Since 2008, the place to look for B.C. political news on Twitter has been the hashtag #bcpoli, curated anonymously by former government caucus IT manager Noah Armaneau.
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In British Columbia's rough-and-tumble political arena, the clearing house for B.C. political news on Twitter is @bcpoli. Since 2008, one anonymous, unpaid labourer has been managing the feed that was invoked about 11,000 times in the past month.
"There are three people on Earth who know I do this," Noel Armeneau said in an interview.
Mr. Armeneau is both a political junkie and an IT wonk, and as he hits the five-year anniversary since launching @bcpoli this week, he decided it is time to evolve to another platform that doesn't limit debate to 140 characters.
In his day job, he tells politicians how to manage technology and social media. While most politicians stick with the bland – tweeting out grip-and-grin photos of themselves, or repeating the scripted messages crafted by their communications shops – he admires the less filtered elected officials who embrace real-time exchanges. In B.C. political circles, if you aren't following @kootenaybill, otherwise known as the blunt-talking cabinet minister Bill Bennett, or @jjhorgan, the opposition NDP's most acerbic critic, you might be missing the fireworks.
Earlier this year, John Slater used Twitter via #bcpoli to announce that he would not be seeking re-election as a Liberal MLA – as he accused his own party of a smear campaign against him.
Now a political IT consultant, Mr. Armeneau was working for the B.C. government caucus as their manager for information technology when he first launched the Twitter handle as an unofficial media monitoring program. It was something he would do when he came home from work, manually retweeting items from reporters in the B.C. Press Gallery.
Although he worked in the B.C. Liberal campaign headquarters in 2005 and 2009, he wanted to keep his Twitter project politically neutral. "I saw a way to discuss politics in a new way." Initially it attracted only the political mavens, arguing with each other across the #bcpoli thread.
Some days, half dozen voices still tend to dominate debate – political activists carrying the standard for their respective provincial parties – the NDP, Liberals and sometimes the Greens and Conservatives.
But Mr. Armeneau says there has been an encouraging shift to people who just want to follow and discuss current affairs . He prunes out, as much he can, the anonymous trolls by blocking Twitter followers who don't appear to be real people. Still, the contact can be bruising. "There are some very vicious people out there."
As the B.C. press gallery eventually figured out how to use social media, he devised automated systems to take over much of the work.
"I used to just retweet everything from the legislative press gallery, but it became a clustered mess when you guys started really using Twitter," he said. "So I had to evolve again." Now his program retweets only news stories, mostly from the mainstream media.
He has no idea how many hours he has invested in this project. "But I enjoyed every step along of the way, I'd get home from work and sit at the computer sometimes until bedtime. It was never work."
Mr. Armaneau is sticking his neck out now in order to launch his next project, a BCPoli Facebook forum. With the B.C. legislature barely in session anymore, it will offer a new place to debate, in a few more words.
Justine Hunter