly through their London operation, but also via fleeting visits in Brussels and once – with Randi Zuckerberg, no less – in Barcelona. They are always charming, interesting, enthusiastic and extremely keen that we should exploit all the potential of Facebook for what we do. Let’s face it, it’s cool to hang out with these people. We tell them about our experiences with their tools and products, offer the odd criticism and suggestion. Sometimes, a month or two later, some tweak to the Facebook system fixes the issue you had or gives you the new feature you wanted, though very often not in the way you expected. No advance warning, no checking back, no overt connection. It’s just there.

This sums up the Facebook ethos. They really want to provide what people want. They are undoubtedly keen that big organisations and institutional players use Facebook in their communications (as their communications even?). They tell you in great depth about how to exploit the functions they offer on their pages. They listen very carefully to what you say. But, when it comes down to it, they know best. Changes and developments come when, how and in the form Facebook programmers think best. It’s for everyone else frantically to catch up, weigh the implications of the latest development and get used to it.

“Facebook is not a fun place, it’s a business place. Don’t forget that”

So we didn’t really expect much in terms of privileged information, or direct insight into Facebook’s future strategy, they’ll never give you that, but we did want at least to put down a marker that we were preoccupied with the issue of how to get greater value out of the comments on our Facebook page.

Two of us had heard Randi Zuckerberg talking about something like a sentiment tracking exercise amongst Facebook users at the 2010 PDF Europe conference in Barcelona, so we wondered out loud about whether Facebook might be thinking of offering some sentiment analysis tool for general use. We also wondered out loud about the possibility of some integrated translation tool on Facebook pages. Actually, we wondered out loud about quite a lot of things. It was a fascinating conversation, as always, but equally as always we came out without any real enlightenment on whether either of these subjects – or indeed any of the other matters we discussed  – will be addressed by Facebook anytime soon, or at all.

However, we know they care about us and our like. As Colombia Journalism professor Sree Sreenivasan tells his students: “Facebook is not a fun place, it’s a business place. Don’t forget that”. It matters to Facebook whether public institutions and big organisations find their services useful.  So who knows, wait a while and we will see how much they were listening. If history is anything to go by, they were; but the same history tells us that if they do react, we will find out after it happens and it won’t be quite what we thought we wanted. Perhaps though Facebook itself will help us discover the life beyond Facebook?

****

Next time: why America loves a failure.

This Monday, the French newspaper Le Monde wrote a dossier about Facebook. “Is it the dream of an interconnected world of 500 million ‘friends’ that comes true? Or is it the birth of a controlling superpower much more frightening than the one from George Orwell in 1984?” Good questions, indeed, even if in the end, the journalist only seems to consider the worrying aspects and not the opportunies.

Big Brother is watching you - by thefoxling on Flickr

Am I going to start a plea in favour of Facebook? Not really. I’m also concerned by privacy considerations. To be honest, I was quite sceptical about Facebook before working for the European Parliament. I had no profile and didn’t want to have one. I changed my mind when I was told I’ll have to manage the Parliament Facebook page… I entered the FB world as a private person at the same time I started considering it for professional purposes.

Mark Zuckerberg was the youngest billionaire ever in the world. He refused a proposal of 1.5 billion dollars for buying Facebook when he was 22. Now, Facebook is worth 40 billion dollars and that could rise up to 100 billion in 2015. Am I going to earn a lot of money while working on Facebook for the European Parliament? After all, I’m just two and a half months younger than Mark…

But despite the article in Le Monde, I don’t think Facebook is – only – about money. Of course, as a huge business, it’s also about money. But if you look at what people do with Facebook, then you can see some reasons of hope.

#pdfeu showed some good practices. The British Foreign office uses social media to connect 16 000 civil servants around the world and give information to citizens like travel advice. Some citizens try to connect refugees with their families and friends.Some others try to raise awareness about violation of LGBT rights in the world. Civil society organizations like Avaaz, GetUp or MoveOn are also on Facebook to defend and publicize their projects. Facebook can’t then be reduced to a tool designed for and used by single users; it’s also a great platform to organize social movement and – let’s use the world – democracy. The European Parliament tries to find its very own place in the Facebook galaxy, providing a discussion forum on European matters and fostering debate among citizens and between citizens and their representatives.

The European Parliament tries to find its very own place in the Facebook galaxy, providing a discussion forum on European matters.

That’s exactly these opportunities that are totally absent of Le Monde’s dossier. Of course, Facebook will never replace social interactions in the real world, it will never replace the physical act democracy requires – the vote. But nowadays, the concept of democracy is much broader than it was, say, 10 or 20 years ago. The social networks occupy an empty space in the political landscape.

Maybe the problem is that speaking about democracy is not as sexy as worrying about Big Brother… Let’s hope journalists will try to put both aspects together next time to give a more accurate image of what social media are.

The Twitter sentiment tracker during Marko Rakar's speech

Last week I was one of the lucky ones that was attending Personal Democracy forum in Barcelona. And I am calling myself lucky not only because the location of the event (University of Barcelona) and because I was together with a great group of colleagues, but because of the experiences that were shared during this conference.

One particular speaker and his story made a lasting impression on me: leading political blogger from Croatia: Marko Rakar. He has been named “data guerrilla” and “data transparency revolutionary” (as well as many other names, I ‘m sure) and his story was about how one man can make a difference in fighting corruption and fraud.

Croatia = more voters than citizens

He started his presentation with numbers that were telling enough – Croatia is the only country in the world where you’ll find more voters than citizens, he said. And while it provoked a lot of laughter, the reality is as it is: corrupted. In many cases, there are more voters because people in neighbouring Bosnia or Serbia are taking advantage of loose procedures in border towns in order to gain social benefits, also local authorities encourage the practice because it gives them an ample pool of extra votes to keep themselves in power.

Marko Rakar’s ideas worth spreading

1) Educating people is the easiest way to double your money and get return on your investment.
2)Stimulating creative thinking is critical in order to succeed in rapidly shrinking an even faster changing world.
3) Rule of law, transparency of governance is a foundation for a prosperous society.
4) There are no boxes (or borders) large enough to contain great ideas.

In order to fight this situation, one day he spread the word in the online community: “if I would have the Croatias’ voters list, I could make a map and see where the fraud is”. And as Rakar is very well known political blogger in Croatia and has established his place in the online community, his voice was heard. In a few days he received DVDs with all the voters in Croatia. From that he made a database that put together names with addresses.

What he found out was that, according to the voters’ list, in a small countryside village in Croatia there was a “skyscraper” where a lot of people were registered with the same address. Or that there were many people that were registered in the house whose number was 0. After exposing all these inadequacies, now the problem has been solved, Rakard said, but there were still other things to attend to.

Fake war veterans

Other project that has Rakar’s name associated with it and why Rakar even got arrested (OK, it was only for 8 hours but that is still much more than any of us have experienced in our life) was a list of Balkan war veterans published online that showed that a lot of people (including prominent national figures) have lied about their participation in Balkan war in order to receive the veteran benefits (e.g. premium health care and duty-free car imports).

Staying true to yourself

Rakar’s presentation was uplifting. It was passionate and it was taking you on a journey. Conference organisers even measured (I wonder how that was done…) that during this presentation there was huge spikes in dominance (how in control people felt) and arousal (how awake/lively people felt).

For a part of the conference participants corruption and fraud is known from their own experience (Eastern Europe during Soviet Union times and just after gaining independence had a lot of cases in this field) for others it was just a story, but for sure, for everyone it was a reminder that if you believe in your goal and stay true to yourself, you can achieve all you believe in and make change happen.

More from Marko Rakar ‘s life

• Interview with Marko Rakar

• Rakar’s blog (in Croatian)

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.

If truth be told, this particular presentation was more a visual prop than a mine of information in itself – I think that’s often how it should be – so I don’t think that it will add a huge amount to what I said (for those who were able to hear it sans microphone). However, there are a couple of interesting graphs in there and the odd fact which may be of interest.

The figures on MEPs presence on social media need a slight health warning. These are based on research we did last spring, and my guess is they have moved a fair bit in a positive direction since. We will set a new bunch of trainees to the laborious task, but I have to say that if those nice people over at Fleishman Hillard were to consider updating their EU Digital Trends survey from 2009, that would be a wonderful thing…

Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry apologised about fifty times each to me about the power cut that hit my presentation. No worries, really. It’s a law of nature that these things happen (anyone ever been to a glitch-free conference? Even Steve Jobs has his problems now and then). I just hope that my Unplugged version wasn’t too tedious or hard to follow.

Anyway, here it is. It’s reformatted as a pdf file, so gone are the few freaky transitions and that nice wheely thing graphs can do in Keynote (I’m a sucker for that one, even if I’m not sure it counts as cool any more). Also absent is the video I showed, but you know where to find that: top right of your screens or here.

BarcelonaPDF

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?

Just lately, chance has dictated that I find myself moving in rapid succession from one webby/communications/social media conference to another (and another). My job is to surprise people with the fact that the European Parliament is actually rather ahead in terms of its institutional peer group in this kind of thing. It works well in the more parliamentary conferences, where a fair proportion of the gathering is often still quite wide-eyed about the possibilities offered by Facebook et al, maybe less so in the more web/communication events where half the participants start twittering the event before boarding their planes to the venue. I jest not. (At such events, every move you make is inevitably filmed and uploaded to YouTube before you’re home. Dangggg! Did I say that?)

One thing 99% of these events have in common though is the business of the powerpoint presentation.

How it's done. Would he send you his slides?

No, this is not going to be a whinge about those presentations where slides full of dense type illegibly reproduce the text read out too fast (or way too slowly) by the presenter. Nor do I intend to complain about complex tables and slightly askew pdf scans projected incomprehensibly behind the talking head responsible. (Inevitably a seated and immobile talking head in such cases.) I am not even going to moan about 200-slide shows or dodgy animations – you know the sort – featuring wandering ovals and mid 1990s text art splurging improbably onto the screen to make some not-very-interesting point surrealistically not-very-interesting.

No, I am not going to mention any of that. My gripe is a different one and concerns the moment when the conference organisers ask for an advance copy of your “slides”.

There is a variant, whereby they ask for a copy afterwards “so we can put it on the website”. This is also problematic, but at least avoids some of my deeply-felt objections to these practices, which are as follows:

First, requests to send in the slides presume the slides are ready, and, if they are not, put you under pressure to finalise your presentation early. Now that might work for some, but I suspect that that is not the way the creative process works for many people. OK, I may be finding rationalisations for my chaotic and last-minute working habits, but, hey, this is me and you asked me to do the presentation, right?

My presentation weighs in at a meaty 150 MB. So how am I supposed to send it? Chopped up into small bits? Or even in a special “lite” version? Ugh! Alas, my art…

Second, practical issue no. 1. You want my presentation. You want it by email. But because I have slaved over a magnificent graphical presentation, full of wonderful hi-res photography and maybe even some cool video footage, my presentation weighs in at a meaty 150 MB. So how am I supposed to send it? Chopped up into small bits? Or even in a special “lite” version? Ugh! Alas, my art…

Third, practical issue no. 2. Yes, the curse of the evil monopolist. People ALWAYS say: “could you send us your powerpoint?” But what if my presentation is NOT powerpoint? Now I know there’s a kind of snobbery about these insufferable Mac-using types who think that they are superior to mere mortals, but the problem is that not they, but the presentation software they use IS actually superior to yer bog-standard powerpoint show. So the moment always comes when the conference organisers need to be appraised of the fact that the file in question is a Keynote presentation designed to be shown from a Mac (which, by the way, I intend to plug into your beamer in the conference hall – no problem there, I trust?), and therefore will be of little use to them anyway. Conference organisers rarely enthuse at this news, though the presenter may secretly rejoice at the infallible excuse to hold back his creation. (“Insufferable Mac-user” is probably right, actually.) I have to mention one way out of this impasse which is truly horrific: to export the Keynote file to a Powerpoint file. This is possible, but I am convinced that Apple engineers have deviously written the code to ensure that, though the outcome is recognisable and usable, it is also truly horrible to behold, full of inferior graphics and clunky transitions. Ha! Take that.

Fourth, and here we get more philosophical, what is a presentation for? Surely it is to illustrate my talk. Hopefully it will have nice pictures, delighting the senses, stimulating associations and assisting the memory. It will pick out key words, key figures, add value, provide an extra dimension. But if it just says what I say, why did I bother turning up at all? If it is a self-standing document comprehensible in its own right, I may as well have saved the fare…

Why should I hand out the fruit of my creative juices copyright-free to any Tom, Dick or Harry? You wanna see it, you show at the conference. So there!

Fifth, …and that goes for the audience too! Somehow it doesn’t seem right. If your slideshow lives independently of your actual presentation, what is the point of anyone being there? Conference organisers have an interest in grasping this point. The point of a conference is to be there, to hear the presenter speak, to be inspired, bored, enlightened or annoyed by what is said… Do you imagine that all those starry-eyed fans who pack the Moscone Center in San Francisco to hear Steve Jobs show them a new iPod would be just as happy if he “sent over his powerpoint”? Now, boy, I ain’t no Steve Jobs, but there is a point here somewhere about, ahem, art, isn’t there? Why should I hand out the fruit of my creative juices copyright-free to any Tom, Dick or Harry? You wanna see it, you show at the conference. So there!

I can hear the mob of social webbers howling at my gate already – it’s all about sharing! How dare you withhold your presentation from us? But stop guys, we have the internet now. We can post stuff that’s suitable for sharing, stuff that is useful when viewed at home or in the office, stuff you can post to Facebook, YouTube, whatever you like. But how about we agree to protect that rare flower – the moment, just being there?

Disclaimer: if any conference organisers, those nice people who have asked me for my slides, read this, please don’t take it too hard. I know you just want the conference to go smoothly and meet the expectations of all those eager participants. I know, because yes, I’ve done it myself – asked for the slides…