Alexia Golez

Eagle-eyed Steph spotted the Green Party advertising for a ‘New Media Officer-Graphic Designer’. From the job spec it seems that they are looking for one person to give their site and online presence an Extreme Makeover. And in less than 9 months too.

This role carries responsibility for:

• Designing on- and offline material, including: web sites, flyers, posters, booklets, newsletters, etc.
• Building systems and tools that will allow us to better contact voters, mobilise supporters and fundraise online

Is this you?

• You have relevant qualifications and experience and possess excellent IT and communications skills.
• Your attributes include strong organisation skills and an ability to meet tight deadlines
• You are a team player, committed to Green Party values and would relish the opportunity to work with us

Skills and experience

• At least two years of web and graphic design experience
• Experience of managing complicated web projects
• Very good knowledge of CSS, Javascript and Content Management Systems (including eZ Publish and wordpress)
• Experience of working with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and other open source software components
• Thorough understanding of web2.0 technologies and tools (social-networking, blogs, wikis, flickr, youtube, twitter, folksonomy, etc)
• Excellent graphic design skills and proven experience with Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, In Design and Dreamweaver in particular) and Quark XPress
• Interest in new media, and ability to rapidly get to grips with new technologies
• Training Party staff, elected representatives and election candidates

Nice to see them reference Flickr, Twitter and ’social-networking’. About time they they kick their present site to kerb. Just compare the Green Party site to that of its left cousin, the Labour Party. Be careful not to browse the Green Party too long or your eyes might bleed.

Here’s what the Green Party need to do:

Centralise blogging efforts

Install Wordpress MU and get all Green Party elected officials to use it. Using Blogspot is unprofessional  even for small business, so why the hell are politicians still using it to sell their policies for national governance? Surely that’s the most important business of all.

The Green Party are well ahead of the some other major parties when it comes to blogging.  For example,  look at Ciarán Cuffe. We’ll just skip past Gormley’s site now. * whistles *  Eamon’s is just a placeholder too. It’s all a bit sad coming from a Minister with responsibility for Communications. Maybe he’s cognescient of the stress that heavy-weight sites can put on 56.6 kbps modems.

Blogging and responding to commenters is the cheapest way (in time and effort) to connect with a lot of people and build policy based on feedback. One has to smile at Kenny’s town hall tour of the country. Why is this such a big effort? Someone could do this day in and day out on a blog. A blog is just that opportunity.

Set up Twitter accounts for their elected officials and actually get them using it

As Barack Obama’s Twitter presence demonstrates, there’s an appetite for political discourse online. Yes, in some ways it’s a campaign where subscribing to him is like wearing a  button, but pushing past that it’s an interesting example of political activism. Something that any political party wanting to make an impact ought to foster.

Where Obama is going wrong, is that his staff are Twittering for him. Yes, he’s the leader-apparent of the USA, but wouldn’t it be nice to see him Twitter? Extrapolating this to the Irish scene, if Greens want to leverage Twitter then simply signing up for an account and letting Joe Soap in constituency office tweet about local clinic hours, it will not wash. People do not want to be plamásed off with some party hack in the back office. Real voices speak to people.

It all boils down to education, education, education for the party.  Introduce members  that are fairly tech-literate, ideally from all levels of the org, to new technologies. Use them to seed interest, evangelise and educate their peers. Technology doesn’t need to be a barrier.

Divide up the work and don’t go for a yellow pack solution

For best of breed design work sometimes you need to contract in specialists. I’d recommend whomever is forging the Green digital policy, to divide up up the work. The ad above specifically calls out for a graphic designer. Someone with the design chuzpah. While there are some design and development genii out there, one invarably finds that designers are look and feel, whereas developers CSS and SQL. Graphics designers * and * developers usually team up on projects. There are full-service designers out there, but the rockstars are generally few and far between.

For faster traction, maybe the Greens ought to divide and conquer the problem. Hire that New Media Officer and use him to coordinate handoff of design work to a web designer and perhaps keep coding in-house. Depending on the magnitude of work that needs to be done, maybe the Greens ought to be hiring two people. A dedicated designer and a developer. The new media hat is up for grabs between the pair of them.

Looking at the skills breakdown they seem to throwing everything web and design into a single pot and asking for a single person to strategise and deliver on it in just 9 months. I’d be interested in seeing the remuneration package on offer.