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This week, the Civil Liberties Committee (‘LIBE’) of the European Parliament has passed by 33 to 17 votes a report on the legislative proposal(s) by the EU Commission to reform the EU’s access to documents regulation.* This means that finally the process on reforming the EU transparency legislation will move on, although I have my doubts […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Back in May of this year, I wrote a blog post titled “The schizophrenic Council, Part 2“, and among other things I remarked regarding the delay of a freedom of information request I had sent to the EU Council (highlights changed): “On 18 May, the exact deadline for the 15 working days limit given by […]
Sometimes I get confused. As you know from previous blog posts, I have requested the “Results of [a] weekly meeting of Chefs de cabinet” of the European Commission, the penultimate before the summer break.* But there may be more to this matter than just a case of a freedom of information request: Until the summer […]
1 1/2 months ago, I’ve requested a meeting protocol of the Chefs de Cabinet of the EU Commission. As blogged before, my initial request received a negative reply.
I appealed this decision, and – as I have also blogged – on 6 September I was informed that the Commission needed an additional 15 working days. Yesterday, I have received the following answer: […]
From time to time you stumble over interesting types of documents of the EU institutions, such as the European Parliament Library Briefings. One thing I’ve come across these days are the “Annual Activity Reports“* of the different directorates general (DGs) of the European Commission, i.e. the kind-of-ministries of the European Union. Now while these documents […]
Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen‘s paper “‘The shady side of sunlight’” for the Annual Conference of the European Group for Public Administration tries to argue why transparency is bad and problematic. His view seems to be based on two main arguments: If there is more transparency, government will be demystified and people become cynical. If there is more […]
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