Focus Group Meeting
„Exchange between Europe and North Africa“
18 - 19 October 2014 in Vienna, Austria
Minutes of the Web 2.0 interest group:
Speakol, Globalmeter and other web applications
Impact of those tools. Monitoring of a success. An Evaluation.
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There is a quantitative part – how many people visited website etc. – which
could be easily covered. However maybe more important is the intangible
effect, which is hard to be quantified.
Approach of the authors: It’s hard to solve all the problems and have a really
broad impact. Important is to try at least something. Therefor they are not
bothering with an evaluation.
Two possible quantitative outcomes of evaluation
o Small numbers of people visiting website – how much of them really do
something then?
o Big numbers – see above.
o Possibility of correlation between activity on the web and in the real
world is hard to be done.
How many people does the campaign reach? Are they useful for what we
want?
o Again we’ve agreed that it’s hard to measure. It’s simply one of the
legitimate tool for civic education however is important to be aware of
its limits (access to the internet, real impact, you can’t reach hard to
reach group via internet, etc.).
Applications for surveys – you can ask people in the streets with your phone;
including position.
Dignity and personal “safety”
§ How does it work at Speakol?
1) You create your own debate – put down your own question.
2) You have to moderate it then – responsibility of the one who created it; he
is moderating and setting the rules. There is absolutely no censorship.
§ All is the policy of the creator of the question.
§ He could take something off – nobody could see what was erased.
§ Could be good to see the track/log and to write down the reason of
deleting…report - notification system.
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It’s good to have freedom at internet, but transparency also is necessary
aspect. For example to avoid a manipulation.
You could try to prevent the abuse (false users, paid contributions) but it still
could happened.
o You have to count on with this hidden manipulation.
o Should be put more effort in information and education about those
abuse and possibilities.
On the other hand it has to be easy to contribute. Not to many
gates/obstacles…
o People like that it is easy and easily accessible – sexy…
Why don’t they have Angela meter in Germany?
o A broad discussion in our group. Most importantly there are media
doing this job and also Germans don’t want to scare politicians doing
their job. They are trying to find more cooperative approach instead of
“we and they” approach.
Another topics we opened in discussion:
§ Are there some areas of CE which are not covered by social media?
§ Expand to another countries and do the training – the tools mentioned above.
§ Use of “IBM jam” platform – more by subscription + have some policy
recommendation on-line instead of meeting face to face.
§ Classification of Web 2.0
§ Participatory evaluation tool
§ Stakeholders sit altogether: what would be success and then – they have to
define it together. After obtaining data they meet together and discussed the
data, so it’s not just one-side evaluation.
o You collect the data, but you still check with your stakeholders and
have their perspectives.
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