Web 2.0 - will it fit on a CD-ROM?
Last week I chaired a session on Campaigning with Web 2.0 at the International e-Participation Symposium in London.
It was a lively session with excellent speakers: James Crabtree from IPPR, who gave us a broad overview of the American primaries, was followed by two practitioners, Cllr David Speirs who has set up a network of citizens in Bath and North East Somerset, and Steve Webb MP who has always managed to be ahead of the curve, first with email, then texting and now social networking.
But I recalled how several people, already seasoned Internet users, have asked me to explain exactly what Web 2.0 is. "I don't remember hearing about Web 1.0" is a fairly typical comment.
So I began by showing sites that exemplify the slightly ironic term, including eBay, Wikipedia, Fix My Street, and of course Facebook. What they have in common is content created by the users; networks of information supported by social interaction.
The concept of Web 2.0 was introduced by Tim O'Reilly, a respected IT author and guru, and I like this explanation that he gave in 2005:
Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data.
It's a bit geeky, but the idea of an architecture of participation is at the core.
To illustrate just how far we've come, I showed some sites I've developed over the years and the levels of interaction they allowed. I present these with some trepidation - will you believe that the Web was like this such a short time ago?
 This was the first site I created, back in 1996, for St Paul's Church, Hook. It was simply a set of pages of information with no opportunity for the visitor to interact. The reason why I'm not showing a campaigning site from that time is because back then there was no such thing on the Web - not a single MP or political party had a website, and the big debate of the day was whether shops should be encouraged to have an online presence. This was one of the first church websites in the country. |
 Three years later I set up the site for Edward Davey, again one of the first MPs to have a site. The only interactivity on that early site was a contact form. I was credited with helping him to increase his majority from 56 to over 15,000 in 2001, but I have to say that the hit rate in those days doesn't really justify that! |
 Although e-petitions are being talked up at the moment, many of us have been running online petitions for many years. Here's one from the Kingston Borough Liberal Democrats' site in 2002. I developed Steve Webb's site for him, but can claim no credit for the way in which he set about exploring what email and texting could bring to his campaigns. This dates from 2005, but in the last year he has become so popular on Facebook (with over 2500 friends) that the admins decided that he could not possibly be a real person and closed down his account! - only restored after vigorous protests. |
So where are we now in political campaigning? In the States, as James pointed out, most of the clever interactivity of the Internet is utilised to raise funds for candidates. Over here we can concentrate on using it to encourage debate and grow support, but we don't have quite the same incentives as the Americans do to communicate well. The three main parties all need to take their Internet strategies further forward, and I must say I'm proud to belong to a party in which the grassroots membership run the space where we meet and discuss issues.
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