European Parliament builds online community
The European Pariliament is building a Facebook, according to an article in this weekend’s Telegraph (see here). This isn’t exactly true. What they appear to be building is an internal online community - a way for Parliamentarians and staff to communicate and stay up to date with each other. This type of activity isn’t new. Many discussions that we have with both clients and potential clients is about building an internal community for them. For many such communities could bring real internal benefits - ways of communicating and sharing knowledge, working on problems across timezones and departments. They are a more advanced, more developed version of some old intranet sites.
And this is what the European Parliament is doing. As the Telegraph article states:
Only parliamentarians and “civil society”, Brussels-speak for officially sanctioned NGOs and trade associations, will be able to use the site for comment and debate. “Myparl.eu offers you a unique online political forum with a social networking tool, enabling you to engage with other parliamentarians across the EU,” said the pilot site launched in Brussels on Thursday.
But with a bit more investigation www.myparl.eu is designed to be more than this:
MyParl organisers are trying to get MEPs “social networking” with national parliamentarians in an attempt to “communicate Europe” ahead of European elections next June.
However, there is much discussion about whether a community like this is needed, not least because of the reported £3.2 million price tag. But for me the real disappointment for this initiative is that it’s not being used as a way of engaging citizens. The structure of European politics is complicated, with individual Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) being chosen to represent relatively large areas. I personally have no idea who my own MEP is despite being quite politically active.
A great development would be a to build a community where citizens, pressure groups and others could all engage MEPs in discussion on issues that are relevant to them. Ways to find people across Europe with the same questions / ideas or issues as you, and so a way to truely engage across the growing EU. Youtube, Facebook and Myspace all have growing political uses and so the time would be ripe for an institution like the European Parliament to start entering and hosting some of these discussions.
Sadly it doesn’t appear that the European Parliament is ready to take this step yet.
