Sitting in the hall of the fantastically grand East Wintergarden in London’s Canary Wharf this Saturday, I couldn’t help but feel optimistic about Labour’s online future. I wrote of Labour’s failings back in early October in a Progress article ‘Relaunch required’, where I warned that if we didn’t start to embrace online campaigning effectively, we would enter an election cycle under-prepared. Coincidentally or not, a flurry of activity has happened since, and a wholesale cultural change is now underway.

The masterstroke, which turned controversial at times, was the informal appointment of Derek Draper to lead the charge in creating LabourList – the party’s new centre of gravity on the web. LabourList is a group blog of sorts, which brings together party activists on all levels from parliamentary candidates across the country to the most senior cabinet ministers, and invites Labour-minded people to discuss the issues. Regardless of your personal opinion of Derek Draper and mine has changed for the better, he is the only person currently able to bring people across the party together in a single online venue (a “broadband church” in his own words).

There has also been a series of ‘new media breakfasts’ hosted by Labour headquarters and chaired by Derek, inviting a number of people to hear from experts and discuss the challenges of campaigning online. Further meetings like this will keep the issue in the air, exactly where it should be. Saturday’s Progress conference ‘Labour 2.0: campaigning for the net generation’ answered my calls in October for a Labour conference on the issue, and was by all accounts, a big success.

In my October piece, I advocated for the formation of an advisory board of sorts, which would advise internal decision-makers, and although I still think there is merit in this idea should it be executed well, the last four months of community-based activity has shown that actually, new initiatives needn’t come from party HQ at all. LabourList is not supported by party HQ, and it doesn’t need to be. The effectiveness of the website comes from its arms-length arrangement – yes LabourList is a Labour initiative, and yes sometimes it will support the party line, but also it can and will be independent. The important point here is that as a community of like-minded people we can come up with our own initiatives, and we have fewer barriers and challenges than those such as the party’s new media team, who have an often thankless task in bringing a range of diverse stakeholders with them in an uphill challenge.

The tools are free and at our disposal to create blogs, group blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, YouTube channels and the like. And of course jumping on every dot-com bandwagon there is isn’t the answer either. We need to go beyond blogs, and use our position as the governing party to allow party members and the wider public to engage with the MPs and ministers who represent them. It’s exciting to think that the next big online initiative could come from any quarter of our great party – indeed these initiatives will hold more legitimacy, because they are organic and not a result of a meeting between bosses at headquarters.

As the Labour party is such a large and geographically dispersed organisation, there are large pockets of the party where technical expertise is scarce. Talking to people at Progress’ Labour 2.0 conference, this was a recurrent issue. In fact some of the panel members themselves touched upon this issue. Whilst Tangent One supplies technical expertise and support for official Labour projects, such as labour.org.uk, there is a need for a wider set of experts to assist prospective candidates and MPs across the country. There are a number of commercial answers to this challenge (and I should admit that my own day-job is to provide consultancy and development services in the UK and abroad) from Tangent themselves with Greg Jackson, to Gavin Shuker’s Political Insight (Gavin made an engaging and informed presentation at Saturday’s conference), but perhaps the people in the party with the technical expertise, and fresh ideas, should come together to form a free knowledge base of sorts. Tools like Wikis and Google Groups & Documents can be useful here, and in fact as I write this article, Twitter has alerted me to the fact that Luke Waterfield has just set up a Google Group for this very purpose.

So onwards we go, marching towards the next election, and indeed the next parliament. We have a job as a party to re-invent ourselves for the next hundred years, to engage the un-engaged, to stand up for our values, our record, and most importantly, for the people of this country. It is impossible for any party to stay in government forever, but we should be proud of the fact that many of the greatest achievements in our country and world over the last century have come about because of the social democratic tradition that is at the core of the Labour party, and not from conservative ideology. New technologies aren’t a panacea, and simply setting up new websites and blogs will not guarantee electoral success, but they create platforms which allow us to open up, be comfortable with ourselves, bring in fresh ideas, and create new tools for spreading our message of progress and optimism. Openness and plurality are at the very core of our party, and it is wonderful to see that with new tools, we are starting to re-invent for the next phase of our historic journey.