‘Communicating with New Media’: our Seminar report
Posted by Ricky in Opinion under on Sep 10 2007
Webmistress Poppea and I took the opportunity of attending this seminar at the Labour Party Media Centre on Saturday 8 September.
Well, we parted with our 50 quid, got up early, took the train up to the smoke, and penetrated deep into the heart of the Labour Party Media Centre. Good turnout and obviously a lot of interest some of which was already well informed.
Greg Jackson CEO of Tangent Labs provided the meat of the seminar. He was excellent: focused, personable, coherent and passionate about the possibilities of web based campaigning for the Labour Party.
Due to time constraints, the seminar was unable to deal with some of the detailed techniques such as pod-casting that were advertised, but to be fair we would require a full course, rather than a few hours, to ‘get under the hood’.
Most disappointing, however, (call me naive), was that the real purpose of the seminar was to sell us on (and to sell to us) the new WebCreator package, the ‘official’ Labour Party site creator. Priced at £411 per year! it’s, of course, out of range for many. We, for starters, were disappointed by the slight-of-hand.
There are other minus points aside from cost. WebCreator favours content over presentation (not by accident, maybe, in light of recent internal politics), but this is just as much an error as presentation over content’ The medium is the message: good design makes the message reality, and so becomes, in effect, one with it. This program’s interface is inflexible, visually incoherent and… dull. (Incidentally, on sites using it, there are misalignment issues). It was alarming to learn that the Party is attempting, maybe even planning, to oblige all candidates to use it. The question and answer session squeezed the admission from Tom Geldard, Head of Election Strategy, that they might be offering a WebCreator Lite (in other words, a stripped down version with a limited set of options) for free. There was a healthy interest in that!
It is no surprise that the best labour sites are all different For today’s digital, internet-wise public (not us maybe but the great majority of the under 30’s) with little loyalty and less patience, individuality does matter. People may love ready meals, but when it comes to information they don’t want it pre-chewed and pre-packaged. They sniff it, sense the manipulation, and pass on.
Out of interest, I suggest visiting the various sites of our MP’s. Start with Tom Watson. He lists all of them with greater clarity than on the main Labour Party site. See which you think are built with offical party software. His site is one of the few high-scoring presences of the Left in an area dominated by a very loud Right. Greg showed us some sobering statistics on this.
I understand the party’s wish, and need, to knit all together, to rationalise communication and information flow, but there are different kinds of network, and this tightly integrated centralised model, seems dated and unlikely to be fruitful. Collaboration, working together doesn’t have to mean fitting in someone’s straight jacket.
Finally, WebCreator (and the engine behind the Labour Party site), is just a Content Management System - CMS. Hopefully, in the future, enough flexibility, choice and space for individual expression can be integrated to meet both Central and Local needs.
