Lessons Learned from the Italian 10Questions

In this post, Italian media consultant Antonella Napolitano summarizes her experience with 10domande, a project similar to our own 10Questions, an online-only debate in which voters uploaded video questions to the presidential candidates, and the public voted on their favorites (if you need a reminder of what 10Questions was all about, check out our summary of the project).

-The Editors

My name is Antonella Napolitano, and I am a media consultant. Here’s my profile on PDF community. Currently I work for Elastic, a social media company located in Rome, Italy.

From day one I’ve considered myself a fan of techPresident and everything Personal Democracy Forum has been doing.

So when I first heard of 10Questions, I was very excited and started talking about it both online and to my company. We grew enthusiastic and when new elections were suddenly called in Italy we decided to try to something like that of our own. We immediately wrote to 10Questions co-founder David Colarusso and to techPresident’s staff to tell them about it and to ask them to be our sponsor.

We acknowledged from the start that such a project would be a challenge, as in Italy the political and technological situation is very different from the US. In 2007 the National Report on the State of the Media in Italy showed that 45.3% of the Italian population uses the Internet (38.3% if we consider people who use it at least three times a week). There are still gaps due to the digital divide in some parts of the country, but one of the most important problems is the lack of media literacy.

The media literacy gap also exists in the politicians’ use of the web: it is slowly growing but mostly during the campaigns. Moreover the candidates are not familiar with new technologies and do not seem to understand the chance provided by the Internet to talk to citizens, build communities and to help consensus grow.

For those and other reasons we decided to look for a sponsor with more credibility and visibility, and we found it when Il Sole24ore, one of the most important Italian newspapers, agreed to host 10domande on its website. The paper, which is mainly focused on economics, also publishes a weekly magazine called “Nova24”, which is the leading magazine on science and technology in Italy. Of course we called the project 10domande, Italian for 10Questions! :)

10 domande

We had little time both to build the website and run the project, so the first round lasted 20 days and the second one a couple of weeks, ending right before election day.

We started to explain the project to our friends and in our networks and some blogs started to write about it. The conversations in the blogosphere spread and helped us fix problems and gave us advice about the voting system.

In the first weeks most of the questions were tech-related and that gave rise to doubts about “10domande” being too focused on these kinds of questions, which clearly weren’t at the core of any candidate’s political program. Later, as the conversation spread, more people asked more kinds of questions. As you can see from the list below, except for the first one, techie questions did not end up being the most voted-for.

At the end of the first round we had 43 questions and 4059 votes – not bad!

These are “our” 10 questions:

• High-speed Internet for everyone
• Civil rights for non-married couples (for both heterosexuals and homosexuals)
• The truth about terrorist bloodsheds (we had several of them in the 70s: bombs, murder of politicians and judges – many documents about the investigation are not available as they are considered confidential)
• Eco-sustainability
• Equal rights for women
• Transparency
• Right to education for every child, beginning from kindergarten
• Whether we should pay a subscription fee for RAI, the Italian public broadcasting service, which includes three tv channels (explanation: now RAI gets more money from advertisements than from the subscription fee, which is mandatory for everyone. The channels are so widely spread that RAI is now quite similar to commercial channels.)
• Funding research at universities
• Expenses deduction from taxes for people with children

Five candidates out of eleven answered. A couple of them were well-known politicians and both of them are leaders of small parties. Of the two main candidates, Walter Veltroni (PD – center-left) answered three questions out of ten during a videochat hosted by his party’s web-tv, while Silvio Berlusconi (PDL – center-right) – who eventually won the elections – did not answer.

After 10domande: what’s next

Overall I think it’s been a good start, considering the premises.

10domande was an experiment, the first of this kind, and in some way it set an example by helping us better understand the scenario and what to do next (by “us” I mean both the people who worked at the project and others in the space; we were invited to talk about the project during a workshop at the University of Urbino, which has one of the leading media departments in Italy). We realize that this kind of participatory project where there is no control of the final output can create a problem for both politicians and mainstream media: the newspaper staff did not know how to interact with the questions, as none of them were specifically related to economy. Additionally, we ended up having no visibility outside the web and we are pretty sure that the attention we got from candidates was due to the fact that 10domande was backed by an important newspaper.

The 10domande project confirmed for us what we thought about the candidates’ use of the Internet: they still don’t know how to use it and how to benefit from it — by talking to the people who will decide whether to vote for them or not. They still communicate entirely using the mainstream media. Plus, they had no staff to help with this kind of thing; to record their responses on video, we actually had to bring a video camera to their offices or events they were attending and record them ourselves.

On the plus side, we also could see how much people care about and want to participate in political life, even though we’re just starting to explore how the web can be used effectively. For example, we received several emails from people asking us if they could write their questions because they did not have a way to record them (these came mostly from older voters).

It is not only a matter of time, of course, but I am pretty confident that things will be very different in the next campaign.