Speak to Me (Once More)!
Hi all, I would like to sound you all out on the possibility of running real-time chats, via coveritlive, with prominent party members.
Like most, I have been massively impressed with Millenium’s blogger interviews. The chance for us hoi-polloi to go and talk face-to-face with the top people in one of the main parties in British politics is pretty cool.
However, living on the continent I am not best placed to sign up for these. Although the next one is going to be in the great northern enclave of Sheffield (where all the best people go to university) I doubt the shores of Lake Geneva are going to be on the interviewing schedule anytime soon. Pity. It is very nice this time of year. But, when there was some hoohah about these interviews a few months ago then Alex Wilcock rightly suggested ‘if you want something done, do it yourself’. So that is what I am thinking of doing.
Via the magic-inty-web.
In a nutshell, coveritlive is a real-time chat platform. If you want to host a chat all you have to do is go to the website and fill in the relevant information and then all you do is paste the bit of code they give you into a post on your blog. The main plus-points for coveritlive are:
- Fully moderated: the ‘producer’ (in coveritlive parlance the person who’s blog it is on) has the choice whether or not to publish comments.
- Easy for commentators: It runs through a normal blog post so individual commentators don’t have to do anything special to join in, no extra software* or registration, they should just be able to go to the particular post on the blog and can join in straight away.
- Easy for ‘panelists’: Whoever it is you want to chat to doesn’t have to make any special arrangements either, all they need to do is find an hour or so to sit in front of a computer one evening - not necessarily easy for busy people but not impossible either.
- Global: The guy in the next room can join in, or the girl on the other side of the world.
- You can add lots of extra bits in: Embed the party’s videos from youtube, or links to policy documents to back up the argument you are making. It also allows you to host quick polls to get an idea of what the commentators/readers think about particular topics.
*perhaps a flash plugin, but most people will have that kind of thing already.
If you want to see what they look like, post-interview, go either here, where Iain Dale hosted one with the Tory Chris Rennard, Eric Pickle, or go here, where Sky hosted one with the C&N candidates. Or better still, go to the coveritlive website, sign up and then play around with their practice platform.
Over on Libdemvoice at the moment there is a short discussion about whether we should always be chatting about our strategy/policy/woe in public. Thinking about this, it would also be possible to password-protect the individual post that the chat was in, and then invite people individually to the chat and give them the password. This might be best if it were possible to get people from the internal party machine to come and chat. For MP’s, Lords, PPC’s etc. it might be better to leave it open so they can tell constituents or other interested bodies about it. As I said, the chat is fully moderated so trolls could be ignored.
So, I would welcome any feedback as to whether people think this might be a good idea? Or whether I should just shut my cake-hole?
