“Unfortunately, those looking for documents gave the lowest satisfaction rating, with 13 percent ranking the site either ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.“ That’s one of the findings of a user survey the EU Commission web team have made ahead of the revamp of the Commission’s website. And this was one of the reasons for my life [...]
There was one question/remark by a professor who attended my talk on “Europe in Blogs and Social Networks” yesterday – the pre-workshop blog posts are here and here – that quite hit the nail on the head. His question was in how far blogging/social media actually impacted EU politics. And he added that if blogging/social media [...]
Hard EU politics – in particular EU law-making – is not made in social media, it is not or almost not influenced by social media communication, but it becomes more accessible through social media as political and institutional activities and conflicts are more frequently visible at the time they occur. That’s the main statement I’ve [...]
Next week, invited by @nvondarza, I’ll be speaking about “Europe in Blogs and Social Networks” (PDF, in German) with students of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder – that’s the Frankfurt at the German-Polish border, not the ECB-Frankfurt. There’s much to say on this subject, there has been said much about it recently, and I [...]
UPDATE (14 December 2011): The Court website has a new advanced search now and the links to the results actually lead to the exact documents one wants to link; life hacking is no longer necessary. Very good! Last week I’ve started to show how life hacking of EU websites can make your life easier. The [...]
Given that from what I see the EU Hackathon this week wasn’t really (meant to be) a contribution to more EU transparency, I thought I’d do a little life hack of EU institutions’ websites as my contribution outside the competition. These examples show how Google or other special searches can make your life much – or at least [...]
When I sat on a panel together with the EU Ombudsman in Ireland in February this year discussing legal and practical aspects of the EU access to documents regulation (1049/2001*), I said to Mr Diamandouros (the Ombudsman) that it may well be that I’d have to make use of his office in the course of [...]
Just saw these tweets by EU Commissioner Maros Sefcovic: “Just finished mtg w/MEP M. Mikolasik, co-chair on EP Intergroup on bioethics about his view of recent ECJ ruling on patentability of hESC.” (link) “Picture from mtg w/MEP M. Mikolasik http://pic.twitter.com/TlK5fs8N” (link) The MEP in question is Marek Mikolasik, a Slovak European People’s Party group member [...]
Using a dataset of EU Structural Funds spending between 2000-2006, Lisa Maria Dellmuth in “The cash divide: the allocation of European Union regional grants“* looks at factors explaining why the European Commission and EU member states gave more of this money to some regions of the “old” EU member states (EU-15) rather than to others. [...]
The Greek referendum is an eye-opener for all of us, no matter if it will happen as announced yesterday by Greece’s prime minister Papandreou or not. It is an eye-opener because it suddenly makes visible the complexity of issues that are intertwined in what is a set of local, national, regional, European and global crises. [...]