DLTQ.org

I have learned several things from my political videoblogging work in 2005 in Norway and this autumn here in Denmark, and the most important is:

Organizational videoblogging is hard work!

My conclusion is that you cannot do organizational videoblogging on a whim, but it has to be part of a larger communications platform, and that you need to really work on the infrastructure of it.

The last days I have worked on an article for the member’s magazine of my political party here in Copenhagen, and in that article I put forth three separate areas of use of videoblogging within a political party:

The exhibition

Videos that promote the work of the party for mainly an external audience. If your organization is holding a meeting about NATO or the European Union, and that meeting is public, you could shoot some footage during the meeting along with maybe a few quick statements from the organizers before/after the meeting, and then put it online. There is not much revolutionary about this format -there has for years been online visual accounts from meetings (mostly conferences or meetings with very public speakers), but what I think is new about a videoblogger approach to this is that it is more low-key, and does not require as many man-hours or setting up of equipment.

Internally, The Exhibition approach can also be used to showcase local arrangements in rural areas that are maybe not well-attended, but where the discussion was interesting and deserve a broader audience. This kind of internal exposure of activities can also help heighten the visibility of such local chapters of the organization.

The library

It is well-known that any organization can gain a lot of productivity from having a well-stocked media library that is immediately accessible to all levels of the organization. That way, when the local chapter in Aarhus or Odense wants to use some pictures about climate issues, wind energy or the new Party spokesperson for tax policies, they can simply use this library instead of going around searching in different folders/systems.

Likewise, it would be great if we could build a media library of video that can be used in a score of different situations. Need to make a video about an upcoming event on the EU? Include a few quotes from a statement by the EU spokesperson of the party from a few months back! Of course, today the burden of creating a video just to promote an event is too big to make it seem worthwhile, but as tools become more ubiquitous and easier to use, I am sure that we will see a lot more of this.

Establishing such a library of video is a bit tricky, though. First of all, you should have different versions of the files available. If the video was shot in HD, for instance, there should be a link to an HD/DivX version of the file. Then, there should be a lower-resolution version that you can download and use. Also, there should be the flash-converted version, that is used for quick-scrubbing to see if the content can be used at all before you download larger files.

Then, you need to find a good taxonomy, which is the eternal problem. A tagcloud for video files along with some categories could work, but experience shows that not even this works perfectly.

The Workshop

Ahh, the workshop. As more people in the organization start to use video themselves, some of them can also be involved with more experimental work. How could political messages be effectively communicated - for instance if you want to reach youngsters aged 15-24. It certainly will not work very well with talking heads if you want to draw the attention of people who are used to being entertained on Youtube. On the other hand, because you have the publicly available library that all of this experimental video narrative is built on, you could link to the longer versions of the interviews, or point to the context of this quote of a political opponent that you used in said polemical video.

The workshop aspects of organizational videoblogging is somewhat more esoteric and will by nature only involve a smaller amount of people in the organization. However, the work done by these people can function as a kickstarter to new forms of discussions and dialogue, and can also help to draw the attention of people from outside the party.

This weekend Radical Youth created a group that will focus on videoblogging and video communnication in general. I am one of the members of the group (I feel old), and it will be interesting to see what we will come up with. The first meeting is on thursday.