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18. December 2009 – 16:07 by Hans Hagedorn
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Today it’s the last day of the climate conference in Copenhagen – and today a new global, multilingual web portal is being launched: the website, entitled Hope+ (speak: Hope Plus), wants to allow people to work together on social issues and social campaigns. As Phil Noble from PoliticsOnline, by which Hope+ is led, writes in a newsletter, the website will allow its members to develop their own projects with “measurable goals”.
It seems a bit too sophisticated that Hope+ is promoted as the “first global portal for social change” – because its aims and the campaigning tools remind strongly of other campaigning websites like causecast.org, takepart.com or the German betterplace.org. They all share the idea of connecting people online, get them into action and make the world a better place to live in.
So is Hope+ just yet another online portal to change the world? What can it achieve what the other social campaigning projects did not achieve yet? Or, to use economic language, what is the unique selling point of Hope+?
According to its organizers, Hope+ will focus strongly on the individual social causes posted by the users and use the social network relationships of all members to complete the campaigns.
What Hope+ already did achieve – and in this point it differs from the other websites mentioned earlier: PoliticsOnline could invite a lot of financially strong and popular founding partners, like Bill Gates from Microsoft. The organizers also asked Barack Obama to support Hope+. This strategy already let to a small media buzz, especially Obamas endorsement attracted interest and got people hooked.
But big names and high ambitions also create big expectations. We’ll keep an eye on the project and will see how Hope+ develops and if the Obama-hype is strong enough to carry this project. It will be also interesting to see how Hope+ and the other social campaigning websites get along in the future, if there will be co-operations or a mere coexisting.
Simone Gerdesmeier, Zebralog Berlin
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13. August 2009 – 08:42 by pol-di.net e.V / politik-digital.de
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For the upcoming German Federal election 2009, politik-digital.de, in a joint project with pro-bono TV production, published a video clip which shows various celebrities telling not to vote. You can watch the clip here (sorry, I couldn’t embed the clip):
Geh nicht hin!
For those of you who are non-German speakers, find an english article about the project on DW-World.de. This article comes along with a radio interview including a statement by politik-digital.de executive director Stefan Gehrke.
Posted in Interview, members, News | No Comments »
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26. June 2009 – 14:11 by Centre for E-Government
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Barack Obama’s electoral campaign represents a masterpiece in online-campaigning. The use of ICTs and the creation of an Obama-brand were the key features to mobilising the masses. Obama’s opponent, senator McCain, couldn’t motivate as many people to participate in his campaign.
Barack Obama was registered on more than a dozen different social media, the main ones (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter) included, and succeeded in forming an online community that strongly supported his goals. The online-headquarter was my.barackobama.com (MyBO) “[which] was at the heart of the campaign’s new media strategy. [… The] site allowed users to create events, exchange information, raise funds, and connect with voters in their area. MyBO was the digital home from which the campaign could mobilise its army of supporters.” [2] This portal helped creating a community with more than two million profiles. Of course, the easy-to-use website also attracted adversaries, which made community managers essential to evaluate and delete certain statements if necessary.
Citizens participate in Obama’s Campaign
The operators of MyBO established a strong sense of community as everyone with political interest could participate. In blogs, people could express themselves and report about their personal experiences during the campaign. Useful information, such as phone lists and guides for campaigning, were distributed via this internet-portal; even fund-raising-statistics of all members were included. However, the “real spirit of the community could be seen in the more than 200,000 offline events organized through MyBO.” [2]
The Obama campaign collected 13 million email addresses and sent one billion emails to mobilize its supporters. “The Obama team used email as an integral platform to engage supporters, bloggers, and online media. Often overlooked by traditional communications departments, email has one major advantage: speed.” [2] Putting email recipients into groups gave the campaign the opportunity to send individually designed messages to specific groups of people. An even faster way to communicate is SMS, which can be used to contact people without internet access, especially in rural areas.
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5. February 2009 – 13:53 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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A while ago the possibilities of Change.gov were discussed on this weblog and right at noon on January 20th the new White House website was launched. Both websites show a spirit of openness and the goal of the new US administration to get citizens more involved into the political process. There has been intense debate over whether these sites were open enough or if WhiteHouse.gov was just a small step to Web1.5. But among this entire discussion one thing seem to be implicit: The Democrats just better than the Republicans at working in the medium internet. Now the website of the Congress Republicans has been re-launched and its look and features seem to indicate that the conservatives try to catch up to the modern web presence already embraced by the Democrats.
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28. January 2009 – 17:18 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Writing letters to elected representatives has always been one of the more effective ways for citizens to state their concern for a political question or to make their opinion clear to “their” member of parliament. This seems perfectly reasonable: If hundreds or even thousands members of the constituency write to a member of parliament how can he or she ignore the statements – both as a responsible representative and a politician who would like to get re-elected?
In the United States this practice is often used by citizens to reach out to both the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives. In more recent years the “letter” on paper was often exchanged by an email. But there is one particular problem with email in this setting: There is no post stamp on it and therefore it can not be determined on first glance if the email is really from a member of the parliamentarian’s constituency – This does limit the effect of email in comparison to letters (one could argue that there is also a psychological impact related to the fact that a member of parliament gets a “real letter” signed by a “real citizen”). Does this mean that the proliferation of the internet and the social networks developing in it does not affect this practice of political participation? No, but the influence is indirect.
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25. November 2008 – 11:14 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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As politically interested citizens and active members of the online community I assume we all would like to see our politicians to use as many of the great online communication tools as possible. There is no doubt that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. can be great to reach out to certain sets of constituencies and potential voters, collect donations or to raise transparency of government and party work. The Obama Presidential Campaign and the work done with Change.gov right now further support this assessment. But the Web2.0 has its pitfalls; especially for those holding a government office.
Politicians, as government officials, have to closely follow the legal and organisational rules governing the position they hold. This means that not every tool they choose to communicate with citizens may fit the purpose of their office or even be completely legal. An example for this would be the plan of Barrack Obama to keep posting his weekly radio address to the nation to Youtube.com and to embed that video on the Change.gov or other government website. This idea and the first try of it were warmly welcomed by the internet community and I fully agree to that excitement. But there are several problems which have to be taken into account:
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