The new political test: can you YouTube?

Political candidates once needed skills in dealing with hecklers ... then reporters and TV cameras. Now it's citizen's media. Steven Clift, who has been promoting e-democracy world-wide for the last ten years or more, has an impressive event lined up back in his US base, with candidates agreeing to cope with a potential barrage of podcasts, videos and photos as well as emails. It could be more challenging than big media. As Steven bills it in his press release:

The era of YouTube(TM) and MySpace(TM) meets Minnesota’s strong civic tradition of innovation, thanks to a new online debate with the gubernatorial candidates co-sponsored by Blandin Foundation and E-Democracy.Org.

The Minnesota Gubernatorial E-Debate will take place online from Monday, October 9th through Thursday, October 19th. Minnesotans can participate directly in the gubernatorial campaigns by using the Internet - including video, audio, pictures, and plain texts - to submit questions and share their views with candidates and fellow citizens.

The E-Debate is designed to promote and facilitate substantive, interactive, in-depth public discussions of candidate positions and proposals.

All of Minnesota’s official gubernatorial candidates appearing on the November ballot formally have confirmed their participation in the debate.

Voters will send email questions, and candidates have the option to provide their Opening Statement in video via the YouTube.com video sharing service. Candidates also may record their rebuttals into audio podcasts, and also provide links to content related to their answers.

Voters may participate by submitting text questions and by using the new “Voter Voices” section of E-Democracy’s web site to share their own video, audio, pictures, blog posts, links, and discussion forum messages across popular online services (for example, Flickr.com for photos, YouTube.com for video, blog posts via the Google blog search, etc.

Minnesotans are then invited to view an integrated, dynamic presentation of all of this material on a single web page www.e-democracy.org/voices

It's an impressive set up, and a long way from Steven's early initiatives with email lists. What's doubly impressive is the way that Steven has managed to catalyse so many initiatives around the world through a mix of hands-on demonstration, speaking and networking without much funding and without being the least bit grand about it. More at his Democracies Online site.

technorati tags:e-democracy

Comments

[Tim Erickson]

Thanks for the kind words. I just thought I'd give you an update on the E-Debate. Three of the six candidates did submit opening statements via YouTube. They can all be found at this address:

Opening Statements via YouTube

For a broader scan of what citizens (and campaigns) are posting:

Other YouTube Postings

Also, here is what is being posted at Flickr, using debate related tags.

To actually see and read the online debate itself, please visit:

The Minnesota Gubernatorial E-Debate

See you at the debate.

Tim Erickson
E-Democracy.Org