By Julie Germany
On April 21, I traveled to Madrid, Spain, to deliver a four-hour seminar at Unidad Editorial, which publishes Spain’s second largest paper, El Mundo, its first largest sports magazine, and dozens of other periodicals and television shows. Unidad Editorial also has its own professional graduate degree program in journalism and political communications. My seminar included both graduate students and people from government and business in Spain with an interest in digital political communications.
Part of my lecture, Evolution and Revolution-The Rise of the Techno-Charged, Citizen-Centric Era, focused on ways in which political communicators and technology are evolving together - and how the way we use technology is starting to change us. According to the Council for Research Excellence, ten years ago, only 2 percent of us got news and information from the Internet, now more than1/3 of us do. In this environment, “information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is,” Clive Thompson wrote in “Meet the Life Hackers” for the NY Times Magazine in 2005 (it’s perhaps my favorite thing ever written about new media).
However, using the technology to push more political communications and public affairs at people in a fevered attempt to get attention is counter-productive and doesn’t really address the reason why people use technology to communicate: we do it to connect to each other and to connect to information of great value to us.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “I can’t wait to log onto the Internet to look at some good public affairs ads!”
There isn’t any one solution or answer. Instead, we have to evolve the ability to think and act more strategically. We need to evaluate our digital outreach programs and focus not just on the kinds of numbers that impress our clients but also on the quality of our relationships — quality, not quantity. Because, as Clay Shirky informed the audience of TED in 2009, in this environment, “what matters isn’t technical capital. It’s social capital.”
Organizations, candidates, and governments that will adapt and survive share a few values in common. They are agile and can easily adapt to new situations, collaborations, and emergencies. Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity and the Open Architecture Network, wrote a fantastic piece about this in Huffington Post in May 2009.
His article, “The Tugboat and the Tanker: Ideas for the New Office of Social Innovation” draws lessons from the concept that smaller, more pliable nonprofits addressed needs after Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Tsunami better than the big, giant, well-known, well-funded nonprofits. He wrote,
“While funds flowed from large scale aid groups and governments, what is referred to on the ground as ‘the tankers,’ it was the bootstrapped nimble organizations, ‘the tugboats,’ that partnered with local community groups and social entrepreneurs that filled the cracks in delivering aid and responding to local needs. In many areas these cracks were more like chasms and the tugboats ended up partnering and occasionally steering the tankers into communities that had been overlooked.”
According to Sinclair this means being able to change tracks and collaborate with others to achieve the same mission. It means adapting to changing forms of communication and connectivity. And it also means open-sourcing your solutions so that other people can help you – and so that you can help other people.
Sinclair’s article provides a good framework for addressing many of my best practices in online political communications and e-governance, which we covered during the remainder of the seminar. Effective, evolving communications are something that should challenge people who work in all levels of the political process. Many of my examples and best practices look at uses (and misuses) of digital tools in everything from non-profit organizing to political campaigning and election monitoring to constituent communications and engagement.
After all, as the Honorable Margot Wallström, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Institutional Relations and Communications Strategy said, at a European Institute event in Washington, DC last year, “Communication is all about strengthening democracy and has to be used at the service of democracy. It’s not mission impossible, it’s mission irresistible.”