There is a vast opportunity staring the Liberal Democrats in the face: To be the first British political party to accommodate speeches via Skype at their conference.
There are all sorts of arguments for and against this. Would it stop people bothering to come to conference altogether and just participate from their living room? Would that kill conference?
But there are two massive reasons why it should be done very soon:
1. It will allow participation by people who are unable to attend conference because of time or money constraints. It will also demonstrate that the party is truly opening its arms to all members regardless of their ability to attend conference.
2. It will allow a wider range of people to be heard. For example, that Liberal Democrat member who is housebound in Truro. That Liberal Democrat member who has a dairy farm on Orkney and is never able to attend conference because her cows need milking twice a day. What about that unemployed single mother in a bedsit in Liverpool? These people have different opinions and perspectives to offer the party.
There is also the by-product of showing the party to be truly embracing modern technology.
I would suggest that a gentle toe-in-the-water pilot is the way to go.
Why not have one or two debates at the next Spring conference which allow Skype speeches? (Or shall we call them “Skeeches”?) The speakers’ cards could be submitted via a website with interchange via email or messaging as needed. Skype speeches could be handled in a similar way to the short “intervention” speeches or questions from the floor now. They could have their own section within a larger debate.
There are a vast body of techie wonks floating around the Lib Dem conference. It is well within their capabilities to zap a Skype image up on the screen.
I also feel that for non-wired members, it is not an insuperable challenge to get a 3G phone or tablet to them for the duration of the debate.
This is a golden opportunity for the party. Let’s seize it urgently.
*Other internet audio-visual devices are available.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
15 Comments
YES.
what do we want? VOIP @ #LDConf! When do we want it? Now…!
I hope you’re standing for Federal Conference Committee Paul 🙂
I completely agree. I don’t know if Paul is standing for FCC but I am , on platform of making Confernce more accesible through technology.
Sadly, FCC doesn’t have the powers to do this at the moment (without suspending standing orders).
I would support an amendment to standing orders to permit FCC to experiment with this, and hope to see one in Paul’s name at Spring Conference.
Please let’s not box people in to proprietary software and protocols supported on a small minority of platforms. As the footnote says, other technologies are available, so let’s pick one based on open standards which can be implemented on any appropriate operating system or hardware device.
At various levels of the party, use of proprietary communications systems is locking people out of getting involved unless they happen to be using the more popular operating systems like Windows. Freedom from conformity?
I’m not sure that even a standing orders vote would be sufficient – the format of debates is in the constitution.
Technology solutions to support remote conferencing is very mature and are designed to make it simple for end users to access – the only prerequisites being : an internet connected computer with web browser and audio capabilities and/or a telephone.
Skype is designed as a basic one-to-one or one-to-very-small-group telephone service and hence isn’t an appropriate tool for the job, before you get onto its proprietary limitations.
The initial use of such technology (ie. experiment) shouldn’t cause any procedural problems for the FCC, as effectively a conferencing system is a private broadcast and proceedings are currently covered by the BBC et al. Procedural (and management) problems only really start to happen when you allow remote attendee’s to contribute directly in real-time and vote.
In fact the main problem will be the volume of traffic sent to a remote attendee, as they may find themselves exceeding their usage cap…
The conference should be streamed live. Most activists can’t attend and have to rely on reports filtered through, and often distorted by, media and pundits. The technology is basic and cheap. Technology has to be at the heart of future campaigns and if Lib Dems are to get it right, we must begin now.
I think this is a great idea of Paul’s and as someone who wasn’t able to attend conference because I wasn’t able to sort out someone to help me get around, I’m blind, this would have been a way of allowing me to participate. I’d go further though, why not allow people who can’t attend to vote as well. And yes stream all fringe meetings. The BBC does a reasonable job of broadcasting from the main conference floor but never broadcast any of the fringe gatherings. My only concern is the limitations of the technology. I’d be pretty annoyed if I wanted to vote in a debate but couldn’t because the site crashed. Is it right that only voting delegates can vote?
@Andy Boddington – The conference already is streamed live. All events in the main conference hall were shown live on BBC Parliament, which is available free to everyone via Freeview, Freesat or the BBC’s Democracy Live website. Proceedings were also repeated on BBC Parliament the same evening.
@simon – are you sure that Conference is on the Democracy Live website. I can’t see Labour confernce on there now ?
@Simon McGrath – I saw last week’s Liberal Democrat conference live on BBC Parliament. The Labour conference is currently on the same channel. It’s online here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/tv/bbc_parliament/watchlive
Yusuf
Some fringe events are also broadcast on BBC Parliament. I think it was yesterday or the day before I saw a fringe event with Vince Cable, Sal Brinton and the President of the NUS talking about adult education, apprenticeships and tuition fees.
Thanks for that Michael I’ll check the IPlayer to catchup.
There does need to be a balance struck between allowing people to view, and participate in, Conference with relatively little expense, and encouraging people to attend Conference. Conference is a big fundraiser for the party, mostly due to the income from commercial sponsors who get value from attending due to the crowds of people.
I’d argue that fringe meetings and things outside the main hall should not be streamed online by the Party – they’re not a part of our participatory democracy, so nobody is disenfranchised by not being able to attend them. Another option would be to allow sponsors to advertise on the Internet streams to recoup some of the potential loss from lower sponsorship rates necessitated by a drop in attendance.
(I also think that given the hotel-type venues used for Fringe meetings, the technical issues in streaming them would be significant and expensive to overcome; I doubt many hotels have enough bandwidth to stream multiple fringe meetings in their side rooms, and the hassle of miking up each fringe room as well as the power and comms requirements would be significant)
I agree with Simon Titley.
All the conferences are already fully covered on BBC Parliament, there’s no need to bust a gut – and spend even more money – duplicating what our licence fee already provides.