Friday 8 February 2008

CIVICWEB III

2. Monday, 4th of February: CIVICWEB practitioners meeting: small group discussion

After first presentations we had small groups discussion. In the group I participated in, there was a discussion among two practitioners:

& four academics:

  • Dr. Fredrik Miegel, Sweden
  • Dr. Victor Bohm, Hungary
  • Francesco Fabro, Italy
  • and me, Slovenia.

(And surprisingly most of the talking was done by the practitioners :)

We had a discussion among two ways of starting politics, one is bottom up political talk within everyday conversations, but most of the time not going anywhere (Vijavaja.com), the other is a sort of top-down mobilizing effort (Coolpolitics).

Matija was working in a company that produced websites and in the meanwhile started one of the first online communities in Slovenia: Vijavaja.com. Their goal is to enable people to meet friends. If there are any political discussions at vijavaja.com, they are spontaneous. The discussion might have political consequences but according to Matija, someone else has to take care of it. The benchmark is for advertising: number of visitors.

Carlijn from Coolpolitics thought that the social effect of their website would be a lot more difficult to benchmark than for advertising.

At vijavaja.com they organize not only online, but offline meetings also, after a while the online spilled into offline. Vijavaja.com functions mostly as an interactive space, the producers do provide their own content, but is in in a traditional form, it is for example in form of funny tests or tests how two people match.

Friderik steped into the discussion with a note that probably the most popular site is file sharing site, it has actually no civic intent at all, but as sharing became an important political topic it too was transformed. With the new law a new political party was established: the Pirate party – an offspring of Pirate site. This is the fast growing party in Sweden. People actually do vote for them. Youth section is the third largest of political parties in Sweden. Matija knew about the site and confirmed that the site is well known. Participants on the vijavaja.com community know for the party and would according to him vote for it if they had the chanche.

Matija presented his view on how, why and where to use different interactive tools. It foremost depends on the goals of the site and on the teams that will be working on the sites. According to him there are four stages of website/community development:

  1. pure text
  2. trying to engage user to engage, but not user to user, but to the content, for example questionnaires, tests etc.
  3. forums, blogs, which allow some kind of asynchronous communication
  4. real life: chat rooms.

He stressed that producers too often try to jump over the first or the second level and the lack of the first two levels actually determines that the forum will never work out well. You need a critical mass to come to your website, to know the content first. He stated it rather poetically: you have to live with the website to know when the proper time for what is. According to him the users are usually the ones who give you the signal to start with something new. It is not necessary, of course, that the website goes through this process, Matija finger pointed to YouTube as an example, but added that this is one case in a million.

Similarly Carlijn pointed out that in Coolpolitics they decided they could only do forums close to elections when there is really close to something to talk about.

As vijavaja.com exists already for 5 years, Coolpolitics is has fairly recent site – 8 months (before that they had a static one with which they were not satisfied). They started to work more on their online presence because of several reasons: because everybody is online, to reproduse the content, it is a good way to archive everything that they do. They are not satisfied with their current mobilisation: through TV shows and a magazine, which they consider still to be a podium debate. Carlijn expressed the faith that getting online will help them to become more interactive. Before the website was only just to support other projects, now they are making it into a project on it self.

Vijavaja.com is a peculiar site, since it closed its doors for new users bacuse the number of users got too large, to handle. Matija expressed this as “Sweet problems” – having too much users. On the other side Coolpolitics reaches for as large number as possible, using offline postcards that are disseminated around bars and places for youth. Next to that they use mass media.

Matija advised that the best thing in mobilizing is not to try to build your own community, but to go and reach the existing online communities. He presented an example when there was a call for bone marrow volunteering and the response from the community was tremendous.

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