falklueke.com

Dear readers/subscribers. Some of you might miss updates, most of you won’t even have noticed yet. I never ran this blog on a regular basis, my time schedule never allowed me to do.

With the beginning of february, I joined the german consumer protection federal organisation (verbraucherzentrale bundesverband), where I work as a policy officer on consumer rights in the digital world. A nice project with very nice people and, what I like the most, a still fast developing environment. I joined due to my very personal wish of working more in-depth on several topics I dealt with over the past years (I don’t have to be that angry about print media management not understanding even the basics of the net after 10 yrs anymore).

Thanks for your patience and your appreciation. A new and just started project sometimes needs more hands-on hours than you might expect before. In the end it hopefully will be successful and bring the best for all of you.

Joe Trippi, one of the most highly reputated online campaigners on earth, asks whether it’s time to establish an equivalent of my.barackobama.com after he succeeded in the US presidential election: a platform my.whitehouse.gov to get people involved into the needs and deeds of the next president of the United States.

I think this is a very nice idea, but I’d recommend to go one step further: my.whitehouse.gov for US citizens, and your.whitehouse.gov for all those who are affected or interested in the US presidents policy making but not being citizens of the United States of America. Never forget: the president of the USA is not only important to US citizens. He also plays a political role on world level.

The world is looking on the United States today: the results of todays US presidential election will surely lead to one thing - a new president of one of the most important, maybe politically still the most important country on earth.

So it’s time to think about the man who’s going to leave the White House now. What do the eight years of George Walker Bush being in charge leave behind for the rest of the world?

First of all, the end of the Bush administration with all it’s failed foreign policies is a broadly welcomed day. Being the winning loser of the first election in 2000 against Al Gore, Bush with his legendary hands-on-anti-intellectualism showed the world what happens, if you give someone a knife without telling him that it’s a dual use good. You can slice bread with it or you can slice people. Regarding the use of knives, there was not much bread in Bushs two terms. Instead of making the world a more safe, more human rights respecting, less problematic and a more free place, he managed to weaken security, causing and awaking strong anti-americanism not only in the countries he attacked. Bush did more for dictatorships around the globe than most dictators do. Maybe he did even have the right opinion (democracy is good, dictatorship is bad, the poor and starving deserve a better life and so on), but his deeds are what he has to be measured on.

Second, no one will miss Bush. The firebrand rhetorics of non-intellectual missionary quality, combined with the inability to interact seriously on international level - which would have meant i. e. to accept negotiations on eye level even though the partners might appear weaker in some way.

Third but nonetheless important, Bush failed on one of the most crucial (no, not crusadial)  issues: finding new approaches to promote democracy and equality in the critical regions of Africa and Asia. Bushs doctrine based on the main power the US without doubts can rely on: geostrategic military power. There’s no place on earth a US president could not reach with military power.  But there is more in the toolbox of politics than just brute force. We got to hope his successor will try out some more and maybe even international instruments. Even though it’s clear that the more the US play on international levels the involvement of countries will be enforced which sat in their couches until now. But in fact, it would have been stupid to accompany the misleading adventures of Bush.

Expectations are high - on both, the electorate and the upcoming president - and low, compared to Bushs political performance. Bushs burdens are heavy weighted, but it’s not impossible to smooth his failures out. You just gotta belive. And by the way: thank you for nothing, Mr. Bush.

Today, I attended the speech of Barack Obama at Street of the 17th of June/Siegessäule. As I did, another estimated 200.000 people came to hear Obama speak. On my way back, on an escalator at central station, I was asked by two nice elderly US citizens why I’ve been there since they could simply not understand what’s on a u.s. presidential candidate so interesting to so many people here.

My answer was just half of the truth, I have to admit. I said that I studied political science and one of my main subjects was political communication. I was interested in the setting, the scenery and the speech of a presidential candidate abroad. But thinking about it later, I have to add some more remarks (even though this post is going to have some lengths). Continue Reading »

With Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org, one of Germanys leading bloggers, I published a short study on Politics and the Web 2.0 in Germany (PDF, german) today.

Our key findings were: German politicians and parties are yet unable to adapt online campaigning techniques such as established in the US or France for example. Some hope seems to lie in YouTube activities, but neither none of the parties nor the leading politicians has a MySpace profile. Some party groups do exist on StudiVZ, the leading german facebook copycat, and on Facebook itself.

If you are interested, I could translate some more of the findings. Leave a comment and I will try.

In Europe, the presidential campaign is widely noticed. Since most of the population shook it’s head over the Bush ./. Gore fiasco in 2000, was pretty upset and astonished by the re-election of “Cowboy George” (god damn, he lied on iraq, promotes only the interest of the wealthy oil and ammo companies - that’s the way he’s seen in Europe), it became expecting very much from Barack Obama.

He’s smart, he’s black, he’s the most left candidate in the american political spectrum. Europeans were amazed, even though the emptiness of the “Change” rhetorics was critisized as some kind of wildcard-politics.

Now Obama filled some of the empty spaces in his political program. And Europeans are irritated and disgusted by it. There’s no country in Europe having gun laws like the US and there’s no country in Europe having violent crime rates as the US has (within the EU at least). Obama aims at the White House, seems to flip flop towards the so-called election deciding center, the volatile voters. It’s a clear political chess move: John McCain is not able to counter it by aiming at those who favor stricter gun control laws. But it seems to be strange to all those who expected Obama to be a liberal in the european meaning.

Politics all over the world will be widely affected by the outcome of the presidential election. But just a very small group of estimated 50% of the americans have a vote on this issue. The President of the United States of America is the leader of the worlds largest, structural and cultural well-established democracy. But due to that, he’s ruling not only between Hawaii and New Haven.

It’s time to have a direct vote on the general secretary of the UN. Then, the US citizens would be able to have their president again without so much interest from all over the world. And the europeans would not be surprised anymore by finding out that US politicians turn out to be US politicians.

Everything seems to be social. We have OpenSocial, CorporateSocialResponsibility, SocialNetworks, Social Democrats (diminishing) and Social Welfare (diminishing, too).

I’ve been to SocialCamp in Berlin this weekend (my now main employer newthinking communications was one of the co-hosts). Two days with the aim to find out which web 2.0 techniques may work for the purposes of nonprofits and non-governmental organisations. And two days full of talks, discussions and politics.

Some people from NGOs turned out to be great and very interested in using the web as their platform, from call-to-action to (in Germany still tough) web based fundraising solutions. Some so called social entrepreneurs were on stage and some of them were more or less deterrently in their concepts, behaviours and interests.

It’s always a bit tricky when it comes to politics. I’m convinced that you got to deal with reality when trying to change the world in the direction you’d like to see it more than with utopian visions. So I was a little bit undiplomatic sometimes, I guess, demanding people first to inform themselves and judging later. I’m sorry if I was rude.

All in all, it was a good weekend with a lot of nice people from different corners of the field of the more or less social anything. Hope to meet some of you guys again, soon. Thanks!

It’s football season in Europe again. Not american football, it’s the real football (some people call it “soccer” and think it’s a sport only played by women such as Mia Hamm). Two days ago the European Championship Euro 2008 in Switzerland and Austria began.

Football is the most political game in Europe. If you think of matches like Netherlands - Germany with the dutch player (and now famous coach) Frank Rijkaard spitting on Rudi Völler, matches between Ireland, Scotland or Wales and England, Italy and France or Croatia and it’s neighbours. And of course there is Germany - Poland. Yesterday, in the evening, Germany shot two goals against a not bad but very defensive playing polish squad. It’s hard to imagine what this match means to germans and polish people, since the polish are the underdogs (in the long history of results, there is no win for the polish team against germany yet) but always capable to beat the germans.

There are many ties between both countries. One of the strongest is the german team: 3 out of 23 german players have polish roots (and I guess it’s about half of the team with some kind of ‘international background’). And it was one of them, Lukas Podolski, netting twice against the neighbours squad last evening.

Before the match some yellow press papers on both sides of the river Oder/Odra were trying to fuel the flames a little bit. But in fact, the stereotypes begin to disappear. Poland and Germany are neither rivals (even though some in Poland would like to see it that way) nor is Poland just a minor partner of the economic strong central european hegemon. Even though there are many cultural differences besides language, i. e. the german way of being liberal-antinationalists without caring much about sovereignity on the surface, which differs a lot to the polish proudness of being a real sovereign state for the first time in many years, it’s interesting to see what happens.

Poland is still transforming quite fast. After decades of being deterred behind the iron curtain, of anti-soviet-communism mainly organised in, by or around the influential catholic church, polish youth is leaving it’s country in masses. Personally, I don’t know any other countries young population to travel around that much, to learn so many languages, to be so straight forward looking to job and business opportunities. Unlinke the saturated german young population, many polish are studying or working abroad, and when/if they return some day, it’s effects on polish society will be much larger than having once again lost against Germany in a football match.

The german Chaos Computer Club got some very benevolent media coverage during the last days. The Hackers club with more than quarter of a century of history is going popular while topics like data retention, fingerprints, cctv and other surveillance technics as well as voting computers are earning increasing attentiveness. It’s been a long debate among german hackers whether they should do public lobbying for or against anything.

During the past two years the CCC was appearing in the media, in the constitutional court, in the parliaments committees. The hackers have, while a lot of them still prefers to stay in the dark nevertheless, made a decision to use the system which is using the technology hackers strongly believe to be the better experts in. Well, expertise is nothing bad. But it will be very interesting for how long their public engagement will last.

You can’t imagine how a paragraph like this feels in Germany:

We recently got an alert from the Frank Lautenberg Senate campaign announcing the creation of an “Action Center” on their website, but were disappointed to see that it’s the same web 1.0 approach: tell-a-friend, sign-a-petition, make-a-donation (while we collect your email addresses). (Techpresident.com)

I do not know any german politicians web site having those three elements implemented in a way it works. Even though you won’t believe it. Feeling least developed.