Whenever an election is on the horizon, a small group of us from across BBC News gather. We meet to discuss how best to cover it on each of the BBC's outlets, and in the new, fully integrated world that is BBC News, the focus often seems to come to the best new idea for how we can join the TV programme up with the website.

For Sunday night's European election programme we're trying something very new...

Have you ever watched Jeremy Vine (or in the past Peter Snow) trying to explain something on election night and wanted to have a go yourself?...

[You can see where this is going... we're hoping the answer is yes for at least some of you]

...Well now you can!

This Sunday Emily Maitlis will be illustrating the make-up of the EU Parliament with the help of a massive touch screen (pictured above), and the BBC News Website's EU Parliament feature (below).

Then, if you want to play with it yourself, you can, at bbc.co.uk/elections09.  The results will be updated live, but the 2004 results are already there.

We're hoping to learn from how this is used in our planning for the next UK General Election, so if you have any comments, please let us know.

Gareth Owen, Senior Product Manager, BBC News Website