Politics | Mark Blevis

2010.03.15

What will PM Stephen Harper do with this opportunity?

The deadline for submitting and voting for questions to PM Harper closed yesterday which means the PMO is now selecting from the most voted-for questions in preparation for the PMs video response.

This is where things will get interesting.

Response is pretty good for an online initiative that gave the public less than a week. According to the Your Interview with Prime Minister Harper webpage, the initiative attracted “170,001 votes on 1,797 questions from 5,128 people.” It’s an ambiguous stat which I’m guessing means just more than five thousand people both submitted and voted on the the questions. So, when the media give the initiative extra attention for the PMO’s use of social media, you can also expect the digital naysayers to point out this campaign attracted participation from 0.0015% of the Canadian population. It’s worth noting that the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group attracted more than twice that number in its first week.

Noticeably absent from the site is the ability for participants and visitors to categorize (or keyword tag) the questions (e.g. natural resources, child care, finance, general…) or sort them based on vote count. That means it’s not as easy to find RuthLBarth’s question on falling crime rates and a US-style for-profit prison industry, nor is it easy to determine if the vote count makes it more likely to get selected than George Jodin’s question about wasting money on the non-issue of global warming.

H.D. Munroe asks “How will we know that you are answering “top-voted” questions from this site, instead of picking the questions you want to answer? (The site doesn’t show vote tallies, so users can’t audit your choices independently.)“‘

Even if Francais McKellan’s and Dan Grice’s questions about legalizing cannabis don’t get answered, they are far and away two of the most voted-on questions. In fact, marijuana and medicinal marijuana appear in multiple and highly voted-on questions and Canadian cannabis advocate Marc Emery, who faces extradition to the U.S., is the subject of at least one question. Will the PMO tackle this issue on YouTube? Which issues did they expect to come up?

So, over to you Prime Minster Harper. What are you going to do with this opportunity?

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cdnpoli, digital, Politics, public forum, Stephen Harper, YouTube

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Digital Public Affairs, Public Relations and Communications, Social media, Tools

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2010.03.12

Time has no beginnings and digital has no bounds

There are three good examples of the Canadian political community embracing digital technology to extend their reach to and engage more with the public.

Watch or participate in a conference about Canada at the age of 150

The Liberal Party of Canada is hosting a non-partisan event called Canada at 150 in Montreal later this month (March 26-28). The three day event features a full program of speakers and aims to challenge Canadians to think about what we would like our country to be in 2017, the year of our 150th birthday. Canada at 150 has offered both media and blogger accreditation (cutoff date was Feb. 22), showing that the organizers realize the value of including social media journalists as part of the planning process.

Don’t worry if you can’t actually be at the conference. Besides the media and blogger coverage, Canada at 150 will be live streamed on the Internet (for those who register for free in advance) and there are a number of interactive tools to encourage Canadians to participate. The organizers have also made available a handbook for hosting your own satellite site to follow the conference.

At your fingertips wherever you go

Ontario Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak became an iPhone App this week. The free app was created by Ottawa company Purple Forge and was modeled on their MyPolitics iPhone App — an app that aggregates political information from all parties and for all levels of government.

Tim Hudak the iPhone App puts Tim Hudak the person at the iPhone owner’s fingertips. Users can access Tim’s bio, his upcoming agenda (though it’s currently a week out of date), YouTube videos and flickr photos, news, Tim’s Twitter stream and contact information. There are additional features for those who register themselves with the application.

I expect relatively few politicians will go as far as creating mobile applications that aggregate their work and centralize the ways in which the public can engage with them while on the go. This is probably more true because of the cost of creating a custom app of this sort, reported to be as much at $9,500.

Video conversation

Prime Minister Stephen Harper used YouTube to live stream his response to last week’s Throne Speech, yesterday. It’s a move that has come with mixed reactions. Christopher Waddell, associate professor and director of the Carleton school of journalism, was quoted as saying “People are trying lots of new ideas and new technologies but to me this doesn’t sound like a winner.” However, the Toronto Star article in which that quote appears offers no explanation from Professor Waddell for his opinion.

Even more interesting than the Prime Minister’s use of YouTube to ensure his message is delivered to the public his way, is his use of YouTube to engage with others online in something called Your Interview with Prime Minister Harper. The PMO has invited the public to submit questions about the Throne Speech and budget in the form of short videos posted to YouTube no later than 7pmET, Tuesday, March 16. A selection of questions that receive the most public votes will be addressed in the PM’s next YouTube video. It will be interested to see which questions are selected and how the PM responds to them.

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canada150, Canadian, cdnpoli, digital media, Digital Public Affairs, Politics, prime minister, Social media, Stephen Harper, YouTube

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News and Notes

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2010.03.09

An update on House of Tweets

House of Tweets, my report about the use of Twitter by elected members of Canada’s House of Commons, has drawn a lot of attention from the media. In fact, I just came from the CBC building where I was interviewed by Daniel Thibeault for TéléJournal (airing this Friday night). The more I talk about the report, the more I realize there are other measures of Twitter use by MPs that I hadn’t included in the report and people seem interested in.

For instance, I didn’t analyze the number of Twitter messages generated by each party during the assessment period. A quick check of the numbers based on my research identified that among the active Twittering MPs, the Liberals rank first for the number of Twitter messages generated (6,289), the Conservatives follow (5,209), the NDP third (4,086) and the Bloc are last (408).

The average number of Tweets generated by the actively Twittering MPs puts the Conservatives first (274), the Liberals hot on their heels (273) followed by the NDP (255) and the Bloc (102). These averages may have changed over the last few weeks, particularly since Liberal MP Denis Coderre has been absolutely on fire, publishing 1,177 Tweets between the close of the initial research (Feb. 19) and this morning (Mar. 9). The next most active Twittering MPs since the publishing of the report trail by an order of magnitude — Conservatives Patrick Brown (86) and James Moore (76). Among James Moore’s Tweets this month is the announcement that U2 lead singer Bono would like to speak with him about copyright.

Since the report was published on February 25, all of the identified dormant Twitter accounts remain dormant and NDP MP Dennis Bevington is the only MP to have opened a new account (March 3) though he hasn’t published any updates.

If I can get them in the same room for about 30 minutes, I’d like to audio record a round table discussion with James Moore, Denis Coderre and Libby Davies about Twitter as a communication tool, their approach to digital communication and engagement, and the role of digital in politics and democratic participation.

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