Tag Archives: Personal Democracy Forum

A collection of thoughts from this evening’s #DigitalEU debate

I’m in Brussels for 36 hours and have just been on the panel at Edelman | The Centre‘s event about whether social media can help bridge the gap between the EU and its citizens. I’m not sure any of the panellists (@MarietjeD66, @lauradagg, @ryangheath, @cybersoc or I) managed to fully or even partially answer the question, but that didn’t stop it being one of the most interesting EU-web discussions I’ve attended.

For a start there was good wifi, and #DigitalEU on Twitter generated some interesting discussion. Might be normal elsewhere, but that’s damned rare for an EU event! The fact that the panel was adequately narrow, and all the panellists respected each other, was handy, and there was a decent (and – for Brussels – reasonably young and gender balanced) audience.

This is not a comprehensive report, but a collection of odd thoughts from the event, in no particular order.

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What’s the value of an e-mail (or a thousand) in a political lobbying campaign?

If you’re an elected representative, what does an e-mail mean? If it’s from a constituent, individually written, it’s clear enough. But what about if it’s part of a campaign? In the clip above Clay Shirky argues that the predictive value of an e-mail for a member of Congress is zero, and with e-mail campaigns its impossible to rescue the signal from noise. Have we put the barrier to political engagement so low that it can cease to be meaningful? I can’t claim to have the answers, but watch the clip and have a bit of a think. The clip starts at the best bit of the presentation, but the rest is worth watching too.

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Tools for European political organising

PdF 2010 - pic © Personal Democracy Forum

PdF 2010 - pic © Personal Democracy Forum

I’ve been at Personal Democracy Forum in New York and I’ve started to get thinking about which US political organisation tools could be effectively used for politics in Europe. Here are a few ideas…

  • Groundcrew – a system of rapid mobile organising via SMS, iPhone apps, and Google Maps. Could be used to organise Fair Votes Now flashmobs, get Swedish social democrat activists to particular Valstugan?
  • Meetup Everywhere – simply and quickly organise events offline – everywhere! Use for fundraising events for politicians?
  • See Click Fix – an idea similar to FixMyStreet in the UK, yet with 2 additional advantages – it works well of mobile devices, and it allows citizens to network between each other.
  • go.usa.gov – a US government link shortener, style of bit.ly but with trust and reliability for government URLs. How about a similar one for UK, FR, EU twitter use? The original code is open source and the system is based on Drupal.

Last but not least: it’s not an organisational tool as such, but it is fun: hint.fm/seer – it compares the predictive Google search for two key words. Here’s the result for a couple of Labour leadership candidates.

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The PdF Compass

I’m on my way back to Brussels from Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona. I enjoyed participating in the conference, and was also very grateful to have been able to moderate one of the sessions there. Some of the everyday practical conclusions of PdF Europe will become clearer in due course, but for the moment I will restrict myself to a reflection about the intrinsic nature of the event and its participants. So here is my PdF Europe compass, very roughly modelled on Political Compass:

poitical-compass-pdf

Yes, of course this is terribly subjective, and some of the characters appearing on the compass may object to their positioning. ‘The system’ also sounds all too like something from Stieg Larsson but I can’t think of a better term for the moment.

But the essential issue is this: to what extent is PdF about changing the system from within, or changing it from the outside?

Take Tom Steinberg’s critique of the EU’s eGovernance funds and how badly these are spent. Yes, fair point, but if you’re Marietje Schaake then you know it’s total hell to change this and there are better battles to fight in the short term.

If you’re Jeremie Zimmermann, convinced in an almost functionalist manner that your arguments are right if you commit enough geeks to the cause, then how do you feel that Andrew Rasiej, conference organiser, has previously run for political office and with Micah Sifry the two of them run a blog (techPresident) about – essentially – insider politics?

PdF must remain a combination of all of the different tendencies represented on the compass, and it’s vital there is a respectful relationship between all concerned. The challenge now is to build on the Barcelona event and make sure those tensions are used constructively rather than destructively.

But as my T-Shirt at the conference on Friday said: it’s probably more complicated than that

In the diagramme: Tom Steinberg (web | twitter), Jeremie Zimmermann (web | twitter), Jack Thurston (web | twitter), Andrew Rasiej (web | twitter), Micah Sifry (web | twitter), Paul Hilder (web | twitter), Marietje Schaake (web | twitter), Tom Watson (web | twitter), Ellen Miller (web | twitter)

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