Angels?

Our latest Christmas video, as afficionados of this blog, and indeed many others, know, is based on the title sequences of 15 well-known TV shows. Well-known? Well, yes. But so far, no-one has been able to recognise them all, with age and nationality playing a clear role in determining which ones are familiar and which completely mysterious. 

So here, how, the definitive guide to the 15 shows to which we pay homage, with the title sequences which inspired us. Enjoy!

Charlie's Angels

Hawaii 5-0

Avengers

Married with children

30 Rock

Pippi Longstocking

The Wire

The Sopranos

Dexter

Murder She wrote

Unfortunately, embeddding is disabled on YouTube for this one, so just a link, I'm afraid

http://youtu.be/v94ugLhua9Y

Addams Family

Friends

Beverley Hills 90210

The West Wing

Mad Men

Embedding also disallowed here, I fear

http://youtu.be/WcRr-Fb5xQo 

And finally…

We are not alone (though we were before these people!). Still, good luck to them. Along the same lines, albeit a slightly different concept. (How come they have ten times as many views???

Moderating the press conference (on the left Mr Assarid and Michel, on the right Mr Aguiriano, Director-general for DG EXPO (Thanks to my colleague Istvan for the pic)

This is a blog post I was supposed to write some time ago… But somehow I couldn't find the time to do it last week. Now I sit comfortably in my chair in lovely Strasbourg (yes, it's plenary once again), watching the Christmas market under the snow outside (or almost) and I can remember those sunny and bright days I spent in Lomé, Togo, at the end of November…

It all started with the boss (aka Steve) popping up in my office, a little bit embarassed. "Well, Florent, I'm afraid some people will be jealous…" Our sister unit, "the press" as we call it, had no French speaking press officers to cover a Joint Parliamentary Assembly in Togo… So we were asked to help them, and as French editor I was the first to get the offer.

It was a bit unfair, I must admit, as I already went to Tunisia for another mission last July. Missions are something rare in our unit, and two missions abroad in the same year was stretching the limits.

It took me about half a second to weigh up the pros and cons… And to accept the mission, of course not out of personal interest but to fulfil my duties and stay loyal to my beloved institution.

First times are always something special

I had never been to "black" Africa before and the first thing I would say now that I'm back is that I would like to return there. The country, as I could see during the 5 days of work and the 2 free days I had at the end of the mission, is really poor but people are extremely friendly. Yes, if there is richness in Africa, it's definitely the people.

The natural comparison that comes to my mind is always the one with China, where I went for several long trips. Togo seemed much poorer. Lomé is the capital and main city but you do not see more than 10 buildings in the whole town that have more than five or six floors. Industry and business seem to be non-existent. The hospital we visited with a delegation of MEPs and African, Pacific and Caribbean (ACP) MPs was hosting a lot of… Chinese doctors and nurses. Many people were sleeping outside, along the roads. And unemployment hits -officially- above 30% of the population (it may be even higher in reality). With 60% of the population being under 25, it would be the "land of hopelessness" if people had no such a positive attitude…

An impressive audience for the opening ceremony (thanks to my colleague Istvan for the pic)

I did not tell you yet what exactly I was doing there. So, here is the explanation. Elected representatives from the EU and the ACP countries meet twice a year, alternatively in Europe and in an ACP country, to discuss development. This has been decided in 2000, when both parties agreed in the Cotonou agreement on a stabile framework for their relations. The Joint Parliamentary Assembly, which gathers 78 MEPs and their counterparts from the 78 ACP countries, is a unique area of discussion for the representatives that control the governments' actions.

My job was the one of a press officer, as I said. I wrote press releases in French (another colleague took care of the English ones), something similar to what I do for La Une ("Headlines" page) maybe just a bit more factual and less free. I moderated the press conference and the press breakfast with the co-presidents of the Assembly, Louis Michel (Belgian MEP and former commissioner) and Assarid Ag imbarcaouane from Mali. And, last but not least, I was answering to journalists on the phone.

Ads for AIDS prevention were all over the place.

A premature conclusion

This blog starts to be too long, so let's come to a quick conclusion, if you've not already left. I discovered a new continent and a new job. I liked being in contact with MEPs and journalists. I did not like very much the writing of the press releases since there is no creativity behind it. And I liked following the multicultural debates (yes, in such an Assembly multiculturalism takes another significance!) on the impact of public debt on development, on the fight against malaria, on the Arab Spring, on the situation in the Horn of Africa…

The political situation on the spot was also very sensitive. The country is in a democratic transition, with the actual president being the son of the dictator that held power for 38 years. There was a big debate about nine MPs that were "dismissed" for changing their political party. MEP Louis Michel was rather in favour of this decision, many journalists again – a very hot topic. The reasons behind are quite complex and I can't go into details but it generated some hostile press coverage and rather virile interventions during the press breakfast. Another challenge to master – really interesting from a professional and personal point of view. Yes, you get the feeling you're in the political business and not only watching it from the outside!

Yes, you get the feeling you're in the political business and not only watching it from the outside!

We also got the chance to be invited for dinner by the Togolese correspondent from Radio France Internationale, and we spent the whole evening discussing the political situation. It was a really enlightening debate that offered us to understand the situation much more in depth.

Get out and you'll see!

Getting out of the office, meeting new colleagues, working directly with MEPs, being on the spot and not hidden behind a screen is always worth it, being it abroad or not, being it in Africa or not. Now I'm waiting for the next opportunity and, as it won't come before a long time, I just hope other colleagues will have the same opportunity and share their experience with us…

Where is the web heading? Thanks to Ludwig Gatzke for the pic @ http://bit.ly/tNLmG8

From Nicolas Princen, head of the web unit of the French Presidency

A company called Viewrz helped the French Presidency to tweet live some extracts of the video stream of the G20 meeting in Cannes. The principle is quite easy: you follow a debate, and whenever you find an extract interesting, you instantaneously send a message to the company, which will cut the last 30 seconds (or 20 seconds, one minute… this has to be decided in advance) of the video and send you a specific link to this short video. Then you just have to tweet it.

=> It would be great to use this kind of tool to cover our plenary debates. It's resource efficient (we need only one or two editors) and the format is nicer than a traditional coverage: you have a live tweet (for example one quote for each political group) and right after the debate you put it online as an article (in a kind of a Storify format). You can skip the boring/technical/empty parts of the debate and focus on the main political statements.

From TBWA 365, web agency

It was very interesting to have a look into the way of working and the logic of a private company, and I noted two things:

• They always start the briefings with their customers with a "cold", data-oriented analysis. It allows to assess the efficiency of a campaign/online strategy.
  => Maybe we should try to objectivise the efficiency of our actions in such a way. We do it but it could and should be more systematic: what were the most popular articles on the Parliament website this month? What worked on Facebook, what was the most retweeted? We need an analyst who does not work as an editor – and thus could be impartial. We could gather good practices and improve the efficiency of our coverage.
• TBWA advises to look for editorial partnerships rather than advertising campaigns. In 2014, the Parliament could write objective, neutral stories about the mandate and the upcoming elections and propose it to big newspapers. I know that journalists don't like it, but it seems newspapers do accept it for (obvious) economic reasons…

La Netscouade, web agency

Benoît Thieulin, CEO of this agency that is well-known for its involvement in the French presidential election campaign in 2007, shared his vision of the future of the web. A highly interesting speech from which I'd like to keep only the concrete points:

• The web is now coming back to more "intermédiation". In the last years, the trend was to try to communicate directly with citizens, but now people want to get some analysis. Hence the central role of journalists, bloggers etc. There is more space for indirect communication and we should not (only) aim at targeting citizens directly.

=> All our multimedia products (for example this one or this one) should clearly made available and customisable by internet users and journalists.

=> Our Facebook and Twitter content should be more "MEP-compatible" so that it can be re-used as much as possible.

• He also pointed out the "social television", i.e. the fact that people watch TV to get the news but comment at the same time on Twitter with their tablets.
  => This raise again the question of putting a twitter feed next to the plenary streaming to allow people to comment live.

Slate.fr, web newspaper

The editor in chief explained us how they explained complex issues in an easy, friendly and funny way. For example, for the scandal around French billionaire Ingrid Bettencourt, they put it in the form of a – fake – Facebook stream. It's really worth having a look!

=> Worth trying in order to explain the negotiations on the EU budget or the financial supervision package?

A number of MEPs will be rewarded for their achievements over the past year during the 7th annual MEP Awards which takes place on 29 November at the Stanhope hotel in Brussels.

The awards, hosted by The Parliament Magazine, consist of 17 different categories with three candidates shortlisted for each category.

Between 28 October and 11 November, MEPs voted for their preferred shortlisted candidates in each category. Click here to view the shortlist.

The winning MEPs will be announced on 29 November at an Awards Ceremony which will bring together EP colleagues, EU stakeholders and industries and EU institutional staff.

For details on how to register for the event, please click here.

And here is the video from the ceremony of last year: MEP Awards of 2010.

The Choucha refugee camp is run by the UNHCR. It hosted, when we went there, around 4,000 people. During the peak of the crisis, it had to give shelters to 20,000 refugees.

Well, in fact, it’s precisely because of the “Arab Spring” that I went there to get first-hand impressions. Democracy building is now a work in process in Tunisia and the changes brought a lot of challenges with them, not least with a sudden influx of immigrants fleeing the war in Libya. Tunisia shares 500km of borders with its neighbour and generously accepted all refugees, despite its own precarious situation.

No, I was not on holidays!

The reason why I went there is nonetheless not a personal one. An ad-hoc delegation of MEPs visited two refugee camps and met the Prime Minister and several other ministers in Tunis mid-July. This delegation was an interesting communication opportunity because it touched upon sensitive and “citizen-friendly” topics: immigration, humanitarian aid and the democratic changes in North Africa.

Hence it was decided to cover the delegation a bit more in-depth and live: a pilot project aiming at sending a Webcomm editor with the delegation was set up. I had the chance to be chosen, mainly because I was French-speaking, active in our social media activities and following quite closely the Arab revolutions. My responsibility was to underline the activities of MEPs outside Brussels, on the spot, giving a human touch and trying to make use of the possibilities of Twitter regarding live coverage and direct interactions.

A trip into distress and hopelessness

I was quite excited to leave for three days with a delegation and the reality was up to my expectations. From a personal point of view first: of course, we all see images from refugee camps on TV, we all know what happens in certain regions of the world, but it’s totally different to be on the spot, in the desert, talking to refugees whose biggest problem is, in the end, that they “lost hope”. It’s very different to sit in your sofa with a coke and some crisps, watching the news on TV, and to sit in a tent with humanitarian actors and refugees, with 43°C, in the middle of a sandstorm.

I was shocked by the living conditions in refugee camps and ashamed by the absence of reaction from the EU (this is not only a personal opinion, this is also what the whole delegation stated, asking for more resettlement). Reporting back about what I saw was a -small- consolation, but I couldn’t avoid thinking that the same evening, I could sleep in a good bed and fly back home a few days later, to find family, friends, a house, a job and, more important than everything else, dreams and projects for the weeks, months and years to come.

Communicating live on the spot, a track to follow

43°C, sandstorms every day... The hell for refugees. The Tunisian army takes care of the security of the camp since some riots led to several casualties in May.

From a professional point of view, the delegation was also a rich experience. Sharing three days, from 8AM to 11PM with MEPs allows you to develop a different relationship than the one you can have, for example, in a short interview. You’re not only facing a politician (i.e. a public figure), yourself being in an official position. You’re also facing the private person behind. Yes, our representatives are just human like you and me ;)

The communication project worked very well. It seems the Parliament’s followers on Twitter enjoyed the experience a lot. I tweeted about 170 times in the three days, sent live some 60 pictures taken on the spot with my iPhone. The followers got background information, quotes from MEPs, impressions… We also proposed to them to ask their questions to the MEPs. In the end, the feedback was very positive, from the point of view of the followers as well as from the one of MEPs.

One interpreter even came to me the third day (there was a crew of interpreters together with us), telling me that from the beginning he was quite shocked by my attitude, thinking I was taking pictures for myself and sending text messages to friends all the time! I’m afraid that he was not the only one to have this impression and some ministers could have got the same when we met in Tunis…

In conclusion, I think the experience was worth it and could be repeated regularly. The Parliament could identify a few interesting delegation to cover more in depth every year. Would you have some interest following it or would it be too much?

If you want to know a bit more about the delegation:

We published a Focus on the Parliament’s website

You can read all the tweets on the French Twitter feed Europarl_FR

You can have a look at the pictures taken on the spot

You can read the common statement made by the delegation

You can read the debates on Facebook with our fans (here or there) and read the chat with MEP Judith Sargentini

And you can have a look at the announcement Steve made on this blog in July!

I was suggested to write a blog post about my experience here at the European Parliament, inside the WebComm unit and especially about the development of the Facebook Chat Application we just finished.

I don’t feel terribly confident about writing non-scientific content, especially with all those talented editors around me, but I like challenges and I thought it might be an interesting experiment.

So where to start? First of all let’s break some myths here. The European institutions and especially the European Parliament are not only composed of old-lazy-boring-suit-wearing guys. I mean I only discovered a small part of the European Parliament, which is the WebComm unit, part of the DG Comm. and all I could see where young, motivated, dynamic people. This is quite the opposite of my preconceived ideas and I really like to be surprised. Of course we have to face a little bit of administrative slowness for some things but in general I’m able to do my job in a smart, agile and constructive way. So that’s done.

About the Facebook chat application. I can say it has been quite a challenge for mostly 3 reasons :

1. Real-time web application
2. Scalability
3. Agility needed

1) Real-time web application

Maybe it’s time to do a short (and incomplete) history of web development

Traditional web applications are not designed to be “real-time”. By “real-time” I mean that all the users connected to the application must be signaled all the changes as soon as they are made (in real-time) and not only when they refresh the page. Maybe it’s time to do a short (and incomplete) history of web development :

1) Static pages: at first they were static html pages. A guy would write HTML* code in some text files, save those in some directory. Other people could then connect to www.someserver.com, their browser would then start from the index.html file located at the root of the web directory, parse it and display it. The user would typically click a link and would then load another html file eg. contacts.html and see the contacts page of the site.

This had many disadvantages :

1) HTML is not easy to write for anybody, so you need specialists for any page produced

2) You had to write html for each and every thing, if you wanted a gallery with 200 items, you would have 200 html files or 1 gigantic one.

3) Content was really static, meaning static text, borders and pictures**

Trying to ameliorate, server (scripting) technologies were developed. In fact you don’t have to write every line of html of what the user sees. You can write code that generates HTML files. Let say you have a e-shop, you don’t have to create an HTML page for every article, you create an article template, an administration site where men can enter information about the products, you then associate urls to different products like www.eshop.com/products/1 www.eshop.com/products/2 would return an HTML file generated “on the fly” by the server using the template and filing in data from the administration site.

This illustrates Mathieu's point (or so we are told)

But server technologies couldn’t solve entirely the third point (really static content), Content could be generated by the server and customized for the user, it wouldn’t make the user’s experience much richer as the user was still seeing a static HTML file and clicking to the next static text/image page. So “they” came up with javascript which was a way to modify what the user see with scripts. It changed web programming forever because you could now write logic that would execute on users actions to the page.

For example you could have a button that would become red when the mouse was over it, or a panel that would open when clicked. Well I’m digressing a little bit, let’s hurry up. After that they invented “ajax”*** so that the browser could contact the server using javascript and fetch new content to refresh your page, so you didn’t have to “navigate” to another page on every action that required interaction with the server (like viewing other items or submitting a form).

Nevertheless all these evolutions lead to the webpages you see now, well that’s not entirely true, because javascript could make the pages more dynamic but it couldn’t make them more “multimedia”, and the users wanted videos and sounds, that’s were macromedia jumped in and came up with flash, that was later bought by adobe and that we still use to watch videos and sounds on internet, recently this changed because we see a trend to come back to pure html/javascript with the coming of html5 and it’s video and audio tags as well as css3 for the animations.

2°) Scability

To explain my point, all these evolutions didn’t solve my problem, because as I said, a Chat must be a “realtime” application and all this javascript and servers stuff cannot do real time applications, why would you ask me ? Because in this standard model content is send to the clients/users only when the user click somewhere or do something, at this precise moment a connection is made to the server, which responds with required content. But in a multiuser chat, when somebody sends a message, all the other users of the chat must receive this message ASAP.

A solution could be to have each client connect the server every second or so to ask if there is a new message. The problem with this and that’s where we get to the second difficulty, is that “it doesn’t scale”! First let’s explain the term : “It doesn’t scale” is a shortcut for something like : it works for 5 users but it doesn’t scale up to 10000 users.

Why this method of having each client ping the server every second doesn’t scale ? Because if you have 10000 clients connected, that makes you 10000 connections by second to the server just for the “realtime” features, meaning that it doesn’t event include the users loading the page, interacting, liking and sending message and you get those 10000 connections per second even if nothing happen during this time.

After a lot of experimentation and researching I chose the following setup: nginx + uwsgi + python/django + APE =)

The solution needs to be able to send messages to the clients as soon as (and only when) a new message arrives. That’s were “server push” arrived, it’s actually an umbrella term to describe the possibility of sending data from the server to the client when new data arrives and not when the user refresh. Real push is called “http streaming” and is not supported by older browsers aka IE. So tweakers came up with a solution called “long-polling” the browser opens a connection to the server, the server wait to answer, the connections is kept open, when fresh data arrives, the server answer like he should have directly when the browser receives data, it handle it and then reopen a “long-polling” connection to the server. You can visualize all this in the Figure 1.

After a lot of experimentation and researching I chose the following setup:

nginx + uwsgi + python/django + APE =)

What are all these geeky terms ?

Nginx is a next gen webserver that’s capable of handling a ridiculous huge amount of connection on ridiculously small hardware. It is in my opinion a huge concurrent to the fat apache out there.

Uwsgi is a “fast, self-healing and developer/sysadmin-friendly application container server coded in pure C” and it executes python code that runs the django framework.

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. What this all means is that you can be a lot more productive with python than with other low-level compiled languages (because high level means you don’t care about the low level stupid stuff, and interpreted means that you don’t have to recompile the program after every change, it just runs directly)

Django is “The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” or a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

APE is Ajax Push Engine, one of the more mature libraries out there for doing server push, it can be configured to user different transport and is also written in C (read : it’s really fast)

So all the business logic and serverside was developed in django.

Real-times updates are sent from django to APE which send them to all connected users and then there is a lot of HTML/CSS/Javascript/Jquery to hold it together in the browser :)

So now we have enough “nerderies” I think. Feel free to contact me if you have some technical questions.

3°- Agility

That’s were I get to my last point : Agile development. We didn’t want to come up with the “wonderfullest chat on paper” that would turn unusable in practice. So we progressively developed features and tested it among us to feel and touch the thing, changing it multiple times. And that’s what agile is all about : small, realistic iterations that are validated, or in other words : if you do a lot of small steps you can only do some small steps in the wrong direction, but if you try to do a huge step, you can end-up doing a huge step in the wrong direction and lose a lot of time and money.

Agile thus equals programmers not programming wrong, but also not getting crazy during long periods alone in their desks. And small iterations, means frequent tests and meetings, and that’s where we get to the interesting part of all:

Humans working together to share with other humans their dream: democracy and freedom!

As a bonus, here is a video showing the coding process of our facebook’s chat application.

Visualization of the EP-FB chat source code evolution. from Mathieu VDH on Vimeo.

Cheers,

Your fellow Facebook developer.

* imagine HTML as language to layout text, images and frames on any screen

** picture were introducted in 1994

*** Asynchronous Javascript And XML

Have a look at the EP from the outside... We need it! (Pic from Gerlos @ http://bit.ly/heflyG)

You won’t believe me if I tell you that my last trip to China made me think about the EU and my job in the European Parliament. Indeed, China and EU do not have a lot in common, if we look at the culture, the political structure, the level of political engagement, the freedom of press etc. However, I had a strong experience there which made me think of what I sometimes – even if to a smaller extent – can experience here in Brussels.

I was in China for the wedding of Chinese friends. It was a good opportunity to travel around the country, mostly in the South, but at the end we came back to Beijing, where we spent two days, before taking the plane back to Brussels.

And it’s only when I landed in Europe that I heard that some – shy – demonstrations were cracked down by the police in Beijing. Nothing surprising, you will tell me, as everyone knows the censorship that takes place in China (I experienced it while working in China Radio International in the summer 2006…). However, it echoed something that happens everyday at work: when I open Le Monde every morning, the French newspaper I get in the office, I learn some new things that happened or are happening in the EU institutions and in the European Parliament…

Yes, I do believe in the power people outside the institution can have. They may need us but, for sure, we need them as well.

Not that I don’t know what happens in the house where I worked but being here on the spot does not necessarily mean that I can see and hear everything. Lost in the day-to-day workflow or in the mysteries of a big administration, I miss some major political debates and issues. Damn, it’s sometimes much better to be outside the institution to look into it, to understand it and… to be free to say what you want about it!

This is not a plea for freedom of expression in the EP, don’t misunderstand me. It’s just that we work here under particular constraints – those being neutrality, transparency, objectivity. And it’s good so but it can not replace opinion, criticism, well-documented journalism… Yes, being outside the Parliament allows YOU to communicate very efficiently about what we do, what we are and why we matter (or not).

Yes, I’m an insider, explaining the European Parliament from the inside. And yes, I do believe in the power people outside the institution can have. They may need us but, for sure, we need them as well.

Accidents do not always happen to others and they also do not always happen in your home country… Keep the 112 in mind! (hfb on Flickr http://bit.ly/eKcbaH)

Our job is in part to show citizens that what the EU does matters to them. Yes, we try to be “citizen-friendly”, even if sometimes we know we won’t convince everybody about what we write… But, on the 11 February, let me tell you about my experience of 112, the European emergency number.

11 February is the European day of the 112, the emergency number that works all over Europe. Because yes, accidents do not always happen to others and they also do not always happen in your home country…

I remember very well the first and only time I used this number. At that time, I was living in Lille, in the North of France. We went – with my girlfriend – to the Belgian Ardennes for New Year’s Eve. Some friend had rented a house for partying all the night. We enjoyed the party very much and slept on the spot. The next day, 1st of January, we drove back home in the evening. It was already dark on the highway, with fog. Suddenly, something black appeared in the car’s light just in front of us. No time to think, no time to react. We drove over what seemed to be a coat – I just had this quick thought that if it were a person, I could not have done anything to avoid driving on it. On the hard shoulder, a car, all lights off. It could have been there for a long time, but somehow you could tell immediately that this car had just crashed. It’s maybe because of all the pieces of the car that were lying on the road, or maybe because you get that awful feeling that something terrible happened.

Breathe deeply, take your cell phone and call… 112.

We stopped on the hard shoulder to call the emergency services. In this kind of situation, you don’t really react in a reflective and objective way. Too many things are going through your mind. Breathe deeply, take your cell phone and call… 112. That may be a detail, but this number automatically came into my mind because I saw an communication campaign a few days before. Otherwise, I won’t have known who to call: French emergency numbers are 18 and 15, but they do not work in Belgium (I still don’t know the emergency number in Belgium…).

So I called the emergency services that asked me to check more precisely what happened. Fortunately some other people were arriving on the spot, one guy went to see into the car and I passed the information to the doctors. To be honest, I’m grateful that I did not have to go to see inside the car that was half the length it was before the accident.

The rest is only a typical story of a fatal car accident in Belgium (I won’t go into the question of the quality of Belgian roads here, nor into the broader question of road safety… So many things could be said and criticized). But what I learnt is that, in some unexpected and stressful situation where lives may depend on the rapidity of your reaction, you’re quite happy that a European campaign like the one for the 112 came to your mind. So spread the word about this number, it could save lives when you’re abroad!

[The 112 is on Facebook as well!]

It is, of course, a silly claim. First of all these “revolutions” happen for reasons totally unconnected to the existence or not of the social media. They would have happened regardless just as countless other revolts and revolutions, happened before the age of the internet. But that is a point that has already been debated to death online, especially after the Iranian “twitter revolution” of some time ago.

Equally, there is no point in denying that at least at the margins, Twitter and maybe also Facebook et al do play a certain role in setting up the demonstrations or, more importantly perhaps, laying the groundwork.

Twitter, Facebook and other Social media certainly must facilitate to a certain point the uprising, and perhaps, more importantly, may provide an additional forum for all those who subsequently take to the streets to find, connect to and network with like-minded people. To deny that would be just as naïve as to claim that nothing would have or could have happened without these online facilitators.

In fact a piece of evidence has now surfaced to show that there is something to the hoopla: It turns out that just as the revolt was gathering steam in Egypt, the government, among other measures, literally pulled the plug on the web. In short, on the 27th of January, internet traffic all but stopped. As the Associated Press put it in flawless Hollywood-speak, “about a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead”.

That the web can be disruptive is something governments realised from the earliest days. That it can be throttled is something they gradually realised and armed themselves to do, legally at first and technologically more gradually and that by the way applies to government and governments in our self proclaimed Free World just as much if not more so than in other parts of the globe. That the web can actually be killed, or at least placed in an induced comma when it gets too annoying is something that is far more recent.

Yet Egypt shows that it can be done, even if apparently there was no specific infrastructure for it to happen, something along the lines of the proposed internet  ”kill-switch” in the United States (speaking of bad timing…). Yet in Egypt there seems to have been no kill-switch: the government just leant on the web, and the web, or rather the providers, and the web went dead…

This must surely be one of the lessons the outside world draws from recent events: the web can be killed, it has now been proven. The second lesson, especially for us net-centric people, is that the revolution seems to be continuing regardless…

Silent sitting - Is that what our Facebook fans did to protest? But against what? (On Flickr @ http://bit.ly/9FyjLh)

All European countries have to cut budgets and reform the pension schemes, so the strikes and demonstrations are quite normal. After all, it’s part of the political process and in our institution, we have to take it into account – and feel it ourselves too. When strikes are foreseen in France, the first sector to be affected is transport. On Monday, no trains ran in Belgium and French trains were very few as well. Some flights were cancelled. So a lot of colleagues had to take the car to go to Strasbourg… where public transports were also affected by some demonstrations in the city centre in the course of week.

Nothing but normal, you may think. And I agree.

But what surprised me more during this week was the strike on our Facebook page. Not a strike by Facebook itself, no, but by our Facebook community. It started last week. We desperately tried to provoke discussions, open debates… And we didn’t get a lot of feedback: 10, 20 comments, sometimes up to 40. We tried to find out why, we had a crisis meeting in the middle of the week to look for a new tone, new and sexy topics. There was nothing to do; the discussions didn’t really take off, apart from some provocations, criticisms and complaints (always by the same people). Sadly, this was a strike without any claim. A silent strike, actually.

This was a strike without any claim. A silent strike, actually.

Was it better this week? Yes, a bit, but not how we expected it. We didn’t reach 200 interactions for one single post so far, despite it’s a plenary week with a lot of interesting stuff: visit of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, vote on the extension of minimum maternity leave to 20 weeks, Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought…

Do I have an explanation for that? Not really, and I’d like to have some feedback from you. The only explanation I have is that we got used to a high level of interactions. September was a very good month. Our Facebook community was incredibly active and the quality of the debates was very good. It’s then difficult to come back to normal…

Do I have too high expectations now? Well, that’s also a good motivation to move forward, after all…