Hey Folks,
Now the by-election glow is reseeding, its likely worth taking some time to think and plot for the next (since our collective election previous two talks of a hustings were too slow, and last minute).
If you’re interested, here I wrote a brief summary sharing the analytics from the speed-hustings video. In there @jtonline has asked:
There would be a lot to do to arrange similar for the next election as it’s an election across 14 wards. 14 wards x maybe 5 candidates = ~70 candidates! Ouch!
My thoughts are even though it’s hard it could be worth attempting. We’ve got to try restore faith in local politics, right? My thoughts are two-prong:
- Following lessons learned, we could pick up some tech-savvy volunteers to help with video processing and attempt ALL. (If candidates are up for it). We should use lessons learned to improve of course.
- In lieu of the above, would be to setup a portal to drum up support in advance. Ask people to vote if they would like to see this online hustings in their ward. The portal should collect only postcode + email (to match against ward). Potential future candidates can then help drum up early support for the concept, and we have contact details to communicate the final result (rather than relying on social media algorithms!). We then target the top few. If we manage by some miracle to do all as per point 1), then brilliant, we still have a contact list to let potential voters know and candidates have an immediate audience.
In my mind the #2 approach above could actually work out better than #1 as it starts to build the future audience, and I can see how it could really start to improve local political engagement.