And the MiCandidate saga rolls on. Just scant weeks before the election, we’re still waiting on answer to basic questions on its service. The price of the Pro package nose-dived. Mark wrote an excellent piece describing how the spiderweb of interactivity is being spun. What’s up with MiCandidate?
Inquiry and Response?
On MiCandidate’s supporting technology, I remain an unconvinced critic. The presentation at the MiCandidate launch on March 30th was scatty on details. For example at the presentation for bloggers, MiCandidate confirmed use a mixture of paid and unpaid people to set up the system, but were either unable or unwilling to give a breakdown of how many. You mean, you don’t know how many people are building MiCandidate? Alarm bells.
MiCandidate did confirm, however, that they were going to pursue High Potential Startup programme. They also confirmed that MiCandidate was built using both proprietary and open-source technology.
So, I bundled this and some other outstanding questions I had into a mail and sent it off to the MiCandidate team. They seemed ill-equipped and too disorganised to manage in-person questioning on their site, email could work. I wonder would the keepers at that gate be given the very same answers?
The mail, typos and all – sent on April 8th:
Hi X
I have some questions on the team and technology supporting MiCandidate that I hope you can answer.
I went to the launch last Monday, it was mentioned that MiCandidate uses a mix of Open Source and proprietary software. What Open Source products are being used in the MiCandidate project? Particulary on website, data warehousing and management and backoffice.
What licenses are these Open Sources products used under?
How many people work on the MiCandidate technical team? How has the team evolved over the lifetime of the project?
How many people work in the MiCandidate organisation? Are these people paid employees, unpaid unemployees, paid or unpaid interns and/or volunteers? Can I get a breakdown on these numbers if they work on sales, technical and if any other teams – what teams?
Have any of people working in MiCandidate organisation from top to bottom been members of political parties? And if so what parties and what team (technical/sales etc) do they work on?
What is the Service Level Agreement that MiCandidate is operating under with its partner news organisations? So if MiCandidate goes down, what expectation on responsiveness/service does the news organisation have?
How many candidates have asked to have their data removed by MiCandidate already? What parties were they from? Were any of these independent candidates?
MiCandidate is looking for funding as a growth startup. What organisations has MiCandidate applied to and under what scheme? What growth projections does MiCandidate forsee as part of its business plans submitted to these scheme/s? Where does MiCandidate see this growth come from?
Kind Regards,
Alexia Golez
I sent the mail to a member of the MiCandidate press team that had managed the blogger launch. A couple of days past and I failed to receive an acknowledgment of receipt of the mail. I forwarded the mail then to another member of the MiCandidate press team. This was April 10th.
On April 15th, I receive the following response from recipient 2:
Hi Alexia,
Thank you for your email. I will respond as soon as I can, a lot of these questions in particular in relation to the technical aspect of the website is outside my remit.
Apologies for the delay,
Best Regards,
X
This email response was only prompted after I Tweeted at MiCandidate.
I have yet to receive a response to my questions. And as far as their press contacts are concerned anything technical falls outside of their remit. Shush, let’s not mention that their product is a website. It might scare them.
The funny thing is that MiCandidate sends its sales people out to sell their product without the requisite technical knowledge to answer questions on their offerings. At the Fine Gael Ard Fheis on April 4th, I asked some techie questions to their t-shirted salesbots. They were at first happy to answer my question, until they realised I knew more about technology than they did and then The Fear struck them. They redirected me to the site and asked me to email MiCandidate if I had queries. If the policy is not to answer technical questions, why are they referring me to contact MiCandidate?
Now I realise that this was perhaps a little unfair on the young salesbots, but you’d expect them to at least have one techie person on hand to answer queries. Nope. Zip. Zilch. It seems if you do have questions on the technology behind it, you had better hang onto them because MiCandidate are not for answering. Now, they could cite the privilege but that would be utter horseshit. I’m not looking for peeks at database schemas or at their class diagrams, but basic technical questions.
I wonder how MiCandidate fields questions from administrators of startup programmes and interested investors. If their confusion, lack of on-the-spot answers and general disorganisation during public demos is anything to go by, they’re screwed.
But sure, the MiCandidate team has a sense of humour. My inquiries on their tardy interactivity means I’m a groupie. More a taunt, wouldn’t you think?
For an organisation hell-bent on helping to make dissemination of information to the public fast and easy using technology, it seems like a contradiction in terms. In the meantime, the MiCandidate bus merrily rolled on.
I followed their Twitter stream for a little longer until it turned into a dumping stream for every time a candidate’s profile was updated. The Twitter equivalent of shouting every syllable in conversation with someone at the top of your voice. And done slowly. Chinese torture has nothing on them. Now the account has turned into a glorified stat-whoring mechanism for data. All without really telling me about MiCandidate.
It’s quite obvious that MiCandidate does not understand Twitter. That’s kind of scary for a company that’s promising to simplify connecting with people using social media and Twitter, right? For an organisation that hopes to serve Obama juice in the run up to the elections. More like Kool-Aid.
The MiCandidate Disconnect
Like many First World economies, Ireland’s politicians have a fundamental disconnect with a lot of younger voters. For many, our grandparents and great-grandparents were parts of dyed-in-the-wool FFers/FGers etc etc. Cut my arm off, I bleed for the party. Nowadays, we don’t live on bread and Jesus alone. Our parishes are not the boundaries of our existence. Outside of the usual political animals, older people habitually follow their allegiances and the young are apathetic. No surprise here. But it’s those same voters that the parties want. People with mortgages, kids, cars, bills. And perhaps with voting cards.
The biggest issue I have with MiCandidate is that it is selling interactivity without engaging in the right places. It’s operating in a silo. CandidateWatch has done a much better job of connecting European candidates to voters by creating an interactive question and answer space. Could MiCandidate with all of its promises on baking in interactivity ever deliver this level of to-and fro-ing?
Think about it for a second. Politicians or rather their team fill in details into the MiCandidate site. Profiles are updated. Browsers can the interact with them. I’m being generous using the word interact here because browsers really can’t interact.
Browsers can search by location and drill down to candidate profiles. Much of which are empty. Now, MiCandidate could argue that it’s up to each candidate to fill out their pages, but what’s the point in showing phantom pages at all? How much extra am I learning about candidate Y whose page just tell me that he is running in my ward/constitency?
On MiCandidate, candidates’ blogs are not real blogs. The information is static and there’s no way I can leave a comment on a post of theirs. Basic terminology fail. A big black mark from an organisation that has appointed itself as an advocate on technology and is promising to simplify the interactive story online, by funnily enough, making it impossible to react to candidates content on their site.
Browsers are offered the opportunity to donate (that in itself being a discussion point). Oh and the candidates can message supporters or people that sign up for updates. Is this the Brand New World of political interactivity online? Those ringtone lines and sexy premium numbers also feature text updates. Is the Crazy Frog, the secret paradigm that MiCandidate is trying to emulate?
Outside of real political animals who already have their minds made up on their voting strategy, who is it that MiCandidate is actually helping candidates to target and interact with? How likely is it that browsers will specifically go to MiCandidate to look up profiles?
MiCandidate could respond with the argument that they are serving up data to the external sites that will be heavy clickfalls during the election furor. But just taking Ireland as an example, neither RTE or the Irish Times is using MiCandidate after previous assertions by MiCandidate that the deal was all but done. Yes, the Indo is using MiCandidate through a served frame version of the site.
The problem is that MiCandidate is operating in the wrong model. It’s a portal that serves data up to external sites through frames that sit on news and TV broadcasters sites like satellites. Instead, it should be a platform. It should try and plum the data being created by candidates on their presences and marry that with on-site profiles and push this out.
By being a platform, MiCandidate could have created an API and let newspapers, TV channels, you and I all consume data from candidates profiles and presences where-ever they are. Real interactivity and information propagation begins by freeing up access to data and encouraging web-savvy people to build their own DIY applications. How much cheaper would development have been? Instead they took the Web 1.0, grey-haired approach to it. Build a portal. Wait for people to browse. I’d love to peek at their visitor stats.
Still Waiting
As of May 26th, I’m still waiting for MiCandidate to get back to me. I’m sure my mails are very important to them if only to point out issues or talking points that they’d rather not discuss and prefer to stonewall on. Almost three months later and they’ve fobbed me off with the equivalent of an answering machine message.
Were I a candidate that had forked out for a subscription there I’d be spitting bricks. But then MiCandidate are selling features like blogs that don’t have the basic characteristics of blogs (comments) to a market that they themselves acknowledge may not be most technically literate. This is scary, right? And they are courting a place at the table of High Potential Startups too?
Looking for interactivity with candidates, search out their blogs and Twitter accounts. Find a conduit for response. Pure and simple. MiCandidate needs a lesson in interactivity in its own DNA, before it can even begin to look about adding interactive features for its customers.
