Every Day is Election Day

With my epic preparation of a thesis on how to save hurling - I honestly do think it’ll be released in drips over next week at this stage - it’s probably time that I did one of those “ooh, nice links” posts.

Not that there’s a whole lot, mind - I really must do a wholescale overhaul of what’s in my Google Reader. I did find one thing of huge interest, though.

Something else eye-catching and doing the rounds at the moment do is Let Our Congress Tweet. It seems that the moment that the Houses of Congress are reconsidering some relatively archaic rules stating that content from members can’t appear on websites alongside political or commerical information or content (which surely seems contradictory in itself).

The project was born when users began following John Culberson (R-TX) on Twitter, while he tweeted - often from the House floor - on votes and his reasoning for his actions. Not, of course, that John was the first member of the houses to Tweet - Chris Hughes from Facebook is “Online Organisational Guru” for the Barack Obama campaign and had him Tweeting first.

Still, though, Culberson’s simple actions are a natural progression in accountability - politicians have been blogging for a while now, so micro-blogging was the simple step forward. Except, of course, that the rules of the Houses don’t allow him to do so.

It’s difficult to see why anyone would oppose a campaign like LOCT. As Culberson tweeted himself about four hours ago:

I wont quit until the rules give me & all members the same unfettered access to new media that I have to TV/nwspaper interviews

Indeed, why should he? Why should the rules allow members to have their own websites, and to participate openly in TV and newspaper interviews - which end up online immediately anyway - but not get their direct channels out? LOTC can only be a good thing.

If the Twitter community was any bigger in Ireland, I’d probably be trying to get more of our own Parliamentarians here at home to Tweet their way too. Maybe in time.

On that, if you have the time at all, head to and do their very short survey on what you’d like to see from the site in future. Damien has already commented that he’d like RSS feeds for speeches from each member - certainly an idea that shouldn’t take a huge amount of work to put into practice. Having already set up the superb Politics in Ireland aggregator, his suggestion can only come tinted with the potential of adaptable uses. I suppose, though, when the Oireachtas currently offers RSS feeds for its Committee Schedule, which then only direct you to a Word Document download… perhaps we shouldn’t hold our breaths too much.

The whole notion of easier two-way communication between politicians and the public, in our era of Web 2.0 and New Media, is one that needs further exploration. Forgive me for suggesting it but Irish political culture needs to be far more like that of Britain in this regard - and Irish citizens are probably the ones that must lead the way. Britain has fantastic sites like They Work For You, where by merely entering your postcode you can see who your local MP is, how often they’ve been speaking, how often they break ranks with their party, how often they submit parliamentary questions… everything. What’s more, the site is entirely voluntary, non-profit, and run by people who just want greater transparency in the political world.

It’s just not the citizenry that create Britain’s political web culture, though - even the Downing Street website integrates an official YouTube channel, runs regular webchats with Government ministers, and keeps a Flickr and - appropriately, for this post - a Twitter. All of them are written in everyday language, are perfectly accessible, and capture the lighter side of life, like when a sickly kestrel was found in the No.10 garden last week.

If anyone can tell me why Ireland shouldn’t be the same, I’d love to hear it. Why should we need Sunday newspapers to discover that the leader of a Government party has only spoken in his House eight times since he took office, when we could just click his name on a decent website - PoliticsInIreland would be the ideal building block - and find out for ourselves?

Fair play to Let Our Congress Tweet, and here’s hoping that they can set a positive role model for the rest of us in civilised democracies.

~~~

Elsewhere, on the lighter side of life, Jazz Biscuit does the funnies with the Dublin Airport problems…

Fantastically, the New York Times suggests that John McCain isn’t actually eligible to run for President…

And via Alexia - Radiohead’s video for House of Cards, due for release today but now put back a bit, has been made without a camera, but rather in the same way that sportspeople wear light-catching bubbles to help developers make video games. Sounds interesting - and if it’s anyway as memorable as the Johnny Hardstaff video for Pulk-Pull Revolving Doors/Like Spinning Plates mashup, it’ll be another job very well done.