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Enclosed is an article about the Latvian site I mentioned yesterday. I encourage anyone out there with project lessons to share via a 500- 750 word text-only article on DO-WIRE. There seem to be about five right ways to reach any particular political/civic goal effectively on the Internet and about 95 wrong ways - the challenge is to find one of the five that work and not get stuck wasting time with the other 95. Please help us all by using DO-WIRE as a place to share what worked and what didn't with your election, advocacy, or governance online efforts. Steven Clift Democracies Online Try on a party! before casting your vote A note on the Elections Special of the Latvian public policy website http://www.politika.lv* Dear colleagues, I would like to share with you our experience of a successful interactive experiment which we launched as part of the Elections Special of politika.lv as well as some of our editorial considerations regarding the contents of this special section. After celebrating the first birthday of being on-line, having reached 1/3 of Latvia's Internet users and establishing itself as the one- stop on-line policy shop in Latvia, the public policy website politika.lv launched a special Elections section last summer, three months prior to the parliamentary elections. This special section, focusing on election issues, was established in addition to the eight topics (such as human rights, social integration, corruption) under which all resources of the website are organised. Some of the editorial and practical considerations regarding the contents of this section were: - keeping the focus on the policy substance and issues (as oppose to news, scandals and superficial information which is abundantly present in all media at the pre-election time); - providing in-depth analyses and information so as to complement the traditional and other interactive media rather than compete with them; - giving voice to the NGO sector; - exploiting the unique features of the Internet, such as interactivity and possibility to publish/link indefinite amounts of information. The contents of the Elections Special included: "looking back" by providing analyses of the how the political parties presently in power had fullfilled their pre-election promises (complete with links to the previous party programmes, the previous government declarations and other information resources), "looking forward" by analysing the new party programmes on specific issues (complete with links to the party programmes and other relevant resources), independent monitoring reports on political party finances and advertisement spending, NGO views on cooperation with the government. The added value offered by politika.lv was pooling together all relevant resources and presenting them in a convenient, user-friendly manner so that anyone seeking in-depth information could access it in a fast and easy way - a service which traditional media is not in the position to provide due to space/broadcast limitations and the commercial interactive media has no editorial capacity to do. Marketing of the Elections Special was mostly conducted by way of placing links to politika.lv resources in relevant news-items published by the commercial portals (free of charge) as well as through a partnership agreement with the largest commercial internet portal. Shortly before the elections politika.lv launched a unique interactive tool Try on a party! which enabled the users to compare their views on current political issues with the views of 5 leading MP candidates of 10 leading political parties. The tool was designed as a questionnaire, where the user responded to 20 statements and by pressing the "results" button saw his/her position on a scale opposite of the political parties' positions. There were several conditions which determined the credibility of this excersise: (1) the 20 statements were formulated in popular language as a result of brainstorms and tested with focus groups, so as to make politicians respond to the way people really think, not the other way around (for example, "joining the EU will have negative influence on the national identity" or "homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexual ones"; (2) the party position on the statements was determined not by their spokespeople but by individual politicians who filled in the questionnaires independently; (3) this tool was elaborated by professional experts using scientific methodology and (4) the entire process of completing the questionnaire and viewing of results was anonymous, so that users could not be influenced by each other and no-one except for the user (including the politicians or their spin-doctors) could see the results. In addition to the questionnaire, the website published charts displaying the deviation of individual opinions within a party and a 2-dimensional map of the party opinions. This tool was incredibly popular with both the public and the media: over 5000 people "tried on a party" before the elections and it received good media coverage. If you would like to have a look at the questionnaire, it is available here (in Latvian only), along with the map of party opinions and charts displaying the deviation of opinions. The Elections Special has been the most popular resource of the website, more than doubling the number of users in the month of September and bringing the pageviews from average 60,000/month to 120,000 before the elections. The rather unfortunate effect of all the publicity, generated also by regular quotes and interviews with politika.lv editor in the leading broadcast and print media, was a server crash two days before the elections - the number of requests at that time exceeded the availability by a hundred times and as a result, a new server had to be purchased. One of the outcomes related to our cooperation with NGOs within the Elections Special was a meeting organised by politika.lv between the leading NGOs and the new government coalition less than a month after the elections to incorporate NGO suggestions into the draft government declaration. The meeting was very productive and resulted in many of the suggestions being included in the final document, in addition to a whole new chapter of the declaration devoted to the government cooperation with the civil society. We view this initiative as a positive example of e-democracy where virtual efforts have actually had influence on policy making process. I hope this experience is of interest to other interactive projects in the region and would be happy to provide more specific information on the Elections Special and the website in general. We are planning to develop a tool like "trying on a party!" before the EU accession referendum, and would be very interested to hear from colleagues elsewhere about experience of similar projects. With best regards, Krista Baumane [EMAIL PROTECTED] publisher http://www.politika.lv http://www.policy.lv *politika.lv, a non-governmental, non-partisan and not-for-profit website was set up in summer 2001 by the Soros Foundation - Latvia <http://www.sfl.lv> with the objectives to make available policy resources, provide interactive environment for public debate on current policy issues and to strengthen the public policy community in Latvia. It is presently financed by the Soros Foundation - Latvia, the OSI Information Programme <http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram> and the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative <http://lgi.osi.hu>. The English version of the website is available at http://www.policy.lv . ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - W: http://www.publicus.net Minneapolis - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - - - ICQ: 13789183 *** Past Messages, Discussion http://e-democracy.org/do *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To UNSUBSCRIBE instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. *** *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
