opolitics

I am a new media strategist to MK. Dr. Roman Bronfman and the Democratic Choice Party. I started in August 2005 after a friend; Eran Vered introduced me to Dan Goldenblatt, Dr. Bronfman’s political advisor. Vered showed me the proposed site of the party and complained about the backstage user-interface.

The design wasn’t exciting but not bad just a standard party website (here is the new russian site). Goldenblatt invited me to the meeting with the website developing company. During the meeting Eran Vered lost his patience and complained about the unfriendly editing interface, which was really bad. I calmed them down and said that it wasn’t that bad and we can work around it, I suggested a few new features like blogging and content syndication (RSS), Eran added a forum. We decided that I would produce an outline and a plan. I started to work on a web strategy.

The first thing was to implement a blogging system and Wordpress was my choice. The developing company didn’t respond to my requests for database and server access and it took them 3 weeks till they obliged to do so. I spent less than 20 minutes installing the Wordpress weblog software. I started experimenting with wikipedia mediawiki as a social software system. Dan organized a meeting with Dr. Roman Bronfman and I presented my web strategy. Bronfman was excited with the blogging idea and asked if it could be and audio one. Yes, I replied “it is the coolest thing on the net called podcasting“. After inviting friends to experiment with the wiki. I got to the conclusion that it was to complex, and I swapped the mediawiki software with the Drupal based civicspace. Wikipedia is popular in Israel as an encyclopedic source, like anywhere else, but there is only a minority of people whom are tempted to edit it. Drupal/Civicspace uses conventional content posing structure people are less hesitant to publish content. Elections were called for the end of March 2006. If we were not in a tight campaigning schedule I would have continued with the wiki.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Politics , Israel , Podcast , Digital Culture , internet . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.