Iain Dale is inviting nominations and though I can’t bear to go through all 44 categories of awards I will pluck out the one that interests me the most: political website of the year.

MyConservatives.com is also nominated by my comrade and friend, Donal Blaney, and rightly so. For it has had a massive impact on web activities at the local constituency level.

For years the Conservative Party has struggled to match locally what happens nationally, certainly so far as the online side of things go. I recall in 2005 a project called “Conservatives Direct” that I was part of. In some ways it was an extranet for party members, but sat outside of the local party association. It was a mixed success, but I dare say it taught some early lessons on how not to do things. Not that it was a bad offering at all.

From 2006 until 2008 I worked with Samuel Coates in a number of ventures and recall a number of conversations around the web and how to localise the Conservative Party offering. Specifically, I recall an idea of his to plot the locations and details of every Conservative Future branch in the country on to a Google Map (back in the day when this kind of thing was new and relatively unknown).  I’m glad to see that Coates’s ideas have grown beyond CF and been well received at CCHQ. I’m not sure exactly what role he had in the adoption of MyConservatives.com, but I suspect he was rather involved alongside Rishi Saha and Craig Elder who are also very good at the web stuff.

I recall looking at similar systems to MyConservatives.com years ago – indeed I even pulled a few early prototypes together using the same Drupal software that MyConservatives runs on today.  I certainly did give myself a slap for not persuing the prototypes further at the time, but it was a struggle to get traction for the ideas when only the likes of me, Samuel Coates, Jonathan Sheppard, Donal Blaney and a few other pioneers “got it” but more importantly ‘got how’ it could be implemented. By the time that people started flashing pound signs in front of me in return for grassroots tools it was too late: the Conservative Party had already rolled out Merlin and was marching towards MyConservatives.

What MyConservatives.com has achieved is not just the deployment of a large-scale Drupal project that pushes forward the case for open source software. It has not just proven that the Conservative Party “gets it” when it comes to the web and has the staff that can lead the way, but it has achieved a groundbreaking moment in the way politics is conducted at the grassroots level of the Conservative Party, possibly forever.  Candidates and committees are engaged, they understand it, they can use it and they can push others to it. The wagon is rolling and who knows where it will call next on what I imagine will be a magnificent journey.

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