European Elections - Are MEPs Innovating Online?
3. February 2009 – 15:07 by Dan JellinekAs most readers of this blog will know, the European elections this year are in early June (precise dates vary from country to country: the UK and the Netherlands is voting on 4 June but most if not all the other nations on 7 June).
Fraser’s post about the ‘bug’ campaign to encourage people to vote in the forthcoming European elections was interesting and looks to be a valuable project.
I’ve been wondering whether there is much else going on online around these elections?
With national elections recently there have been major stories about internet campaigning and innovation, such as Barack Obama’s cutting edge campaign, or in Europe the French Presidential race not so long ago.
With MEPs, I don’t remember hearing many stories about web campaigning.
You can find out links to information on MEPs by country at:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/members.do
but this does not include links to their individual websites.
There has also been an electronic petitions service launched recently: EuroPetition (fledgling website at https://www.europetition.eu/ though this has yet to be populated in many areas). Running at local and international levels, the project intends to boost engagement with MEPs, but is not specifically linked to the elections as far as I know.
(for slightly more about it see my own blog post at
https://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=190 ).
So this blog post is a call for responses – has anyone heard of or seen any online campaigning innovation this year by MEP candidates?
Thanks,
Dan Jellinek
www.headstar.com
2 Responses to “European Elections - Are MEPs Innovating Online?”
By Umar Ahmed on Feb 14, 2009
Eoin Ryan, Irish MEP for Dublin, will be launching his web campaign over the coming weeks. The campaign will include the usual suspects in terms of social networking sites. It will also set out to introduce online political advertising to the Irish politics scene. It’s very likely that a lot of MEPs are going to follow the trend into getting web campaigns up and running. However, there is a difference between getting a facebook page up and actually putting real efforts into a thorough web campaign. We are just going to have to wait and see how the campaigns play out over the coming months.
By Dan Jellinek on Feb 16, 2009
Thanks Umar, I’ll keep an eye on this, and do keep me posted about any interesting developments - perhaps if it all works well for him Eoin might like to share his experiences at my e-democracy conference in London in November!
Cheers,
Dan.