Just poked around the various party websites to see if any of the candidates were blogging – hoping to find a real person running, rather than a campaign manager puppet or a focus group byproduct. I found some interesting things.
Liberal party: They appear to have one blog – posted by Martin’s speechwriter via his Blackberry. Very cool. Subscribed. (but it doesn’t have full text of entries, just titles. maybe unsubscribing…) My candidate doesn’t even have an “about” page – just a map of the riding. Bad form. In the last election, Paul Martin published a blog – it was likely massaged by PR goons, but it was a start. I was hoping they might take the next step…
NDP: They’re using Drupal to manage the party’s online stuff! My candidate even has an (empty) news page which would be kinda blogish, if he was posting anything… Looks like the NDP is really only using Drupal to manage publishing press releases, speeches, and official responses. That’s too bad. So close…
Green Party: Jim Harris has a blog on Typepad (subscribed) but the candidate in my riding appears to be doing nothing online…
Conservative Party: Using a commercial CMS called Expression 1.7. No blogging, but they are podcasting and vodcasting. And they have a “live” photo gallery. Feels pretty massaged – not sure how much of this is “real” and how much is massaged by a PR expert…
Marijuana Party: Using SPIP. Couldn’t find any candidates blogging, but they seem to at least have bios for candidates.
Why on earth don’t parties encourage their candidates to blog? To show they are real people, and not just plastic committee-driven amalgamations of focus group fodder? That’s my perception of politicians, and has been for several years. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this. It would take very little effort to break this perception, if it’s incorrect.
Suggestions for the parties:
- Blog. If the candidates aren’t going to do it, at least link to other relevant blogs. But this is a pretty straightforward way to show candidates are human.
- Discussion forums for the issues. This can’t be a one-way publish/receive model anymore. Solicit actual feedback from constituents. And USE it.
- RSS feeds. Make it easy for us to follow along.
- Here’s a radical idea: use wiki pages for your position/issue papers. Let constituents provide feedback and help craft the documents. Sure, you’ll get some noise by “competing” parties, but managing that noise might be worth the benefit of actually including the constituents in the process…
Update: Tod Maffin did a bit of a breakdown of the major party web efforts.
Just poked around the various party websites to see if any of the candidates were blogging – hoping to find a real person running, rather than a campaign manager puppet or a focus group byproduct. I found some interesting things.
Liberal party: They appear to have one blog – posted by Martin’s speechwriter via his Blackberry. Very cool. Subscribed. (but it doesn’t have full text of entries, just titles. maybe unsubscribing…) My candidate doesn’t even have an “about” page – just a map of the riding. Bad form. In the last election, Paul Martin published a blog – it was likely massaged by PR goons, but it was a start. I was hoping they might take the next step…
NDP: They’re using Drupal to manage the party’s online stuff! My candidate even has an (empty) news page which would be kinda blogish, if he was posting anything… Looks like the NDP is really only using Drupal to manage publishing press releases, speeches, and official responses. That’s too bad. So close…
Green Party: Jim Harris has a blog on Typepad (subscribed) but the candidate in my riding appears to be doing nothing online…
Conservative Party: Using a commercial CMS called Expression 1.7. No blogging, but they are podcasting and vodcasting. And they have a “live” photo gallery. Feels pretty massaged – not sure how much of this is “real” and how much is massaged by a PR expert…
Marijuana Party: Using SPIP. Couldn’t find any candidates blogging, but they seem to at least have bios for candidates.
Why on earth don’t parties encourage their candidates to blog? To show they are real people, and not just plastic committee-driven amalgamations of focus group fodder? That’s my perception of politicians, and has been for several years. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this. It would take very little effort to break this perception, if it’s incorrect.
Suggestions for the parties:
- Blog. If the candidates aren’t going to do it, at least link to other relevant blogs. But this is a pretty straightforward way to show candidates are human.
- Discussion forums for the issues. This can’t be a one-way publish/receive model anymore. Solicit actual feedback from constituents. And USE it.
- RSS feeds. Make it easy for us to follow along.
- Here’s a radical idea: use wiki pages for your position/issue papers. Let constituents provide feedback and help craft the documents. Sure, you’ll get some noise by “competing” parties, but managing that noise might be worth the benefit of actually including the constituents in the process…
Update: Tod Maffin did a bit of a breakdown of the major party web efforts.
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Thanks for the link, d. Japanese politics seems a bit more highly strung, too 🙂
I’m just a bit depressed that we’re heading into yet another lowest-common-denominator election, and that the denominator is just so mind numbingly low. I’m pretty sure anyone could win a majority this time around by promising a Wal-Mart on every corner…
your answer, sir:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0920/p01s04-woap.htm
d – it’s not detail I crave – I need to know that the person whom I elect to represent me is, in fact, real, and not a construct of focus groups and PR monkeys.
The problem is that anyone with character or convictions is immediately dismissed as not having “mass appeal” – which I find abysmally depressing. We end up with Britney Spears for Prime Minister. Gag.
I’m a blogging community residents’ association director. no clue if it would work any higher up. I’m half tempted to find out 🙂
Marijuana Party: Using SPIP.
Hmmm – I wonder if they picked it because its close to “spliff”
I’ve been looking at some of the same stuff on my blog at http://stigmergicweb.org/index.php/archives/2005/12/01/oh-boy-its-election-time-once-again
the masses will not vote for an individual–they are too unique, and there will be countless edges of friction. only a massaged, homogenized representation can appear similar enough, although too often overpolished. personal political blogging makes less sense the more (variety of) people one hopes to represent. i doubt even a mayor could get away with it, but perhaps a PTA president or something could.
or, are you just craving more micro detail? reporting daily on experience (informal voice) rather than every so often in press-release fashion (corporate voice) could be compelling.
Politics 2.0?
I started this as a comment to D’Arcy’s post on how Canada’s political parties stack up as adopters of social software, but since my output here is so slim, I decided to cut and paste it into my own space. D’Arcy and Rob before him make lots of goo…
Sami – good points. I concede the country to the crowds at Wal Mart. I’ll just have to suck it up, and keep some Guinness handy to help numb the pain 🙂
Well there is always genetic engineering ;). I could write a nice Sci-Fi blurb which may even be possible in the next 20-50 years, but I’ll save you that. The way that I see it, this is as good as it’s going to get for now, just have to accept it and live your life. Even if you had all the solutions, it’s not that likely that anyone would listen to you in your lifetime, I however doubt any of us really have even a clue about any potential solutions.
These discussions have been had a million times over, and will happen a million times over yet again in all the pubs, cafes, lecture halls — you get the picture… The discussion will yield no actionable results. The point is that liberal democracy produces this outcome and having a deep understanding of the situation (perhaps I am being full of my self) yields for me the opinion that though things could be improved slightly in terms of side effects on the individual level, these systems really can’t be improved upon with the implicit goal of for the people, by the people considering who the people actually are: Look up the statistics in Canada for how many people actually attend post-secondary.
If you however want to consider other systems, I have a few ideas, but then again they are ideas and perhaps the outcome they might produce may be a million times worse than liberal democracy or so they tell me. Enjoy your time here, it’s short, make it sweet. 🙂
yeah yeah. I know… Democracy has issues, and I guess what I’m suggesting isn’t really democracy after all. It’s just that the masses are so mediocre – perhaps by definition, perhaps because we’ve let ourselves go downhill pretty far – but I just have this nagging feeling that there has got to be a better way to run a country than by pandering to the lowest common denominator. Maybe we just need to work really hard to help educate/enlighten the lowest common denominators… Benevolent dictatorships only work for the dictators, so I guess we’re stuck with figuring out how to fix the current system 😉
truly perform? without caring what everyone they represent thinks? maybe if your name is Mussolini, (or even Trudeau). let’s just say there’s a lot of risk there.
you point out no fatal flaws. elected officials are still elected by a majority. when you are smarter than, blacker than, gayer than, conservativer than nine out of ten of the people for three thousand miles, how how how can you be surprised the country’s leader isn’t?
the scripts just round off the jagged edges.everyone wants to represent themselves at their best. that’s why you take your time typing your entries, and probably use backspace and pause frequently.
Sami, good points – but what we need in government is people who are able to run without a script, and without handlers directing their every action. We are effectively electing PR consultants hired by candidates into office unless we demand more from our candidates…
We may be shaped/crafted/constructed by society, but many/most of us are not artificially and explicitly constructed for the specific purpose of pandering to the masses.
Maybe that’s a fatal flaw in our implementation of democracy – any individuals who stand for something or are able to stand on their own and truly perform in the role of government are dismissed as not being dumbed down enough to get the mass vote. Maybe if we break down the party system, so it becomes individuals running for an office rather than PR lackeys hand picked from above due to their chances to get the party into majority government…
The irony is that the whole party and representation system was put into place because direct participation in government (ala Greek civic democracy) didn’t scale to a population larger than a small city. We now have tools to enable us all to directly represent ourselves in government and actively participate in the process – not the day-to-day administration of the government, but the major decision points certainly.
“I need to know that the person whom I elect to represent me is, in fact, real, and not a construct of focus groups and PR monkeys.”
Unfortunately, in order to pander to the masses well you have to be that construct of focus groups and PR monkeys. Otherwise, even if you’re a decent candidate worth voting for, they may simply not understand you and vote for the opposition, or more likely, choose not to vote at all. In democracy, you have to go for aim for the lowest common denominator, that’s why newspapers are written at I believe the 8th grade level. Brittany Spears wouldn’t need the focus groups and the PR monkeys, she already tailors her message to the lowest common denominator. In terms of being a construct as it pertains to being something you’re not, well we’re all constructs in societal terms and perhaps if you sell the voters a construct then you have to abide by that construct, in the same way that you have to abide by societal constructs, for your term in order to at least seem consistent. The Americans wanted the construct of George W. Bush and to me at least it seems he does abide rather well by the construct, at least in the public eye.
Yeah, Rob. I just saw your post. Sorry for duping! I completely missed your original post – and I know I’m subscribed… 😉
Hey, the Greens have an RSS feed for all their news announcements at http://www.greenparty.ca/index.php~module=phpwsrssfeeds&RSS_BACKEND_MAN_op=view&lay_quiet=1&PHPWS_MAN_ITEMS%5B%5D=1
It wasn’t working a few days ago and so I emailed them about it. They fixed it and got back to me, but said I was the *only* person who had ever asked them about it, which does make one wonder about how much traction some of this stuff gets outside our little echo chambers.
I went to the site because I was incensed by the news that the Greens were going to be excluded from the TV debates, again! So I was looking to see if they were helping to organize a campaign to lobby the networks and maybe exploit the blogosphere to do so. They hadn’t got their act together, and even more to my chagrin the blogosphere surrounding the Greens at least seemed to be pretty disjointed. But it made me realize that this could be my contribution to the political process. I expect that’s what my new committment will be, to help the Greens specifically with using the network more effectively. And why the Greens? Well in addition to the fact that their politics fit mine o.k., they are the only major party actively campagining on electoral reform, and until we see that happen, we will be choosing between the lesser of two evils.