Digital strategy

LabourList Review Part 2

01/19/2009 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

LabourList: It's Approach to Digital Politics
From a quick glance it’s evident that LabList is going big on creating clever and vitriolic campaigning tools and content seen during the Obama presidential campaign (and playing on some of the same by ConHome). My instinct tells me that this worked for those two groups because both are/were in opposition and campaigning for an election. The risk for Labour is that although it may feel at times as though it’s in opposition, it isn’t.

My advice would be to go about making friends using LabList as well as trashing the opposition.. Show a bit of humility and demonstrate you’re listening and responding to people’s opinions (party and non-party) as well as taking the party political approach. I’m not saying that this approach doesn’t happen (or won’t happen in the future) but two observations I’ve made on LabList indicate that it hasn’t quite struck this balance yet.

Firstly is Derek Draper’s comments which from reading some of the posts come across as if he is flaming other users. In fact, in the site’s first comment thread some of what appear to be responses from Derek’s to complaints by commenters about over-zealous moderation are pretty troll-like. In fact, they’re so troll-like I half wondered whether they were really left by Derek himself.

Two random examples:

“that was because it was a libel and i thought i would save you the trouble of me suing you. if you don't "get" our comments policy read it again and maybe ask a friend to explain it”

“Well… you'd better hope you don't need the police, a school, get ill, need to use public transport etc. etc. if this is the level of debate we're up against I think we're going to be ok!”

Not exactly the best way to make friends and influence people. And I understand that in traditional politics there’s llttle chance of converting those clearly not going to vote for your party and thus little point expending energy engaging/trying to convince otherwise, I would argue this approach doesn’t work – or at least translate well – into the digital political environment. I can’t help but feel that Derek’s a bit traditional politician at the moment.

Secondly, some of the creative anti-Tory campaigning stuff is – while inventive and coming from the right direction – a bit too much. A couple of comments from broadly supportive users also flag the issue of going after the Tories as too much too soon when more in-depth debate about policy, news, etc is what’s wanted.

Coming Next – Part 3… LabourList: My Conclusions

LabourList Review Part 1

01/19/2009 by simoncollister 2 Comments

I posted yesterday that I was holding off posting my review of Labour's new LabourList grassroots site until I had worked out where the cunningly titled Labourist site had come from. Well, it turns out the site is a spoiler put together by Tim Ireland so I'm going to post my review. However, I'm going to publish it in a couple of posts to spread out the reading. My aim is to break up the review into the following sections: 1) A bit about the site's background and a review of the site's look and feel 2) a review of the site's approach to digital politics and 4) my conclusions. Here's Part 1:

LabourList: Some Background
First things first. What is LabourList? The answer seems to be provided in the memo I was leaked from the man behiond LabList, Derek Draper, in a memo to Ray Collins, Labours General Secretary. Draper writes that LabList is “an independent site that aims, in time, to be our version of Conservative home”.

“Hang on a minute.” I thought, “Isn’t LabourHome Labour’s equivalent of ConservativeHome?” Not anymore. One of the other people behind LabList tells me: “I've always said Labourhome has the wrong name – Labhome is a community for people to talk to each other – Lablist will be a content engine, offering insight, thoughts, news, [about Labour]."

That makes sense to me but I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens with LabourHome as LabList develops. Will the sites work together and complement each other or compete? I suppose the nearest scenario is that of the relationship between Guido Fawkes and ConHome.

LabourList: Look & Feel
The site looks nice and clean. It is probably fair to say it looks and feels more plain and blog-like than ConHom does – but then again ConHome probably started off quite blog-like before growing into a more content rich traditional feel website. I can only guess this is the direction in which LabList will grow as it develops. If LabList is designed to be more of a “content engine” (which it is according to insiders) then the site’s layout will have to adapt to help make the content easily findable.

I think the layout and functionality of the site could be tidied up. In general, it feels a bit messy, although I think we need to bear in mind that the site is more than likely to evolve organically and so settle down once it gets going. In addition the site has also been launched in Beta so presumably any teething problems can be ironed out before the full launch.

A couple of specific (some might say pedantic) bug-bears is the comment thread and software platform. While the site looks like a blog, the comment threads seem to run like forums. While I’m sure the idea of allowing comments to comments and sub-threads is a good idea in practice I must admit I find it confusing. Equally, one commenter wonders out loud why they didn’t go with an open source platform like WordPress. It’s familiar to bloggers/new media types and there are a number of Government sites (Downing Street’s no less!) already built in WordPress.

Part 2 – coming next… LabourList: It's Approach to Digital Politics

Chinwagging tonight

12/02/2008 by simoncollister 3 Comments

Whoops – I meant to post about this in advance but clearly I have to organise my time better.

I'll be on the panel tonght at Chinwag's event: Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls? discussing, um, I guess, what 2009 will bring.

Others speaking on the panel include:

Neville Hobson – blogger, communicator, digital luminary
Jonathan Mitchener – Futurologist & Principal Research Scientist, Devices, BT
Jamie Coomber – Head of Digital Strategy, Profero

I'll be bringing up the issues of the economy, the perennial echo of "next year will be *all about* digital, the direction a lot of digital PR and marketing seems to taking compared to the route I believe it should be and how this leads my thinking right up to Doc's vision of the "end of the social bubble."

Hopefully see some people there.

Technorati tags: Chinwag, Future watching, Crystal balls

Research shows that social media won’t halt political disengagement (aka "I told you so…")

11/22/2008 by simoncollister 2 Comments

I wrote a rather lengthy post-cum-essay earlier this year speculating that MPs and elected politicians might be out of a job within the next 10 years time.

My argument was based purely on my own thoughts about how the participatory web is rapidly overcoming barriers which made full participatory democracy (as opposed to the representative democracy we have currently) more viable as a political system.

This contrasts the populist line you get in mainstream media where journalists and others like to ride the band-wagon that the Internet and ‘Web 2.0 tools’ such as blogs, YouTube, Facebook etc is allowing people to reconnect with politicians and politics. David Cameron is the usual UK example trotted out with Obama now the figure-head in the US.

I’ve said all along that technology itself is not capable of reconnecting politics with people. People feel politically disenfranchised because the political systems in most Western democracies are specifically designed to keep most people removed from processes of empowerment. In the same way that businesses traditionally kept ‘consumers’ at arms length.

If politicians and political parties want to reconnect with people then they need to change the way they do things. Doing the same old thing using new technology *will not* politically re-enfranchise people.

This is a slightly contentious view but since posting it I’ve discovered an unpublished PhD thesis by Kerrill Dunne from Sussex University which examined the role and effectiveness of political forums in renewing political engagement – or rather stemming political disengagement.

Kerrill’s research takes an empirical look at the value of using online forums to reverse political disengagement and it concludes that political online forums will not reverse political disengagement. More specifically discussion forums do not fail because of some inherent design fault, but because political disengagement is tied to citizens’ dislike of liberal thin democracy (i.e. British democracy based on representative
democracy, liberalism and a free market economy).

In discussion about his research on the DoWire E-Democracy forums, Dunne, explained his findings in more details. Political disengagement he argues boils down to two main theories: firstly a reaction to the fact that in representative, liberal democracy as long as enough people vote (or engage in the process) then the system works thus by its very function it fails to maximise participation. But secondly:

“political disengagement is growing because modern democracies do not support strong participatory or direct democracy […] this theory argues that political disengagement is a disease of the liberal thin democratic model. (i.e. representative, liberal democracy)“

Offering a favoured theory in light of his research, Dunne remarks that:

“I agree with the latter [second theory, because research (see chapter 4 of thesis) has shown citizens are dissatisfied with the current political system and are turning away from it because representatives are unresponsive to them the political system does not support any form of direct democracy and individuals are not interested in politics because they do not identify with political parties or trust politicians […] Offline citizens are saying that they are not satisfied with the current political system and online, they are less likely to participate in forums rooted in it.”

Based on Dunne’s study it would appear that public disengagement is not something that web 2.0 tools can solve alone. Rather the political and social system in which these tools exist must change for people to reconnect with politics.

Technorati tags: participatory democracy, Kerrill Dunne, digital politics

Doc Searls on digital capacity building in the new admnistration (and what Lord Carter can learn)

11/22/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

A few weeks Doc Searls laid down his vision for how the incoming President Elect could use the Internet to stimulate the US economy. coincidently, Docs’ post came about a month after the UK government’s Department for Business, Economy and Regulatory Reform (BERR) launched its own plans for using the digital economy to regenerate the UK’s economic fortunes. I have my own concerns about BERR’s plans for what it calls ‘Digital Britain’ which I laid out recently. Doc’s vision is inspirational however, and the UK government should read his blog post carefully. In case it doesn’t however, here’s a few things worth noting.

Doc outlines a number of key issues for consideration but at the core of his vision is the need for greater infrastructure – specifically “fiber-optic” – although a solid case for wifi is also made.

And then what to do with this increased infrastructure? Doc believes that it can only lead to greater productivity among everyone – individuals as well as small businesses; thus boosting, creativity, production, consumption, the economy and mankind:

“new devices based on open source technologies demonstrate how easy it is to scaffold and build innovative new products and services that make money and expand the scope of civilization.”

However, one of the major barriers to this potential great leap forward lies not in the impracticality of increasing infrastructure nor does it lie in the predicted costs of the investment program (estimated at $300bn).

No, the big barrier to making this significant economic and social step forward lies in the thinking and strategic mindset with which the government and business approaches the issue.

To quote Doc again:

“We can’t see the potential for that [digital economic] growth as long as we’re blinded by phone and cable company offerings, which treat the Internet as the third act in a ‘triple play’. Even though most home phones are now digital, we still “dial” to connect and get billed by the minute. And while analog cell phones are gone, even “smart” digital phones are locked up by phone companies and their phone-making partners. Next February [By 2012 in the UK] all over-the-air television broadcasting in the U.S. will go digital, matching cable and satellite TV distribution systems that have been digital for years. Yet we still watch “programs” on “channels,” just like we started doing in 1950.”

Doc’s argument is for an American market, but there are clear parallels with the UK and its current situation – not least the shared desire of national Governments to inject stimulus into their domestic economies.

Which is where I want to shift my focus to the UK. In the US they are still riding high on the optimism of a new administration. Doc’s post is aimed as a piece of pre-emptive advice for Barack Obama. Here in the UK, the Government has already unveiled its plans to use the Internet to improve the economy. My concerns are that its planned review will not even head in the right direction, let alone go far enough down the right route to really make a break through.

In fact, researching this post I googled ‘Digital Britain’ to see if there was an update on the Carter Review. I found a Marketing Week article from earlier this month (this in itself maybe gives us a steer on the *actual* aim of the Digital Britain review).

The article revealed the review team assembled by Lord Carter. These experts are (in no particular order):

TV presenter and child psychologist – Dr Tanya Byron
Chairman of Japanese investment bank, Nomura International – Francesco Caio
Chairman of the Digital Radio Working Group – Barry Cox
Editor of political magazine, The Spectator – Matthew d’Ancona
Former ITV commercial chief – Ian McCulloch.

So all in, a well qualified team of digital experts.

Doc ends his post by urging Obama:

“to make constructive and realistic suggestions about what this new administration can do in just one area of infrastructure investment: expanding connectivity and network capacity in ways that open innovation and growth opportunity for everybody.”

I wonder in which direction Lord carter’s review will go? Towards greater infrastructure investment and opening up peer production; or towards regulation and centralised creative production?

Technorati tags: Carter Review, Lord Carter, Digital Britain, BERR, Doc Searls