DLTQ.org

Our party, Det Radikale Venstre, is the B on this list:

Image Source: Politiken.dk

We lost. We were the loser of the election, losing 8 of our 17 mandates in parliament, and we now have 9 left.

On the other hand, what happened was that we simply went back to the level we had before the election of 2005, where Radikale Venstre had a substantial gain. I covered that election here.

Why did it go so wrong? I think it was a mixture of the creation of Ny Alliance in May, which was founded by membes of Radikale Venstre. Practically, a split of Radikale Venstre. Then, in this election, the socialists (SF - which is F on the overview above) had a tremendous gain. They were successful with communicating their core values, and their new leader is also a politician many people feel they can relate well to.

But the decline of my own party was not the biggest problem. What really made us annoyed was that the current government (V and C - The Liberals and the Conservatives) can continue in majority with just the support of the Danish People’s Party (O). It was our hope that the opposition could receive a majority and we could have a new government. If that didn’t work, it was our hope that VKO alone would not have majority, and that they would need Ny Alliance to continue. Ny Alliance (literally: New Alliance) was created with several goals, one of them being to minimise the influence that Danish People’s Party could have over Danish politics, particularly on the immigrations area (today, Denmark has some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe).

Now the Danish Prime Minister (V) says that he will seek broad dialogue - that is, that he will invite other parties to negotiations, and not just stick with the VKO parties, even though they do have the majority.

The candidate I worked for in this election campaign, Mikkel Sarbo, did not have even a long shot at becoming a member of the parliament. Granted, he was a pretty unknown candidate in the general public, but it was our hope that with among other things an innovative web campaign we could help him get closer to being elected. It did not work very well, and in the coming days and weeks we will do a thorough review of the campaign, and write some guidelines for the next campaign.

Regarding political videoblogging, this election campaign has also been disappointing. Most parties were active on youtube, even Danish People’s Party, but most of them did not open up for proper dialogue. The leader of the Labour Party, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, however had some Q&A sessions where you could ask questions, and she would answer, for instance this:

In Radikale Venstre we also had different videos from different candidates, as well as the official videos from the headquarters of the party. Nicolas Charbonnier has been videoblogging for years, and he registered and administrated radikale.tv, which I think is a great way to aggregate videos from all these different candidates, and he also went out himself and interviewed candidates as well as people on the streets about their point of view on politics and what issues they think are important. Today radikale.tv has over 340 videos of different length and topic which is a good basis - - for what?

Now, that is the question.

These videos from the election campaign - how can they be used in the organization? For years, I have myself been interested in organizational videoblogging, both internally and externally. How can one person who travels somewhere give video updates to the rest of the organization? How can this be streamlined? (I think mobile videoblogging is the way to go there)

How can organizations and companies use videoblogging to communicate with their peers and customers? How can citizens - members of the civil society - use videoblogging to communicate TO the politicians, to the companies, to the organizations?

Yesterday I spent most of the day considering: What now, Raymond?

I had worked in an academic bookstore for a year or so before the election campaign came and “forced me” to quit the job so I could help out full-time during the campaign (it’s not quite the same to campaign after 6 PM and during your lunch break) Before the bookstore, I had worked as a consultant in blogging and videoblogging in Norway and some in Denmark, but I had - basically - grown tired of working pretty much alone. Before that, I had been woking in a hospital while being involved in politics in Bergen. Before that - well.

So, I considered the last days to take on different opportunities for a full time employment, but I realize that this is not what I am really aiming for.

So, I am going independent again. Or, at least, going back into the whole blogging/videoblogging/socialmedia thing full-time. I am actually very excited about this. This time around I will definitely be more motivated!

More information will follow, but now I need to write some emails. I wanted to start using a blog again more actively, and dltq.org it will be.