Labour Conference goes Online with Twitter, UStream and Online Q&A Sessions

Its an interesting departure no doubt about it, the Labour conference at the weekend will be all teched up. The party are hoping to integrate the internet into their conference programme with the use of ustream, twitter, flickr, online question sessions etc. Most of the conference will be streamed on UStream including Eamon Gilmore’s conference speech and there will be regular status updates on their twitter. The full info is over on the Labour website.

Jan O Sullivan, Joan Burton, Dominic Hannigan and Ciaran Lynch are going to sit down and take web questions a bit like this one from the UK (if you want to submit questions leave a comment on the Labour post). As a blogger and someone who thinks the web can offer a huge versatility to Irish politics this is a welcome development. We will of course be keeping an eye on proceedings here but using some of the web’s best tools for this purpose is a good idea.

With two years to go until the local elections and a full five years to go until the General Election, the time for all parties to be experimenting with the tools of the web is now. Getting things right and wrong now gives you plenty of time to augment your organisation with the online kit. Of course it is a two way thing and it depends on how well voters respond to the web but it is hard not to think think that in five years time the internet will be far more prevalent in people’s lives than even now. Hopefully I will be writing similar posts on the other major parties in the coming weeks and months as it can only be a good thing in the long term.

Next they will be looking to install E.A.B.