We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

 Ta- dah for the annual BCS MP Web awards - taking place, after a year long election hiatus, next month at the House of Commons.  Having (mind-bogglingly) reviewed every single MP's website, the team at the Chartered Institute of Technology have come up with a shortlist of 77 digital-political paragons.  These will be whittled down to the final list of winners by a panel consisting of Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail,  politics professor Rachel Gibson, Mark Say of Government Computing magazine and Matthew Windle of the UK Youth Parliament.   The judges say they are looking for sites which are not only navigable and accessible and ""use social media", but also "engage, excite, provide information" and "encourage two-way communication between MPs and their constituents".

My strong hunch is that this final criteria - "two-way communication" - will sort the men and women from the boys and girls.    Most MPs and councillors would be in favour of flying purple turtles if they would broadcast their name and mugshot for minimum effort and cost - and for that not-very-well-disguised-reason, many MPs have duly added Facebook bells and Flickr whistles to their web presence.  But even the most digitally-competent of our elected representatives have yet to get the message that social media is NOT just another broadcast channel to share pictures of themselves making a "royal visit" to the local school or hospital, or to boom out their strident opinions on Trident.

Social media is about having two-way conversations with people who care about the same things you do, in the (online) places where they spend time: an incredibly powerful idea with the potential to transform the very distant, opaque and slightly cynical relationship that most people have with their MP.  Sadly, for the vast majority of MPs, the prospect of opening doors to these conversations is still a  horrifying one, which is a great shame for themselves, their constituents, and democracy.   For that reason I hope this year's BCS winners won't be the usual suspect celebrity bloggers, but the band of brave and few MPs who are daring to engage genuinely with us online.

My own interactive MP favourites:
Andrea Leadsom MP and Charlie Elphicke MP: clean sites by Politics Web that showcase innovative chat maps

Grant Shapps MP and Barry Gardiner MP  very unusually for MPs, have discussion forums on their websites. Shapps has vastly more traffic - partly because he makes more effort with social media (one of most followed MPs on Twitter) but mainly because his forum is at the very centre of his site and it's focused on the local community.
Alec Shelbrooke MP combines blogging and polling nicely to invite feedback on specific bills before he debates and votes
Alison McGovern MP:  has a Twitter feed on her site, and crucially, uses it to invite opinion, not just broadcast it.
Kevin Brennan MP:  puts reader comments and tweets right at the centre of his homepage
Mark Reckless MP, who manages to regularly update a dazzling array of social media sites (blogger, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr), although they could be better integrated

Lynn Featherstone MP and Damian Collins MP:  just for being lifestreamers, though there could be more evidence of reader interaction on their sites.
Finally: Mark Pritchard MP, whose website isnt remotely interactive but is the most incredibly regularly updated.