I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.

As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic debates, there is no shortage of name-calling and point-scoring. But if you ask the readers to look at things from a strategic point of view, you may find out something that you didn’t know in the first place.

Mick is no mean political analyst himself, and nor are his regular contributors. But by inviting commenters to look at thing objectively – to spell out what they see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that the DUP face, commenters from all sides of the spectrum could at least agree on where the DUP stand on the political chessboard.

It provides a useful tool in any materialist analysis of ‘what will happen next’ because, for all that some politics is, as Harold Wilson put it, “a crusade or it is nothing”, the last few weeks in Northern Ireland have shown that political parties rarely do anything unless it allows them to make the best of whatever strategic hole they are in.

So, having attracted lots of comments over the course of one day, deleted the ones that sought to introduce pointless whataboutery and pointscoring, Mick was left with a couple of dozen nuggets of information.

Next step? Let’s visualise them – put them in a fun-to-fiddle-with application like Prezi: (be patient – it takes a while to load…..)