Tibo commented in the last post on editorial aspects of all this, so I’ll just stick to the nuts and bolts. What are we offering?

I was recently asked to sum it up in an email. Here’s what I wrote:

QUOTE

First we have a special hearings website, where we will be referring everyone for the coverage. All stories and press releases on the hearings will be flagged for automatic publishing there, and all hearings will be streamed live.  After the hearings, recorded video-on-demand will be available via the pages devoted to each candidate.

Heads of EU indeed

The site also contains all general infomation (e.g. on the procedure) and all documentation (e.g. CVs, questionnaires, responses, etc.) anyone could reasonably want.

On the Headlines page we have published a “why you should be interested” article, followed by a “how to follow the hearings” piece as a guide to our online offerings. Today, a little “in numbers” article has been added ahead of the meat of the content on the hearings themselves. There is also be a top page banner linking to the hearings site.

Every day during the hearings we will publish an announcement of the hearings scheduled for the day, with all the necessary links. We will also publish a daily roundup of the previous day’s hearings

The Press Service will prepare press releases on each hearing, to be published asap after the hearing.  Each hearing will itself be followed by a press point with the candidate. These will also be webstreamed.

As I said, all relevant material will be published on the hearings website as well as on the usual Headlines and Press Service pages of Europarl.

EuroparlTV will produce a daily news bulletin on the hearings. This will be online in the original language each evening with all other languages added during the night and during the following morning. We will embed these videos in our roundup stories too.

Meanwhile, EuroparlTV has already produced a range of introductory videos on the hearings:

On Facebook, we have an “event” for the hearings, and publish regular status updates through the hearings process. We have set up a “discussion topic” where we will invite Facebook fans to comment on the hearings throughout the process. We will link to this from all our editorial material on the site

On Flickr, we will publish a stream of photos from all the hearings.

On Twitter, though it is sadly not feasible to twitter the whole thing live (!), we will keep up a steady stream of tweets pointing to the latest news, new publications, etc.

On our YouTube channel, we will publish the EuropartTV bulletins in English asap each day.

UNQUOTE

Give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and they’ll come and get it.

Now you know. But – at least here – it’s not really my intention to market what we are doing (though please feel free to follow the links above), but to provide an illustration of where we are now – our current possibilities and limits. This might help the discussion we’re having at the moment about the future of Parliament’s online presence.

I just checked. The early stats are showing a lot of traffic to the hearings website. Some consolation for Tibo, sometimes just give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and, if they’re interested, they’ll come and get it.

Such moments are rare. All too soon, those real world constraints will crowd in, stakeholders will all demand their bits of prime online real estate, technological limits will be reached, decision makers will make decisions for the mix of reasons they always do. But right now, as Tibo already let slip, we are in such a moment – we need a concept for the next generation website (website, what’s that?) of the European Parliament.

HELP! Album cover by the Beatles 1965. (Actually, I recently learnt that they are spelling "LPUS" - apparently it just looked better. The triumph of the graphic designer once again.)

Everything’s on the table. What is our website for? Who is it for? Do we need one website, several, none…? How does a site fit with a wider online strategy? How do we balance the needs of very different user groups? How do we manage multilingualism? What’s important, what’s not? Beauty v. accesibility v. usability v. interest v. interaction v. innovation v. stability v. …?

Looking around, we see cool websites, beautifully designed websites, ultra-Web 2.0 websites, no-nonsense functional websites. How applicable are other people’s models for us? Other parliament websites have great features, intuitive navigation, much to teach us. For example, the UK Parliament recently redesigned, coming up with a nice result which seems to have many features in common with the Irish parliament’s site – was it that way round? (BTW I was also interested to see the UK Parliament’s web team also blogs, a little sporadically, about its work.) But are all these ideas transferable to us? Is it wise to adopt a model which already exists, rather than looking for the next model? Should other parliaments be the last place we look for inspiration?

Help! And I mean that literally. We need help

Help! And I mean that literally. We need help. We need ideas, inspiration, suggestions both great and small. We need gurus, visionaries, ubergeeks, but also sceptics, pragmatists, real people to help us. We are, as they say, in the market for ideas.

This is NOT a call for tender, an invitation to proffer commercial services. C’mon, this is a BLOG – if we go for paid support we will seek it the proper way. No, we just want to hear your views: what would you do with a blank sheet and a brief to make a European Parliament website? Or maybe you just have that one thing you just hate about the site as it is now and are just desperate to see disappear? We are determined that we won’t end up designing this thing by committee (fine intentions…), but we still want as much input as possible!

We will ask again (and again). But this is the ultimate blank sheet moment – it won’t be back for a while – so if you have something you just have to tell us, now’s the best possible time.

In our collective mind’s eye, we all see something similar: slick, designer, multimedia aggregation pages updated with new material as it becomes available.

We are convinced that the idea is good, but of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and translating an idea into reality is always going to be an issue when your website is as huge and complicated as ours, and in 22 languages to boot. In our collective mind’s eye, we all see something similar: slick, designer, multimedia aggregation pages updated with new material as it becomes available. Want the latest on the immigration debate: concise, clear background, up to date coverage of debates and votes, helpful illustrations and arresting photos, video interviews, links to all relevant documentation and resources, a profile of the rapporteur perhaps? One click and it’s all there! Yay!

That is, until the man with the spanner very reasonably points out that this is all very well, but there is a small matter of developing all the underlying technologies, building a robust content management system, idiot-proofing the whole thing (that’s us…), and all this – lest we forget (which we, in spite of ourselves, inspired by our perigrinations on the web, always do) – IN TWENTY-TWO LANGUAGES! 

Hmmm you’re right, of course…

We take our good old familiar  front page in both hands, and start bending, folding, squeezing, pummelling it to extract the last drops of potential still lurking there

But still, time waits for no man, so let’s see what we can do with what we have. ‘Twas ever thus, fortune favours those who get on with it. So we’re operating a brand new state-of-the-art workaround system this week, using the tools and the technology we already have, while the man with the spanner disappears into the basement to build us the machine of our dreams. The sounds of clanging and rivetting (with just a spot of totally justified muttering about bloody clients who want everything done, like, yesterday) drift up the stairs. Meanwhile, we take our good old familiar  front page in both hands, and start bending, folding, squeezing, pummelling it to extract the last drops of potential still lurking there.  

The new tube of toothpaste is coming soon.

Now, dear reader, read on.

Seen our site lately?  Of course you have, but just in case you have been away, distracted, hospitalised or otherwise indisposed, you should have a look.  There is a welter of new elements: as well as the standard banners, we can now publish two mini-banners (which are in fact stories), there are photo galleries, there are so-called “visuals” (the three graphical links between the news articles and the features, and there are “ads” (the vertical series of three boxes below the visuals, which we can use for “quote of the week”, “figure of the week”, “did you know?”, etc. type elements).  These things are not necessarily there all the time – we can mix and match a bit – but collectively they give a much more interesting graphical look to the page and give us more editorial options. Combine all this with some serious efforts we have been making to sharpen up the content from a journalism point of view, and we really feel we are making progress.  Yes, we’re lookin’ good!

But are we?  As evening draws in and the shadow of the night descends on the web-editor’s soul, questions niggle.  Why are there fewer visits to our site than at the same time last year?  Why did a speaker at a webby event (EIF organised) I attended last week (admittedly somewhat incoherent and full of herself) hold up Parliament’s website as an example of people living in a bubble, out of touch with real people?

To doubt is to be alive, I suppose, and however much progress we make we are still a public institution and unlikely to be at the cutting edge of the creative web.  And, yes, we could still do better.  But as I calmed down, I realised that the throwaway disparagement of the web-event speaker was largely based in ignorance, unrealistic expectations (she wanted us to be Obama’s election campaign transplanted into the European Parliament), rather more justifiable criticisms of other, neglected parts of the site and indeed a group-think driven desire to be provocative for the sake of it. We’re not Obama, but in our peer group (for example: this, or this, or this) we’re ahead of the game.  As for the visits, it transpires that our part of the website is doing well, with people reading more of our pages than before.  All the same, we badly need a promotional campaign…

At the aforementioned webby event, another speaker was on hand to sow more fruitful doubts and concerns. Paddy McGovern, founder of RocktheVote.ie (see also US version, not least for the neat intro video) and mycandidate.ie, was there to talk about his ideas on voter engagement.  Here was a man full of pithy detail and telling anecdote. What I took from him was not so much what to do – which I suspect changes every time – but the message that you have to do something and that that something has to be a bit different. Once more, the message was that having a great website is all very fine, but what really counts is your ability to get out there and get people interested.

If this blog were live, which it isn’t yet, I’d be really interested to hear what other people, “out there” in the real world, think about all this. I hope some day to get this feedback.

Yet this is the European Parliament we’re talking about here.  Not that the European Parliament is particularly hidebound or slow compared to its peer group – it really isn’t so bad – but it’s that peer group which is the problem.  A public administration, responding to the demands of political authorities, is never going to be exactly fleet of foot, as any serious change is going to have to go through a lengthy, inevitably cautious, and at times unpredictable decision making process.  And then there’s the question of how it gets paid for.  None of this is actually a bad thing, the last thing the taxpayer wants is a bunch of flash harries throwing money around on hare-brained schemes, but it does imply that the website will develop somewhat more cautiously than what we might call the industry norm. 

And to be fair, you have to remember that the EP website is a seriously weightly undertaking.  Our “news” part of it is only one small component of a sprawling enterprise: news site, vast quantities of more static information, documentary archive,  constantly updated politico-governmental resource, streaming and multimedia… And all this in 22 languages (so it’s really 22 sprawling websites, synchronised).  But though we may feel the technical guys’ pain, we still can’t help getting frustrated as we send each other links to the coolest websites out there, drooling over their technology, freedom and creativity.  We’re desperate to do some of that stuff.  Oh well, it’s good to push, but we have to be a tad realistic at the same time.

So imagine our excitement when we got back from our summer break to find a great big gift-wrapped parcel from our tech friends sitting on our desk.  Inside: photo galleries (at last!), multimedia mini-banners, a new package of promotional graphical elements, a set of “boxes” for “quotes of the day”, polls, quizzes and the like, and much more.  Visions of a new, graphically richer, multimedia dawn!  It had taken a while to arrive, and, OK, there were some initial glitches with some of our new toys, but now it’s up to us to get this show on the road.  Watch this space!