Emilis Dambauskas has updated me this week on few developments from Lithuania. I think we mentioned already that Emilis plans to set up Facebook fan pages for all Lithuanian MP’s. He has started this process with the first 10 pages. Initially the MP’s who have a larger amount of Facebook friends have invited those to the newly set up fan pages, so the response is good. But as long as Emilis does not have the ful set of pages ready, he will not invest in promotion – it will be easier to raise awareness about the idea once all pages are up and running. We will need to wait a little bit to see how successful the idea is.

Secondly, he spotted in their Google Analytics site a particular regional portal driving traffic to KąVeikiaValdžia.lt. After a quick look at the regional portal, he realised that the policy feed site is basically put into the portal without any technical skill. First thing to do was to contact the site administrators and offer help in adding the policy feed to their site in a proper way, but it did raise a very interesting question. When I asked Emilis if he announced this case to his audience to make sure that other regions use the policy feed in the right way, he responded:

“I am worried about who is going to use this info so I am not bloging about it too much”

The worry there is the fact that before the approaching elections the opposition can use the feed to flag up that their opponents do not work as much, as the opposition representatives. What is the main worry there? Emilis respons:

“We would not want to be associated with that.”

So is there a need to wait? Can the openness wait for the times after the elections? These are very difficult choices, and they heavily depend on the political landscape too, I believe. But I would love to hear what others think!