Politikforelle

Yesterday evening (24 June 2010) we joined the well populated Politforelle to listen to Julien’s, Dave’s and Steffi’s presentation of the evolving politools projects. politools is an academically backed association aiming to increase political participation in Switzerland and beyond. Better known than their own name is their core product smartvote. Since 2003 the tool helps Swiss citizens lay back and easily find their candidates using an online questionnaire. In 2007 an amazing 1million users or about 15% of all Swiss citizens used smartvote to find the best matching national councils. Now that’s about when Twitter launched or in other words a looong time ago - the team is busy overhauling their baby to Web 2.0 standards. Additionally we’re likely to see the rollout of smartvote’s little brother smartmonitor. It’s supposed to be launched in the course of the 2011 national council elections and will provide transparency on the voting profile of political candidates, network analyses and more. Thanks to Feinheit for hosting, thanks to Politnetz for moderating!

Last Thursday our friends of feinheit.ch hosted the third installment of the digi-political series started and organized by the innovative amazee.com-team, especially by Ana (thanks again for this one!), and supported by us from politnetz.ch.

Dania from amazee introduced (Thanks a lot as well!) the white label solution http://www.intergenerations.ch, a – as the title says – web plattform for projects which are bringing old an young people on different topics and with specific needs together. Chaired by the Swiss national councilour Pascale Bruderer – the highest Swiss politicians for this year – the plattform has seen a vivid and prosper start.

A key goal in interactive online communications it is of course to get the people to talk – not only to read and listen. How does one get with one's topics into the focus of a broader public? It's all about events. And about the key people of the organisations involved.

In the case of intergenerations.ch Dania described, that because of the older target group's relatively distance to online media it has been necessary to offer support by telephone, too. Personal contact was (and is) a key point of the strategy. Like it is with the personal engagement of Pascal Bruderer as well: She is currently visiting events organised by contributing organisations, generating new content (pictures, reviews etc.) for the platform.

Another question discussed was e.g., to what extent an intense community management like this can be scaled? Key is the education, support and inspiration of the people inside those organisations to be then able to deliver the management mainly by themselves.

Furthermore Ana managed to get another interesting guest at the table: Matthias Brüllmann, Leiter Sektion Web of the Bundeskanzlei. It was a pleasure to have for the first time in the history of the Politikforelle also a member of the federal administration with us. Mr. Brüllmann gave a quick overview about the strategy of the federal web unit, and showed interest and openness towards the ongoing changes in online communications. It is striking that he is sceptical towards the introduction of a web platform for online participation by the authorities, too. It is a job or duty for civil society, as we believe in as well.

With some remarks and discussions about the SwissID, and peculiarities within administrative and startup-working environments, the session was closed. Thanks again to Moritz of feinheit.ch for room, snacks and drinks. Looking forward to the next one.

Last night our friends from Politnetz.ch hosted the second installment of the Politforelle, or political trout, a somewhat regular meetup of those interest in Swiss politics and the Web.

Andreas of Politnetz, who had organized the event (thank you for that!), managed to find two very interesting guys to present: Moritz Zumbühl, CEO of the Feinheit agency and candidate for the Green Party in Zurich as well as Stefan Krattiger, a successful, young politician (how do you translate Gemeinderatspräsident?) of the Social Democratic Party from the Bernese Oberland both talked about their experience with the Net.

While Moritz Zumbühl was quite skeptical about the power of Social Media in general (except Facebook, as he stressed), he stated that he heavily relies on E-Mail (again). The only problem being the obtaining of E-Mail adresses. But he was able to show some interesting cases in which mailing helped to get a campaign off the ground. At the same time he is convinced that in Switzerland there is not yet a way to successfully bypass mass media when you want to get your word out big time.

Stefan Krattiger talked about his campaign to become Gemeinderatspräsident (president of his local town council). Amongst other things he started chatting up young people from his town via Facebook and managed to mobilize them. They would not have voted otherwise and eventually carried him to victory.

Both, however, were not convinced that online Social Media will be successfully used by Swiss parties in the near future. Too fragmented and decentralized is the national party landscape.

Last night we hosted the first ever Politikforelle, a new, regular meetup of people interested in politics and the online world living in Switzerland. The Politikforelle (the political trout, don’t ask …) wants to find answers to the question, how the virtual world is changing the way in which we participate in political processes down here in Switzerland (and elsewhere). First special guest was Andreas Amsler of the Swiss deliberation site politnetz.ch (http://politnetz.ch).

After a short presentation we had a very intense and thorough discussion of how people exchange (political) views, how they organize according to interests and what the future role of political parties will be. While some of us believe that political parties will be around for a while, if maybe not in the shape we know now, others see more single charismatic leaders in the future.

As for politnetz.ch there were a lot of ideas for more direct deliberation, easy participation in discussion processes and the role the site can play in arranging political agendas. Some even saw politnetz.ch as a rightful successor to the popular Swiss TV show Arena, a political debate program which has become somewhat rusty over the years. – All in all the first Politikforelle was a great success and we are very much looking forward to further installments! Stay tuned!