Report on the National Capital FreeNet All Candidates' Meeting
for Federal Election 1993

by Richard P. Taylor

The 1993 Federal Election presented a major challenge to the
National Capital FreeNet and the Victoria Freenet. Both
organizations had recently started up and had a small but rapidly
growing membership. We knew that during the election, the political
parties and the candidates would want to distribute a lot of
information to voters. One of the main goals of Freenets is to make
this kind of communication work in BOTH directions. The challenge
was to show how Freenets could enhance democracy by promoting two-
way communications between candidates and voters.

The concept which we used from the beginning (the idea was first
discussed in the Spring of 1993) was based on the model of an all
candidates' meeting. In a live all candidates' meeting, each
candidate is allowed to begin with a prepared statement, then there
is an opportunity for voters in the audience to pose questions to
one or more of the candidates. In the Freenet format, the prepared
statements were simulated by giving each candidate a menu item
where he/she could post information; the question and answer
session was simulated by a newsgroup. This concept was expanded to
include information areas for the federal political parties, a
national debate area (newsgroup), information about the local
ridings, and information about the election process.

The NCF All Candidates' Meeting depended on the work of a lot of
volunteers. I would like to publicly thank the following people for
their efforts:

Julie Chahal        Ian Clysdale        Nadia Diakun-Thibault
James Dick          Nita Dunn           Jocelyn Ferguson (Jo)
Jeff Goddard        William Grant       Doug Hewko
Michael M.Y. Hui    Peter McPhee        Robert Rattey
Al Seaman           Sandy Shaw          Christopher Studholme    
Warren Thorngate    Jean Wilmot         

These people gathered and formatted information, prepared menus,
drew character-based maps of the ridings, contacted and nagged
candidates and political parties, gave demonstrations and wrote
publicity material. Please accept my apologies if I didn't mention
your name and contribution; this was a very loosely organized
group, with a focus on getting the work done, rather than holding
a lot of organizational meetings. It is worth noting that the main
meeting of this group took place over the FreeNet, not in person.

The All Candidates' Meeting also had the cooperation of a number of
other groups. The Victoria Freenet worked with us to share
information of national interest, and we were very happy to be able
to announce a truly National debate area: a newsgroup shared
between the two Freenets. For publicity, the Ottawa Citizen ran a
couple of articles and shared their Riding Profiles with us; the
Ottawa Sun and the Globe and Mail also ran articles, and both CHEZ
FM and the CBC broadcast interviews with the organizers.

During the election campaign in October 1993, the two debate
newsgroups (national and local issues) attracted a total of more
than 680 postings. Towards the end of the campaign we gathered some
usage statistics and found that about 200 users per day were
reading the postings and newsgroups. Unfortunately, only five
candidates became registered users and participated in these
debates. By the end of the campaign, most of the major and many of
the minor political parties (a total of eight parties) posted
platform information. Information was posted about 14 local
ridings.

Thus, we were successful in providing useful information to voters
and in providing a forum for exchanging opinions, but we failed to
achieve the two-way communication between candidates and voters
that we had hoped for.

What have we learned from this experience? It turned out to be a
lot harder than we expected to convince politicians to use the
Freenet. Most of them were not familiar with computers and were
reluctant to try a new technique during a short and intensely busy
campaign. Yet it was difficult to get the attention of the
politicians before the election was called. We need to work
steadily at breaking down these barriers and show politicians how
to use the FreeNet throughout their time in office.

We must also recognize that despite the phenomenal growth of the
National Capital FreeNet, our members still represent a small
minority of voters. In order to change this, and for the FreeNet to
become truly a public forum, we must concentrate on attracting new
users, providing public access terminals, and making FreeNet access
as quick, as easy and as "friendly" as possible for people who are
not familiar with computers. Those are our challenges for the
future.