Town hall meeting

The Internet offers politicians infinite ways to reconnect with the citizens. Some campaign teams go for more classical solutions such as e-mails, websites and online advertising, while most present-day political messages are delivered via alternative wide-reaching channels such as blogs, podcasts, Youtube, Twitter updates or Facebook pages.

Engaging voters, recruiting volunteers, and raising campaign funds via new media is simply a matter of few clicks.

Microsoft jumps on this political bandwagon with its cloud-based TownHall app, which claims “to combine the grassroots appeal of the town hall meeting with the reach of the Web”. Launched at this year’s Politics Online Conference, TownHall works on Microsoft’s Azure platform (therefore, it comes at a price) and uses a badges system to convince its users to vote and answer questions.

As promising as it might sound, TownHall is not build to become mainstream and will probably end up being used by large political organizations. Nonetheless, it shows us that the 2008 US presidential election changed the way big players in the IT sector relate to politics.

Towards More Open European Politics

Like businesses around the world, European politics is affected by the limitations imposed on air traffic, with EU officials and administrative personnel facing a hard time reaching Brussels. Professor Žiga Turk investigates what can be done to streamline the bureaucracy within the Commission, Council and the Parliament:

People that fly to Brussels in the morning typically have to wake up between 4 and 5AM to catch a flight to a meeting starting between 9 and 10 around Schumann. They bring their sleep deprived grumpiness to the tables of European decision making and all they can look forward to are the incredible queues at the Brussels airport security controls in the evening.

Massive replacement of person-person meetings with videoconferencing could also result in a happier European politics.

Similarly, TechPresident’s Micah L. Sifry, himself affected by the plane-grounding Icelandic ash cloud, questions the closed environment of public agencies, which fail to provide their services to the people when most expected to do so.

My friend David Weinberger got stuck trying to head home from a vacation in Barcelona. [...] David titled his post “Volcano 1, Internet 0.01,” but the truth is that what failed this past week was not the Internet, but corporate and government agency websites. They’ve been rendered useless by this crisis because they operate under a no-fail rule: nothing can be posted on them unless cleared from above. Since the “authorities” barely know what is going on, they can’t update the public in real time, despite the need.