I’m taking a crack at liveblogging an event tonight [ed. -- now last night] at NYU featuring Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for the Obama campaign, in conversation with Ellen McGirt, senior writer at Fast Company and author of magazine’s April 2008 cover story “The Brand Called Obama.” Arun left his job as an adjunct film professor at NYU to produce video that pulls from public events, behind the scenes, and one-on-ones — unique creative content that populates BarackObama.com and a YouTube channel. Let’s get started.

Asked about the new media team, Arun describes at least 50 people crammed into one corner of an office building floor with with “pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall.” Arun says the new media team spends a fair amount of money, but they’re buying fishing poles rather than fish; the broadcast quality footage they capture, for example, can be used for advertising in addition to online video. Asked about past campaigns he tried working with, Arun says they saw media as “too precious” to take creative risks with.

Arun explains his hire by the campaign by saying ‘you can learn the politics. You can learn how to navigate these worlds. But you can’t really learn the trades very quickly.’ The campaign has been attracting successful people that way, he says, naming Facebook’s Chris Hughes, who came on to handle social-networking. Arun then screens a well-crafted mock movie trailer calling people to a rally in New York’s Washington Square Park that features Obama in slightly goofy situations. Ellen: “We’ve never seen anything like this before”:

Ellen asks if the technology was in place three years ago to make video like this. “The technology was there three years ago, but I don’t think the right audience was,” says Arun. Back then, he jokes, there were just six hundred of the same people commenting on political blogs and that’s it; online participation today spans a wider segment of the population.* Ellen ask how he managed to get approval for the trailer video from the campaign and the candidate. Arun laughs a bit nervously, “I don’t know if the candidate saw it,” but says that it made its way, he believes, to the level of campaign manager.

The next video was crafted to call people to the pre-Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, as, Arun says, showing organizational strength was the key to getting attention and momentum in that state. Ellen asks if there was a concern that Obama and guest attendee John Legend were the only African-Americans seen in the clip. Arun pointed to the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archives as the source of the overly white footage. (At the actual event, the video team had five cameras and five videographers in place capturing footage.):

Next video. An Iowa call-to-caucus piece, says Arun, is a campaign classic. It both asks Iowans to caucus for their particular candidate and educates voters on how to actually go through the confusing caucusing process. Both the Obama campaign and the Edwards campaign went the route of a dated instructional-style video, he says. (Arun praises the Hillary Clinton campaign’s call-to-caucus video which featured Bill Clinton eating a cheeseburger and saying something along the lines of “exercising is hard, but caucusing is easy.”):

It was the campaign’s “traditional media” team, says Arun, that whipped together a quick response to the Clinton campaign’s 3 a.m. phone call ad. But the new media team tracked down the young girl in the stock footage, Casey Knowles, an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. In the one-minute video, Casey deconstructs the techniques in the Clinton ad — the blue tint to the footage, the “scratchy voice” — and slams the “politics of fear.” An ad like that, says Arun, would never make on air, but works well online:

The candidate was in Terre Haute, Arun says, when the news broke that Obama had earlier made remarks in California concerning “bitter” Americans. Obama inserted a response to the incident in his Indiana speech. The new media team, says Arun, edited, packaged, and released the candidate’s own words within 19 minutes of the speech’s delivery. A lesson learned, says Arun, is that people are actually interested in the “sound blast,” and will watch long clips in their entirety:

He also cites Obama’s speech at their Chicago headquarters.The 14 minute clip shows the candidate addressing his staff, both in person and through a conference call (which creates a few minutes of less-than-thrilling footage when the call goes dead and Obama has to stall while it’s reconnected). It wasn’t deliberately shot low-fi for an extra dose of authenticity, Arun says, as some people suggested. There was no intention to create some sort of “Tanner 88″ moment. It was just, he says, that there was an intern manning the camera:

Asked by Emily about what an Obama administration might bring, Arun says that the role of video in an administration would be even more powerful than in a campaign. He mentions the broadcasting of health care meetings — creating a broader base of people who are able to keep an eye on the proceedings. The idea, Arun says, is not ‘telling people who tell people to tell people,’ but to use video to tell people directly. The role of video in governing, he says, is to achieve the goal of “cutting out the middleman.”

Q&A

Question: There’s a discontinuity in your work with high video quality and no sound mixing. Why?
Arun: We shoot as high quality as we can because it might be used for broadcast, but get used to it — a lot of the networks are going so broke that they’re getting rid of their “sound guys.”

Question: What role with user-generated content play in presidential campaigns?

Arun: Using voter-generated content while probably remain “an unrealized ideal.” Much of the content that gets sent to them is “a little strange.”

Question: Why is new media going to make young people come out and vote?

Arun: It isn’t. Barack Obama is what is going to make people come out and vote.

Question: If you embrace an interactive politics 2.0, how do you avoid politicizing governing?

Arun: I think we’re ready for 1.5. We’ll [ed. -- a clarification: "we" here is a reference to political campaigns in general, and to the tools that might come into common use -- not a reference to the Obama campaign in particular] have virtual townhalls, for sure.

* Updated to correct: The original line referenced political blogs; in making the joke, Arun was referencing hard-core blog commenters.

The European Union is a proto-democratic polity, focused on the city of Brussels, dispersed over 27 member states and 500 million citizens, based on a story of overcoming centuries of violence and held together by complex administrative procedures and a small number of Europeanised elites willing to invest time and effort in bridging the gaps that are still obvious.

Genuine European Union politics are limited to politicians, officials, and diplomats within the core EU institutions like the European Commission (the supranational political administration of the EU), the EU Council (where the 27 member states are represented), and the European Parliament, which has been newly elected in June and just re-started its activities.

Outside Brussels, these EU politics have always been low key, hardly noticed by anyone not involved in European administrative co-operation, EU-related lobbying, or rare transnational meetings of political associations with a European agenda. The best example was the European Parliament elections this year that passed almost unnoticed by the larger public.

In this centralised, Brussels-focused context, participation of individual citizens in EU politics was close to impossible. Yet, web 2.0 is offering new channels for involvement of ordinary citizens – and we are ready to use them.

When I say “we”, I am referring to a small but growing group of European citizens inside and outside Brussels using blogs, online social networks, and Twitter to communicate, discuss, and organise activities that are not born within the institutional setting of the EU – but still related to questions of pan-European interest.

Most of us are part of the Generation 2.0, but in the end this is more than a generational issue. We don’t want to accept the old top-down politics and we are trying to overcome a European perspective that doesn’t treat us as citizens but as simple beneficiaries of policies made in our so-called “best interest”.

Over the last year, there has been a rising amount of interaction between us, and especially the use of Twitter has finally brought some dynamics into EU politics that appear very static from an outsider perspective.

A good example was the European Parliament election night (7 June 2009): On that night, despite the lack of general interest in these elections, a significant number of people from most member states discussed the election results under the #eu09 and #ep09 hashtags (that a smaller circle of people like us had been using already before) in all major and many minor EU languages – still unthinkable at the 2004 elections.

What we see is the development of a slowly growing Euroblogosphere (summarised on the still developing platform bloggingportal.eu) complemented by a Eurotwittersphere that involves even more individuals (political citizens, journalists, scientists, EU officials, lobbyists, and politicians) who do not write blogs.

Together, we are trying to create a (hyper-)linked European public sphere, researching and spreading information that remained unnoticed so far, thereby creating publicly visible European debates that go beyond the old-style closed-door politics that still rule the Brussels world.

But I don’t want to create a false image:

These developments are still very young, they are not straightforward, and they include a very limited number of people that are already part of the Europeanised elites I have mentioned at the beginning of the article. We are starting what needs to become bigger, we are testing in how far modern technologies are able to spice up EU politics, and we are creating a basis that might be helpful in the future.

This is nothing but a beginning. What we will have to do is to figure out ways to get more citizens into the European democracy, extending our limited circle by creating communication networks and communities in which European politics can be both debated and influenced.

However, one of the major obstacles compared to the USA is the existence of 23 official languages within the European Union. Creating transnational and translingual debates around political processes – that in addition are also largely opaque and poorly communicated – under these conditions is not trivial; the evolution of common blogosphere hardly possible.

So we will have to find creative ideas and creative individuals to overcome these obstacles. But many of us are ready to accept the challenge, and already over the coming year I expect several initiatives in this regard.

From now on, I will use the possibilities of the Personal Democracy Forum blog to discuss with you such issues related to European politics 2.0; I will present my own ideas and the ideas of others, looking forward to input from you who are reading inside and outside Europe!

(The author is a Euroblogger writing about EU and European politics on his blog “Julien Frisch – Watching Europe”.)