Project case study

The 2020 Vision

A forum for debate

Summary

Website to encourage political discussion that caused quite a stir and grabbed a lot of headlines

Objective

Ex-UK-ministers Charles Clarke MP and Alan Milburn MP commissioned a website that was to act as a catalyst for debate about suitable progressive policies for Labour that would address the challenges facing the UK in the coming years. Inevitably, because they tried to address questions of direction post-Tony Blair it was also seen as a challenge to Labour’s next leader, our new Prime Minister Gordon Brown and that’s what the media seized upon.

The intention was to stimulate an open discussion and also draw together relevant material, so there were blogs for comments, a forum for discussions, a mailing list to be kept up to date, an events calendar to see what’s going on, a collection of links to related sites, speeches and recent articles in the news. This was all rolled out in two stages and the site got an awful lot of media coverage for its launch - coverage on all major news channels in the UK, plus featured on Newsnight where Jeremy Paxman interviewed the 2 MPs about their intentions.

Solution

At BridgingUnit we’re fairly apolitical and non-partisan in our views but believe that encouraging discussion about the things that effect our lives is a good thing and saw this as a way of helping to promote bottom-up participation.

We produced an identity for the site that included a logotype, typeface and colour-scheme. The logo was designed to be open, progressive and modern and was set in lower-case type to be in tune with contemporary sensibilities that are less formal. After this a set of templates were designed to extend this aesthetic to the various page types within the site using a flexible grid layout. These were integrated into the content management system (expressionengine) which was chosen for its robustness and versatility and because it had discussion forum software that could be easily and seemlessly incorporated into the site. Premasagar from Dharmafly was kind enough to provide a second pair of eyes on the design we produced. Icons in the forum came from the Chameleon collection from Dan Cederholm because they perfectly complemented the look we were trying to achieve.

BridgingUnit provided support to the site for a period after launch and helped appoint an editor to manage the content of the site on a day to day basis. The CMS allowed him and a moderator to easily update things and to keep an eye on discussions. The editor and moderator were both provided with training so that they didn’t need to rely on us, though we were on-call and available if needed.

What they said

“Aidann Bowley's work in setting up www.the2020vision.co.uk was outstanding and a credit to his professionalism and imagination. He worked very well with us as clients and we believe that the final product was of the highest quality”
Charles Clarke MP

Client

The 2020 Vision

Sector

Political

Date

February 2007 - June 2007

Services provided

Status

Offline