Take all of the political speeches of all EU Commissioners, all Members of the European Parliament, all Presidents of any of the EU institutions in 2011 and all other talks of EU officials, EU lobbyists and so forth on innovation, technology, the internet, globalisation, democracy in the 21st century. Now replace all these speeches with […]
Yesterday, I’ve found my way to the Chaos Communication Congress 2011 in Berlin to take a look “Behind enemy lines” at a congress bringing together German and international hackers of all kind (note: most talks are on Youtube). At first sight, such a meeting does not seem to be relevant for the political sphere, in particular […]
It’s been a long time I’ve been waiting for a decision by the EU Commission on my requests for access to EU documents – but today I finally received a letter signed by the Secretary General of the European Commission, Catherine Day (photo). This request concerned a set of five documents I need for my […]
The Commission has proposed that 2013 shall be “The European Year of Citizens“. I already find “European Years” in general a quite ridiculous concept, but this one is plainly, and I excuse my choice of words, stupid. If a European Year is meant to do something, then to focus the attention on something that deserves more […]
Since I’ve blogged about the need to “life hack” the EU Court’s search one month ago, the Court website got a new advanced search. When you search for a (list of) Court document(s) there and choose one of the results, the the links to this result can now be “re-used” afterwards, making it now possible to […]
The great thing of working with social network analysis is that is a truly inter- and transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach. Network analysts come from such diverse backgrounds as sociology, physics, psychology, biology or, as in my case, political science (and more). This interdisciplinary approach can sometimes lead to quite funny moments when all these […]
On the agenda of the EU Commission meeting of 30 November 2011 (meeting minutes, PDF), Commissioners discussed the rationalisation of IT in the Commission to save up to 10 million Euros until 2014. In the minutes of the meeting, there’s also also an interesting statement by EU Communications (and other issues) Commissioner Reding: “Ms REDING … […]
As a follow-up to the 7th Framework Program, which is currently the main EU instrument to support research and development, the Commission has proposed Horizon 2020. On 30 November, the Commission published its concrete proposal on “the rules for the participation and dissemination in ‘Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020)’“. […]
Last week, the EU Council published “Conclusions on partnering in research and innovation“. Content-wise, this in an awfully drafted, hardly understandable and significantly watered down document. Given its bad quality and lack of substance, it will not have any impact on research and innovation in Europe. However, it contains the following sentence: “ACKNOWLEDGES that both […]
Accessing EU documents for your research projects can be work-intensive and time-consuming as I have experienced with the EU Commission as well as with the EU Council in the course of this year. One recent confirmatory application made by an (undisclosed yet apparently) Belgium-based researcher to the Council for a large number of documents is […]