I won’t come back on 2009. I am not a nostalgic kind of guy. I’ll just support Steve’s claim on how this particuliar year marked many breakthroughs for us, professionally and online speaking, and I kind of feel things will be different and, possibly, a bit less exciting for us. You can’t have European Elections every year, after all.

One of the positive aspects in our line of work, though, is our ability to dig our own hole – or to build our own hell. Once we daily achieve our publishing-news-for-my-Latvian-grandmother mission, our team is usually left free to come up with ideas, projects, crazy scripts to fulfill the same mission only in different forms.

2009 was the year of a main big challenge while 2010 will propose many different ones, not all of them being small. Here are my perspectives.

I want a following not an end.

Keeping the team spirit up and raising.

Our team is demanding – you have no idea. They always want more challenges, more fun, more projects. Some of them have been with us for more than three years and they start to wonder if there would not be greener grass over the fence. Some have left and will be replaced soon. Others just want to stay as long as possible without getting bored in the process. In 2010, we’ll have to take care of them, with the little management possibilities (trainings, events, crazy projects) available in the institutional world. More than ever, it will be “management with a smile” but the smile should never become a grim. We’ll work on our processes and workflows. Synopsis and schedule will stay, since they do work as reliable and efficient tools, but we always look for better way to do things. This means team-workshops, trials and errors.

Amongst the things I’d like us to improve:

• shorter synopses (and, therefore, shorter articles)
• better posts on this blog
• better spreading of all the material we produce
• better coverage of the Plenary sessions.

Food for thought, as they say.

On a more personal quest, I’d love to integrate, in a way or another, Google Wave in our daily workflow. Like the whole Internet, I am yet to be convinced on the usability of the tool. But I am convinced this unusual live cooperative stuff can fit with our unusual 22 language team. Unfortunately, we can’t set it up on our current PC configurations. Maybe a good excuse to decree a new era of working from home?

Improving the current website

The end of the Elections Communication campaign took us back two years with the (scheduled from the beginning) closure of the Elections section. No more comments, debates, polls. The flagship website is like a supertanker: powerful and reliable, with a huge capacity, but slow to move. We already expressed our needs to the tech team. They laughed a lot, at first, and when they understood we were dead serious, they started to worry. Now, they are coding, and developing and we will work with them to add some features to the European Parliament’s website in the months to come. Yes: months. This is the frustrating part – those things take damned too long.

And there are also all the back office aspects that our dear readers and users don’t see. It’s amazing the amount of things we do manually – just because when we decided it would be a good idea to propose them online, the DIY way was the fastest. But as features accumulate, the time to call for automation has come. We’d like to be able to aggregate different products on a specific subject (say, stories and videos and slideshows and press releases) in a same place in one click for all 22 languages. We’d like to make life easier for our editors, so they write more and edit less.

We’ll try to report on our doubts, insights, creativity flashes and best intuitions on this blog. Don’t expect any concrete outcomes before at least two full years.

Designing a new website

While the current European Parliament website is still trendy and doesn’t look too “made in 1996″, it is actually an old website by the Internet standards, as it is older than six months. We’ve been instructed to conceive a full new website, based on the best forecasts and trends of how and what the Internet medium will evolve and become. Not an easy one. 2010 will be dedicated to meetings with external experts, workshops with internal users and, even if we don’t exactly know how yet, to getting some feedback from actual visitors and users of the website. We’ll try to report on our doubts, insights, creativity flashes and best intuitions on this blog. Don’t expect any concrete outcomes before at least two full years.

Staying alive online

We’ve created many profiles and platforms outside the main website. I remember some bets were taken, few months ago, on our intention to keep them alive after the Elections. Well, they’re all are (and some of our readers owe us some drinks…). We’ll keep them alive, but we still have to find our own personal and unique way to do so. More food for thoughts and more debates to come on those online social media.

I’ll stop here. I don’t want to scare our editors any more, the huge majority having already left for holidays somewhere in the EU or beyond (and possibly being currently stuck in a train blocked by the snow or in an airport full of delayed planes). I’ll take my chance with the train soon to visit my French family in the Alps. On a personal note, 2010 promises me what we call an “heureux événement” in French. I wish you all as many good surprises, challenges and “bouleversements” as the many ones that, I’ve been told, await me on the way.

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année à toutes et à tous.

See you on this blog in January 2010.