I’m just back from the Digital Single Market high-level conference, where we were ensuring the online animation. I’d like to share with you some lessons learnt.
The model adopted for online animation was the same as for the Digital Agenda Assembly last year. We launched early discussions to identify the most relevant issues, this time through entries in the Digital Agenda blog. We stimulated discussion on twitter during the conference through a team of live bloggers and made sure that the input received online was fed into the conference (thanks also to the great work of the moderator). Finally, we created a idea-storm forum to get feedback from participants.
The results, analysed through my “participation steps model“, were positive:
- no technical hiccup
- good quantity of participation: we overall collected about 1500 tweets from 200 people, and 51 comments on the blog. As usual, participation was very unequal, with some session attracting lots of comments and other much less.
- little spam and inappropriate content: only one or two spam comments in the blog. There were some criticisms, but constructive.
- high quality of online participation: some of the comments helped to raise the level of the discussion and actually engaged people who were not there. For instance, the question from @lisadf1717 about the possibility of a European Netflix under the current copyright regime nailed down the issue and helped to better frame the debate. This was for me the best example fo what we want to achieve with online participation.
We learned several lessons that we will use for the Digital Agenda Assembly. The live bloggers (Jamal and Andrew) did a great job and it was a win-win situation because they were highly knowledgeable about the theme, and good in communicating. Twitter participation increases when you have good, snappy speakers that are easily “retweeteable”.
But the most important lesson is that if we want to have high quality of discussion, we need to directly identify those stakeholders who have important things to say, are normally interested in EU policy issues but are not based in Brussels. We need to contact them personally and explain why it’s important that they participate online. EU policy debate is often highly technical and jargon based, and if we want to reach out to new stakeholders we need to explain clearly what’s at stake and why it’s important to participate. Let’s hope we can do even better in the next Digital Agenda Assembly.
I can’t be more tuned !
Yes Jean Yves, that was your argument as well. I realize that some people are just too far away from the EU policy debate to be involved – for instance the community of co-working spaces. But there are individuals, like you, who are in between the pure bottom-up community and the EU policy circles.
The good news is that we manage to involve several of them and this helped to raise the level of the policy discussion. It would be good if people like you participate as well in the future. Feel free to post here the content of your e-mail!
David, I really enjoyed the conference and the online discussion.
Some other lessons learnt from my side:
- when the discussion was more pragmatic, focused and grounded, we managed to get much more people and interesting comments in twitter. It is very difficult to discuss in the vague..I think that also explains the difference in the participation between panels, not only participants’ interests.
-I realised that many people were tweeting from the room (not from outside following the webstream) but they preferred to address their questions on twitter maybe because they feel more confident to do it that way than asking directly to the panel. Questions were more direct and they enable to focus more on controversial issues, where not everybody shares the same interests and visions.
-when there is a decision to be taken and the discussion is about possible actions, different options, people get easily engaged. When is about conversation but no action…it’s much much difficult.
-animators & bloggers: it makes a difference when the animators and bloggers are embedded in the topics of the discussion. If they are experts in the discussion topics, they know which quotes and thoughts to be highlighted and they manage to engage people (they have credibility). Andrew and Jamal did a great job!
Finally I was glad to see that some policy makers were engaged with the online discussion and even if they had never tweet before, they asked for help to learn and they managed to do it
. This is not a small change because feedback is what most participants look for when they engage online..this is just one signal of a long lasting friendship between policy and social media!
“if we want to have high quality of discussion, we need to directly identify those stakeholders who have important things to say, are normally interested in EU policy issues but are not based in Brussels”
I agree, but would suggest it’s even more important to target those who are *not* interested in EU policy issues, but would become so if someone explained:
- the relevance of an EU-level debate to them
- how they can contribute to that debate
- without having to learn the arcania of the EU and becoming a paid-up member of the Brussels bubble.
Until we manage that, the EU online public space will remain pretty much an echo chamber, and the EU will remain distant from 99% of Europeans.