A week in e-democracy

A week in e-democracy: Nicolas Sarkozy launched its offensive on the web

Nicolas Sarkozy launched its offensive on the web
Just after announcing his candidacy for a new mandate of President, Nicolas Sarkozy launched  "France Forte.fr"(Strong France.fr), his official campaign website, his Twitter account, an official page on Foursquare, a very special Timeline on Facebook, where the outgoing president has ten times more fans than his Socialist rival, with 540,000 registered ...  If his website links with Facebook and Twitter, allow users to view videos, interviews and photos on the campaign, access to news and calendar, the campaign website will broadcast exclusive interviews between the candidate and French citizens, made ​​outside of traditional media. The online campaign budget would include 2 million euro (10% of the total budget).

Socialists in the field of irony
Young Socialists were quick to react after the announcement of the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy, by igniting Twitter with the hashtag #Sarkoçasuffit (Sarko, that's enough!) which was widely taken to be the top point of Topics Global Trends in the hours that followed, and launching a website to divert the official poster campaign, "My strong France". Within hours, over a thousand posters have been created and shared on social networks. Dynamics that anti-Sarkozy want amplify with  the website "Sarko, that's enough!"

Paris wants to boost e-Petition
If online petitions are part of everyday life for Americans, British or German, the system is not really popular in France. The City of Paris, for example, allows e-petitions since two years, without success. The parisian authorities just launched an information campaign to try to restart the system. "Only 90 petitions have been published online, of which 37 were validated by the Paris committee of public debate", recognizes Bouakkaz Hamou, deputy-mayor for local democracy. But they have collected between one and 49 signatures...  And, to be debated in the council of Paris, a petition must concern a matter of daily life (roads, environment, waste management, municipal facilities) and collect 54,000 signatures, representing 3% of the adult population. Paris just decided to lower this number to 18,000 signatories, representing 1% of the adult population.

After SOPA, the Internet mobilization blocks ACTA
After the success of the online mobilization againt the anti-piracy law SOPA, mobilization of European webusers blocks the international treaty "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) process of ratifying. The agreement aims to establish an international legal framework for targeting counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet. The European Commission has been forced to release an 8-page document justifying how the ACTA negotiations were conducted. After the success of mass protests across Europe against the agreement, the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, has expressed his skepticism about the follow-up: "I don't find it good in its current form". ACTA is set to be debated in the European Parliament in June.

Why Internet in Iran severely disrupted?
Some 36 million Iranian web users (on a 75 million population) can no longer access their e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube while browsing speed has dropped dramatically. The cut-off appeared to target all encrypted international websites outside Iran that depend on the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, which display addresses beginning with https, according to Earl Zmijewski of Renesys, a U.S. company that tracks Internet traffic worldwide. Control of the internet is a major concern for Iran, whose authorities have created in 2011, a specialized police unit to fight against "cybercrime" including social networks, widely used by the opposition and announced the establishment of an "Iranian Internet" to gradually replace servers and foreign search engines. No doubt that authorities are stepping up censorship of opposition supporters ahead of parliamentary elections next month.

a week in e-democracy: Hollande in the footsteps of Obama?

Hollande in the footsteps of Obama?
Alongside the official website campaign, francoishollande.fr, the team of the socialist candidate for the French presidential election has just launched "All Hollande", a website for mobilizing activists. The objective is to organizing door to door and convince at least 5 million people to vote for him. Through targeting of priority areas with high potential to mobilize 10,000 activists will be trained to recruit 150,000 volunteers to go and meet directly voters. it is also possible to forward content to Facebook friends, invite them to join the candidate Facebook page, or make a donation. The strategy is directly inspired by the Obama campaign of 2008, which had shown that 14 abstainer met personally had moved to vote, 10,000 times more efficient than leaflets. The French socialist team is also accompanied by Blue State Digital, the agency headed by the Obama former online campaign director,  Joe Rospars, who came to Paris himself. The Internet campaign of Francois Hollande has a budget of 2 M€ and led by 35 people.

For the French centrist candidate, it's possible to mobilize in a funny way
The mobilization website of the centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou, is less rigid than the Holland team.  With Bayrou.fr/volunteers, the idea is to provide registered activists a choice of actions to perform, such as printing and distributing campaign leaflets to friends. Like Foursquare, the activist earn points for every action taken and may even earn badges. For Matthieu Lamarre, the digital campaign director of Francois Bayrou, "the idea was to offer a fun and accessible tool where the number of actions to be performed is not limited and which is designed to evolve throughout the campaign ". The site is optimized for iPad, iPhone and Android.

In Syria, the revolution involves also Internet
Impossible, of course, to put on the same level people who die by the bullets and those who use the networks to carry the revolution. But as in all conflicts, information warfare is real and it takes place today on the web where hundreds of emails from Syrian President Bashar Assad's office were leaked after an attack by the hacker group Anonymous. Some 78 inboxes of Assad's aides and advisers were hacked and the password that some used was "12345". The exchanges were published by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, including how Damascus is seeking to manipulate the American public.

The internet should be a demilitarised zone
The cyber war is no longer science fiction. We can not only access to confidential data, as illustrated by the syrian example, but it can also cause physical damage since the discovery in 2010 of Stuxnet, a real cyber weapon used against Iranian nuclear facilities. For Russian Eugene Kaspersky, cyber security specialist, countries should adopt treaty would create a cyber equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Authority, also reporting to the UN and with similar powers of inspection. "It would not eliminate cyber weapons completely, but it would improve the current situation a lot," he said.

 

 

A week in e-Democracy: the last 100 days

France, USA, Russia ... voters in these three countries are going to the polls this year. Is Internet will play a role i these elections?

The last 100 days
We enter the last hundred days of the electoral campaign for the first round of the French presidential election of April 22. A timing that will take us to June 17 for the second round of parliamentary elections, a long time to explore and analyze all that officials are imagined to mobilize voters online. Reuters published an interesting file (. Pdf, in French) questioning the role that Internet will play in this election.

French Socialist candidate adopts the Obama method
To mark the 100 days of the campaign,  the socialist candidate team sends e-mailing inviting French people to "become a volunteer for Francois Hollande," inspired by the successful campaign of Barack Obama in 2008. During the socialist primary, nearly 700,000 email addresses were collected before being qualified by a team of twenty people, late December. Today, they are asked if they wish to take action closer to their home, going door to door, putting up posters or organizing dinners apartment.

To be a hero of the web will be enough?
Ron Paul, "the young and the Web hero" as the title of an article in the French magazine "L'Express", failed to win the New Hampshire primary, in United States. Those were based on analysis of "AllFacebook.com," which pointed out that data from three different companies highlight this influence of the candidate on the web, to bet on his victory are for their expenses. But with over 20% of the vote in Iowa and in New Hampshire, the Texan remains a phenomenon to follow.

Opening of Putin's website campaign
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin launched his website campaign for the presidential election of  March 4. Putin2012.ru shows, of course, his biography and his proposals but offers a particular section, "Changing Russia together," where visitors can make their own proposals. It did not take more than a few hours, as reported by The New York Times, for the initiative turns against him, much comment inviting him to step down now.

A global study minimizes social networks influence
A study conducted in 31 countries by KPMG revealed that while 86% of people are connecting regularly on social networks, only one third admits to being influenced in their decisions. However, the study was conducted to measure the influence of advertising on the purchasing activities of users of social networks (. Pdf).

The 5 myths of Arab Spring
The Washington Post publishes a contribution of a professor at Stanford University, Fouad Ajami, who write about "the five myths surrounding the Arab Spring", a year after the revolution in Tunisia. Among them, the idea of ​​"Revolutions Facebook and Twitter." "Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian street vendorwho set himself ablaze, didn’t have a Facebook page. He had a sense of righteous anger and despair. We should rein in the technophilia: Internet penetration in the Arab world is still modest" Ajami writes, explaining that revolutions took place in a conventional manner. But his interpretation minimizes the crucial role in mobilizing people by sending photos and video during the events. Without Internet, it is likely that these revolutions were crushed without being aware of it, here in occident.

A week in e-Democracy

The year 2012 will be eventful, with a lot of anecdotes and experiences mixing politics and digital in France, in USA and other countries. Hence the idea to summarize weekly news on e-Democracy. The use of technology, from Twitter to social networking, via  location-based networks, web and mobile services will change the way we see the world and to influence the course of events.

The main news that impressed me this week:

 Happy New Year!
Impossible to miss the wishes of candidates for the French presidential election on Dailymotion. From the socialist François Hollande (100,000 views) to centrist François Bayrou (36,500 views), Eva Joly (32,500 views), Corinne Lepage ( (6000 views), Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (8000 views), Dominique de Villepin (25,000 views), Jean-Luc Mélanchon (42,000 views) or Marine Le Pen (46,000 views), spend all styles. The campaign team of the Left Front of Jean-Luc Mélanchon has done a pretty remarkable parody, " the true wishes of politicians . "

Access to the Internet is a Human Right?
No, access to the Internet is not a fundamental right, like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information, write Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet in an article published in The New York Times . "The Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition".

These foreign presidents addicted to Twitter
The French magazine "Nouvel Observateur" published an interesting article on the use of Twitter by Heads of State and Government in the world. Furthermore, it was by Twitter that Cristina Fernandez Kirchner ( @ CFKArgentina ) thanked "God and the Argentine people of the blessings received" after his operation and the announcement that she did not have a cancer. This article reminded us that it is through the same channel that Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president had sent a message of support to the argentine president.

The Facebook page of Nicolas Sarkozy comes to life
5 posts in a week is all that over the previous three months. The Facebook page of Nicolas Sarkozy (nearly 494,000 fans to date ) reminds us that we are entering an election year.

Right-wing activists leave Sarkozy
In France, Arnaud Dassier, one of the right "activists" the most active announced his support for the centrist Bayrou. In an interview, he explained his choice by the need to "open the locked political system that prevents the integration of different people, from civil society" and "reconcile the national representation with the forces of the country ". The same week, Pierre de la Coste, Chairman of the club Hyper Republic, published an open letter to his former cabinet colleague, Henri Guaino. He announced that he will vote "for the first and probably last time" for the socialist candidate in the second round of the presidential election if Nicolas Sarkozy is present.

United States also is in campaign
The campaign for the nomination of the Republican candidate who will face Barack Obama, really began with the Iowa caucuses, narrowly won by Mitt Romney. The popularity of the former Massachusetts governor is widely reported on the Internet. His Facebook page has well over 1, 2 million fans, far more than its main competitors. The breakthrough of former Senator Rick Santorum , came second, resulted in an increase in its visibility on the Web, but according to Socialbakers , which analyzed the Facebook candidate, it is Ron Paul who would win the onine electoral battle because he is the most efficient in mobilizing its supporters.