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.

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? :)