Paris ©Taxiarchos228

France might be one of the better places for meeting the French, but it also works a treat for making friends from outside the Hexagone. When I left Paris in 1999 after studying there for a year, I did so with an address book spanning the breadth of the European continent. It didn't involve me cultivating a winning personality; it was just one of the unexpected benefits of enrolling in the Erasmus programme.

This year the popular initiative, launched in 1987 to encourage students to do part of their studies in another EU country, celebrates its 25th anniversary. It was appropriately named after Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, who embraced life-long learning and was no stranger to living abroad himself.

I signed up to the programme in 1998 eager for a chance to live in the City of Light and wring some use out of my high school French. Through a friend I managed to find a poky but liveable flat in the swanky 16th arrondissement, just a convenient stroll from the Eiffel tower. I quickly made many friends, not only from among the French students, but also with the other Erasmus students who were as keen as I was to sample what Paris had to offer. Many a night finished in Bar de Bastille as it was one of the few bars that would stay open until the first metro started riding again after 6am. It also proved invaluable to me as regards to improving my French. Shortly after arriving it was clear that the French had not picked up their language from the same books as I had as everyone insisted in speaking at break-neck speeds using words not covered by le Petit Robert. However, I quickly made great progress.

And I have been far from the only one to discover the advantages of the Erasmus programme. From a modest 3,244 students in its first year, it quickly blossomed by 2006 to more than 150,000, representing nearly one per cent of the total student population in Europe. Today more than 2.2 million students from 31 different countries have already participated and this number continues to grow each year.

Erasmus not only offers the chance of an unforgettable experience as depicted in the French film l'Auberge espagnole, but also the opportunity to give a much-valued boost to your CV. Employers appreciate what an Erasmus stay says about the language and life skills of an applicant. A-levels French might show you have studied the language of Molière, an Erasmus stay proves you can use it. It also demonstrates you know how to fend for yourself outside your comfort zone.

My Erasmus year certainly helped me to broaden my horizons. At the end of it, I didn't want the experience to end and after I graduated I went on to do another degree abroad and work in three different countries. It's probably no coincidence that I now work at the Parliament with colleagues from 27 different countries as the stimulating variety of cultures and languages reminds me of the good times I enjoyed as an Erasmus student.

Heading happily to jobs they love

And yet, I am uncool enough to say I love my job, like some sort of ridiculous American inspirational CEO or pushy office junior. Why?

What is it that really matters to most people about their jobs, once they have one that can keep body and soul together in a satisfactory manner, that is? I suppose it's about two things: (i) whether you actually believe you are achieving something, and (ii) who you work with. Simple really.  In both categories, the WebCom life works for me.

This is supposed to be the traditional end-of-year review post. Actually, I looked, and there has only been one before, in late 2009, so let's say that makes a tradition. I was musing about it in the office - in fact, thinking "that's-another-bloody-thing-to-do" – on the last working day of the year, slightly aggrieved about being the only one still there (trying to clear out some of the sort of stuff referred to above) when, at 5.46 pm, something happened: an email arrived.

I have to say I felt inordinately delighted … the sheer webcommishness of it

Not usually the source of much joy, but on this occasion the sender was one "santasecret[...]@gmail.com", the title "****SURPRISE****" and the message "Go and look in your pigeon-hole NOW". Which I naturally did, to find a card and the kind of present you actually want to receive. I have to say I felt inordinately delighted. We do the Secret Santa thing every year and it always spreads an improbable amount of happiness. But a gmail Santa, getting in there at the last minute, with perfect timing, and a really nice personal present? Well, it gave me a warm glow, not only about the clever generous person who is my Secret Santa, whoever he or she is, but about the sheer webcommishness of it, the atmosphere in the team that makes this seem if not exactly typical of our daily life, then not anomalous or strange either. 

Who you work with

Who you work with makes all the difference, as I said. In many ways, it hasn't been easy. Over 2011 (see? I am doing that review of the year thing…), nearly half of the entire WebCom team has changed. I was worried that the famous spirit would go, that the newcomers would not feel part of the team in the way that their predecessors, who were the "founder" members of the unit, had. I was also worried that maybe some of the impetus and energy would leak away, as the pioneer days came to seem a thing of the past. It was also hard to see some good friends and very able colleagues leave, and frustrating too that the vacancies in several cases took months to fill. At one point in the year, I even thought I detected signs that people were not all happy or comfortable in the team. But then, yes, it came back. The team now is every bit as good as it ever was, perhaps better even. A year which included these moments of doubt ended with my Secret Santa and, of course, this. 

 Let's say it: in many ways it doesn't feel like part of an EU institution at all

Of course, it's not just a cool video and a Christmas present which make people great to work with. It is, and I am not exaggerating, being surrounded by a young, friendly, enthusiatic, motivated and creative team which makes them great to work with. I shan't pretend that everything is perfect in the world of WebCom, but, having kicked around the Parliament for over twenty years, and having worked with some very talented and remarkable people throughout, I can still honestly say that this team is different. It has an atmosphere unlike any other. Let's say it: in many ways it doesn't feel like part of an EU institution at all. To a large degree, that goes with the territory: the web, a team composed mainly of new recruits, the fact we take – we need to take – the kind of people who get social media, the fact that, if we are to do our job at all, we have no choice but to innovate all the time. I sometimes wonder what ex-webcommers make of the EP world outside our little sub-culture, but they're smart, adaptable and they need to move on some time.

And, finally, after all the guff about sub-cultures and motivation, let's just say it: there are just some great individuals working in WebCom right now. Step forward, Secret Santa!

So, reasons I love my job no. 1: being with great people.

What you do

Wasting your time with great people can be fun, but doesn't necessarily mean you love your job. Fortunately, I don't think we waste our time. 

It's not that we're cool, but that we're lucky enough to have a cool job

The internet is a fantastic field to be in. Things are moving so fast, you have to be on your toes, you have to try to spot the trends, you have to be creative, you have to be out there, at least in terms of our EU/institutional world, doing things that are breaking new ground all the time. You don't know what you will be doing in a couple of years, because no-one knows what they'll be doing in a couple of years on the internet. Let's face it, it's fun. It's not that we're cool (though we may be) but that we're lucky enough to have a cool job. Moreover, no-one would seriously contest that the internet has become the prime mass communication tool in our world, both directly and through its pervasive impact on the media. Sure, you still can't beat TV for getting a message, or particular content, across to a lot of people at the same time, but when it comes to informing people's daily lives, to giving them a way not only to hear, but also to send, messages, online is where it's at. And that's our job.

2011 will probably go down as the year we got cracking on the refonte

2011 will probably go down as the year we got cracking on the refonte, principally upgrading the website. Near the end of the year, we launched a redesigned version of the website, the most visible, but very far from the most significant part of this process. Some of the groucherati moaned about it of course, and, yes, it was buggier and less stable at the outset than it should have been. But most people loved it, and the truth is, the EP website now looks good, and, like any other website, once you've become accustomed to it, is easy to use – though it still has to get easier. We now have the basis for the really interesting and innovative stuff that comes next.

Not that innovation has been on hold. In 2011, along with our friends and colleagues in our sister Webmaster unit and from the IT department, we developed and launched a mobile version of the website, we made a new website for visitors, we developed the new portal page for the main site, we helped develop a strategy for the websites of Parliament's Information offices around Europe. Outside the website, in the world of the social media, we have seen the number of fans of our Facebook page double to (right now) 211,029, we developed our own Facebook chat application and used it to chat with 14 MEPs and one Arab Spring activist since, we have a really innovative application on Facebook to promote the Sakharov human rights prize (so innovative that Facebook's own automatic filters initially couldn't handle it), we have the new "MEP tab" on our page, grouping all the MEPs on FB and allowing you to "like" or "friend" them right from our page (plus a similar tab for FB pages of the Parliament's offices), … Pause for breath … We introduced a new Twitter strategy, which saw the number of followers we have triple over the year (it helped that the editors who added most won a bottle of fizz for their efforts!), we are now the proud managers of a Parliament LinkedIn group, we have started making our own (endearingly webby?) web videos for YouTube and Facebook and are looking forward to going onto Foursquare next year, as well as launching something truly remarkable, currently codenamed "Newshub", on which we have been beavering away, and about which I will maintain an air of mystery and suspense… 

Am I getting carried away here?

And dare I add that along with all of that we have carried on publishing daily news on the Headlines page of the website in 22 languages (this used to be all we did once upon a time…), updating and managing Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and co. daily (really great pictures on Flickr, by the way, have a look), we now do infographics on a weekly basis and are planning way more, and, and, and… Am I getting carried away here? The point is, all of this does make a difference – this is a Parliament which is really communicating online, breaking out of the famous Brussels Bubble.

So, reason I love my job no. 2: doing great things.

And finally… 

I like to think most of the team read these blog entries (actually the blog is one thing where we do sometimes have different opinions), so this last bit is for you guys.

Thanks for all the work, thanks for being such a great team, and have a really happy Christmas. See you next year.

First: Parc du Cinquantenaire. It is one of the first parks that I visited since my adventures in Brussels started. And who would have thought that it would have become the park that I see every morning while the bus brings me to work? It’s a beautiful park, really big and there is even a tower that actually reminds me that of Rapunzel, but it’s in miniature. And then, there is that triumphal arch like the famous one in Berlin. I have experienced this park at different times. In the mornings it transforms itself into a big open-air gym: I often see high school kids having their hour of physical education here at 9 o’clock and in t-shirts (I don't envy them at all!). Not to mention all those jogging, even when it’s raining (those kind of things that I could never understand). Then I passed through the park during a Sunday afternoon with my flat mates and it was really crowded: there were children running, grandparents sitting on the benches, lovers lying on coverts on the grass, families making picnics and all the others snoozing under the sun. It's also happened to me to be in Parc du Cinquantenaire even on Sunday morning during the marathon day. Unique and rare event for a person like me who strongly believe that Sundays generally start after midday. It was because of the presence in the city of my parents. And these are just few things that happened and I have experienced in this park.

Then it was the time of Bois de la Cambre. The first time someone brought me in this park it was Mathilde, my French flat mate, in a really hot Sunday afternoon of September. Surely I was not expecting to find a real wood at the outskirts of the city. I crossed it safely (and I saw close to me some cute squirrels) and I reached a beautiful and giant park, which winds around a pond (I was advised not to touch its water, thanks Caroline). That day the park was really packed with boys playing sports, scouts, people playing strange instruments with the form of arches, lovers, children in rollerblades and small vans selling drinks and ice creams (obviously I got an Italian pitchman, because Italians are everywhere!). Then it was the time of my friend-colleague Caroline after a “short Friday” at work. A blanket, the iPod, a book (for her) and a magazine (for me), something to drink and sunglasses. Oh yes, that’s life! Lying on the grass for hours, observing who was surrounding me, chatting and sleeping a little bit of course (It was after lunchtime!). The park was the meeting point for many people after work or after school. Some were playing football and others practicing in acrobatic exercises. All were so relaxed and no one was too much noisy. Even dogs were not so bad.

Finally, the park situated at the end of my street. It’s a very simple park, but what struck me was that on Sunday afternoon it was the paradise for children! There were their parents playing with them, the scouts trying to sell you calendars for 5 euro and some guys entertaining the youngest with team games. And it was in this occasion that I said to myself: All this could never happen in Italy! It seemed natural to me to start making comparisons. It is not because of the Italian youth. It’s because of the lack of the raw material: Italian parks are unlivable. They are often poorly maintained, recreational activities are never organized and they are frequented by the wrong crowd. On the contrary, here in Brussels the parks are a meeting point for everyone, especially for the youngest. It’s nice to spend here your free time, to meet your friends and to bring your kids. I myself have reassessed the role of parks in the life of a city and of a person.  All we need now is that I start go running!

"Estate Liberi!": volunteering and studying on the properties confiscated to mafia. Picture by Elena Tubaro on Flickr: http://bit.ly/psmSBL

Last week we wrote several articles on volunteering on the occasion of the II Youth Convention on Volunteering. A recurrent assumption on voulunteering is that you “help the others”. Allow me to disagree: for me volunteering is, first of all, helping yourself. And – at best – some trees.

Last year’s project to spend a month in Burkina Faso doing a theatre activity was exotic enough to attract the curiosity and even the envy of many friends. This year’s choice, on the contrary, had become the big joke: “and you will spend your summer holidays working in a mafia field in Sicily, right?”, they were asking with unmasked irony.

They had almost managed to convince me, and the day I learnt that my inscription hadn’t been registered (just two days before the start of the camp) I wasn’t too sad. But then they called me to tell that “where 30 can sleep, 32 can fit too”: mmmh, good start, I thought. But the experience exceeded all my expectations, and I will show you how volunteering has first of all helped myself, at least in three regards.

The trees, the nature, the land I love

Basically the idea was: working on a field of orange trees and olives confiscated from a mafia family a long time ago, abandoned for twelve years, now given to a cooperative of 5 people that obviously don’t have the resources to take care of the 95 Hectares assigned to them.
The task was cleaning up each tree from all the weeds and bushes that were suffocating it. They told us that when they were given the land, they couldn’t even see where their land started and where it ended. Now, after one year, you could understand if the trees were olives or oranges, but not much more. And still, they were alive.

We woke up every morning at 5:00 (4:30 when it was your turn to prepare the breakfast), walk to the fields and attacked the trees at 6:00. One of us would pass the rake to take cardoons and asparagus away, the other would cut the dead branches, and another one would remove the grass just under the tree. And then the orange tree would suddenly look like a tree again, breathe again, and even – what a miracle! – show new fruits and leaves, liberated by the vine that covered them.

Meet the Cooperative Beppe Montana: 95 Hectars, 5 people and 1 tractor. Photo by Vincenzo Bevivino

Being 30 Italians in few square meters, you can imagine that the noise was not missing: somebody would sing, another would do impressions, and most of us were chattering and learning of each others’ lives. In the meanwhile the sun would rise, and it’s difficult to describe the beauty of the light on the tree leaves, the bitter scent of the green oranges, and the variety of colors that this earth would get in the different hours of the day.

(Re) starting from the land to solve some of the most urgent problems of the planet: it’s a conviction I had before, and it got strengthened after this experience. That’s why, every tree I was liberating from the weeds, I would feel a bit freer too, and every single drop on my back would sweat happiness and satisfaction.

A “s*** country” plenty of beautiful people

In the afternoon, after a good lunch and a long rest, we had several meetings with people committed in the fight against mafia. I thought that thanks to this I would learn more about mafia. But it wasn’t the most relevant: what I learnt is – there are so many people, simple people, people like you and I, very far away from the news on some “excellent arrest” or other Padrino-style scenes, that fight their daily war against mafias and beyond mafia: against corruption and illegality, against the connivances that hold together the system, against indifference and silence.

Impressive people, starting from the ones managing the cooperative where we were hosted: young or very young, with a simple, common goal. Working in their land, and don’t be obliged either to go abroad or to abide by the mafia’s rule. Having a clean job: it’s a normality that in some places is still a very courageous dream. In the same way as it is opening a private company and refusing to pay a local “tax” to the mafia, or to do your job as a true journalist and not as a servant. As it is working with the thousands of immigrants landed in Sicily after an unutterable journey from Libya or Tunisia.

Even if some think that Italy is a “s*** country”, there are people that love it so much that want to change it.  I met energies that I have never known abroad, flowers that can blossom only in the desert: a mix of courage and lightness, of commitment and joy, of willingness and naiveté, which gave a boost to my ideals and to the belief that change is possible. That it’s already happening.

Men are not islands

26 August, Catania Airport – We had been told to be there at 11:00 to meet “the group”. When I saw this colorful mix of sleeping bags, guitars and backpacks my instinctive reaction was “Run NOW – you’re still on time!”.

Proud to be tired! Photo by Elena Tubaro on Flickr: http://bit.ly/pveCbZ

The first night I went to bed (in my room shared with my boyfriend…and other 15 people) quite early, trying to prepare for the 5 AM alarm. Around midnight I was opening the window to shout against the dozen of people playing bongos, guitar and maracas just below my head. I said to myself “They will get tired soon, too”. I was wrong. The second night, I played cards till 1:00 AM. On the third, everybody could listen to my singing talent. The fourth we finished the beers in the fridge, and the fifth I was already very sad at the idea of leaving them in a couple of days.  The last one, we danced till morning and then we slept all together under the stars.

It must be between the third and the fourth day that the idea crossed my mind: men are not islands; we are not done to live separate. The dimension of community is a natural one. It’s true – you give up some individual freedom – the right to sleep when you wish, for example. But you discover that you don’t need to sleep 8 hours, because there are other energies – such things as enthusiasm and joyfulness – keeping you awake.

Conclusion: the invasion of the red t-shirts

One day we went to a small village to make an excursion. The organizers had asked us to wear the red t-shirt they had given to us, exposing the name of the association and the project we were participating to (I hate wearing t-shirts with things written on them, by the way). When we arrived to the main square, locals were starring at us, with our t-shirts, our quest for “gelato”, our noise and our laughs. Several people, old, young, men, women, got close to ask who we were, what we were doing. Some thanked us; some said “you are the energy that will change this”.

Right in that moment, the time of a gelato, I felt blessed by this incredible human feeling called hope. Do you know anything else to help yourself better?!

PS: if you are interested in the summer camps, consult the list here… and get ready for next year ;)

I’ve started to explore the beauties and pitfalls of Molière’s language as well, but in the beginning I had to rely on my Dutch to find my way in the maze of Belgian bureaucracy. I did it with pleasure.

Getting registered in the city council, opening a bank account, get cable/internet installed in your apartment are just a few items on the list of chores a newcomer has to go through.

The Brussels capital region is by law bilingual (French and Dutch), but predominantly French speaking. This bilingual status means that all signs, street names are in two languages and that staff in the public administration, the police and hospitals should be able to communicate in both languages. This is not always the case.

My theory was that if I use Dutch and not English to deal with the authorities, they simply cannot ignore me. They didn’t. But some of them surely broke out in a sweat while they were trying to answer my questions or ask something. A bank clerk once even apologized for his poor Dutch. A French-speaking police officer did the same when he could not draw up a two-line document in Dutch stating that I am a registered resident of the city.

Other authorities took linguistic aspects fully into consideration and worked with military precision. After my first year here I received a hefty envelope from the tax authority with all kinds of forms in it. Everything was in French, by default. I sent them an e-mail in Dutch explaining that this is not going to work. A few days later I received another hefty envelope with the same forms. This time everything was in Dutch.

Stories and anecdotes are galore about Dutch language use and abuse in Brussels including ludicrously translated restaurant menus and the golden rule that if you speak neither Dutch or French, always go for Dutch when you call a customer service line. Chances are higher that you’ll get someone on the other end of the line who speaks English. But then bear the consequences. You will probably get all your correspondence from that company in Dutch in the future.

This can be a cardinal issue. The language of telephone bills has been recently a subject of a parliamentary question in the Belgian chamber of representatives. A member wanted to find out what the approximate percentage of Dutch speaking Belgians in the capital was. He thought that the percentage of phone bills sent out in Dutch would be a good and reliable indicator.

The telecom company concerned sends out 7% of its bills in Dutch in Brussels, answered the minister in charge. But this would then include those who once out of necessity opted for the Dutch menu when they called the customer service line. According to a study published last year, the proportion of Dutch speaking Belgians in the capital is even lower, 5,3% (55 000 people). French speaking Belgians make up 66,5% of the population, the rest is foreigners.

A handful of these foreigners are the Brussels-based correspondents and journalists. They report not only about EU affairs but also keep an eye on what is going on in Belgium. But who are these people and what sources they rely on when they write their stories about Belgium? Katrien Maerivoet, a university student, tried to profile them in her dissertation. She interviewed 20 of the 829 foreign correspondents who were officially based in Brussels in 2009.

Only two out of her interviewees claimed that they spoke Dutch: a journalist from the Netherlands and a Belorussian correspondent living in Flanders. Although we don’t know how the rest of the correspondents would have answered to this question, the proportion is indicative.

Do foreign correspondents then exclusively rely on the francophone Belgian media to follow Belgian current affairs? Many would say yes. This may also explain why Flanders Today, an English weekly (the online version is also available in French) reporting on current Flemish affairs was brought into life a few years ago. Surprisingly though, many correspondents said that they didn’t speak French either as they took it for granted that everyone in Belgium speaks English.

Language use remains a very sensitive and often political issue in several parts of Europe. Brussels and its immediate surroundings (this is another story) is one of these places. But what I’ve always found amusing in Brussels is that whenever I’ve done a Dutch or French course there were surely a few Belgians in my group. Last Monday, one of them said that she signed up for the French course so that she would feel “a bit more Belgian”. It was good to hear her say that.

Vasiliki, on the Island of Lefkada

In all I judge mine  a success. I felt it while I was on holidays (for no other reason than that it felt good to be where I was, doing what I was doing, being with the people I was with) despite the fact that objectively it was a pretty mediocre state of affairs, neither the place, nor the hotel or the entertainment, being “ideal” even by my own rather low standards.

But how can you actually prove this? How do you quantify the level of satisfaction you draw from your holidays if you can’t claim to have spent them on a zillion dollar yacht or on the beach in Bora-Bora? Until this past week I had no way of doing it.  But now I know. I have a measure and I am ready to share it with the world: it is the forgettometer.

How much do you remember when you come back? Do you remember your password? It took me 3 tries, so I will arbitrarily give me 3 points (out of, say, 10) for “forgetting your password”. Do you remember how to embed a video? It took me a couple of minutes, so I will even more arbitrarily award myself (or rather my holidays) another two. Do you remember how to find something in your office phone menu? I didn’t even remember my phone had a menu, so I think 10 points are in order, with another 10 added for forgetting to call a team meeting on Tuesday. And then the coup de grace… Do you remember how to tweet?

A big fail...

This will take some explaining. I do remember how to tweet and love doing it, but…

First of all I came back having forgotten that I have to tweet, but that’s so unprofessional I will actually deduct a point from my score. And then there was that most excellent site that allows you to handle twitter without actually using it. Now what was it called? It was, before the holidays my daily companion, my trusted lieutenant for all things Twitter. I used it every single day, all day to tweet in two languages. It was a little tricky sometimes but it certainly made my life a lot easier. I was so fond of it, I didn’t even bookmark it, I just typed the address every time. What a mistake!

... for a good reason

Yes… I came back having forgotten its existence, its name, its URL, everything. Then at some point the need arose and, after having tweeted some, I dimly remembered I had long stopped using Twitter.com. Slowly it dawned on me that there was some other site that did the job. Ah yes, that greyish site. Umm let’s see… no, not bookmarked (in case you hadn’t noticed, I belong to the AltaVista generation and will never, ever, say “favourite”), no recollection of its name whatsoever.

It was embarrassing. So embarrassing I didn’t even dare ask. I just wandered down the corridor hoping someone would be using it. Someone was. My holidays were certainly over but forgetting Hootsuite is a definite 10 out of 10.

So in aggregate I have unscientifically but fairly accurately awarded my holidays a nice 34 out of 50 or just a whisker short of 70% on the forgettometer, which sounds about right. Not bad… not bad at all.

What I wanted to know was how they saw this experience. And what were the next steps for them, what were the next adventures that they had embarked upon. That is why one day I sent out an email to all the trainees that we’ve had since I’ve worked in WebComm and received quite a few answers.

Here come their stories, all of which tell me that if you have a chance to do a stage outside your country, you should go for it. It makes you see the world from a different perspective.

She is Italian. She has red hair. And she can get into places when even experienced journalists could not and get that interview that nobody else got…Now she lives in Australia and is a freelance journalist. Just after the traineeship she got married (the proposal was done during her traineeship. Just like with Lelde, actually) and her husband was moving to Australia, so she moved together with him.

 She is Slovak and gave us all (or at least some of us) nicknames (some of them are still stuck, by the way). After she left Brussels she got a job in Slovak Marketing Agency working on sports events, organizing them and taking care of VIP people such as: Anna Kournikova, Thomas Muster, Michael Stich and others and aiming to climb the career stairs in this area.

(ed. Interested in Dan’s back story? We loved this post he wrote during his traineeship) 

Rafaela

As the first thing Rafaela mentioned that she remembered how persistent she had to be to get the traineeship- her application was not accepted twice and only the 3rd time had the lucky charm. Rafaela was in the WebComm in the period when the 2009 European Parliament’s elections took place and she feels happy that she was there when the EP started using the social media platforms as she is a strong believer in “informing the citizens about their rights and opportunities in order to increase the level of conscientious participation in civil society”. 

Rafaela says that: “Translating complex EU policy jargon into a form that the “common citizen” understands brought altruistic rewards. But after this experience it was clear to me that I wanted to stay in Brussels! Portugal is nice, I know… once you “taste” this “European-multicultural-life-and-work-style-atmosphere” it is difficult to ever turn back … So, here I am… still in Brussels and working for a political communications consultancy as a Senior Consultant in Media Relations.  My career is already reaping the rewards for the experience that I had.”

Unfortunately, the EP doesn’t always support my taste for digital experimentation, therefore I had to use a week of personal holidays to review the iPad as a blogging tool. To be honest, since I was traveling alone, I wanted to impose to myself a discipline of writing, in order to structure my days and bring some purposes to my wanderings. Also, writing is what I like.

I did it for science

My trip was in Istanbul for a week, a city I’ve never been before. I didn’t want to carry my laptop as I’ve started to appreciate iPad’s light weight and versatility. However, I can’t type more than an e-mail or a tweet on the glass screen. I bought the bluetooth keyboard, which doesn’t weigh much. It stayed in my hotel room all week, being used only at night when my writing routine was taking place.

The keyboard is a real pleasure to use. It connects in a glance with the iPad, copy/paste is made easier, arrows allow you to navigate in your text and, of course, typing itself is quicker and more precise.

Selected apps

Depending on your workflow, your blog’s host and your own preferences, you may consider you don’t need any apps to blog from the iPad. I personally like the whole apps concept: there is always one which does exactly what you would like to perfom. The difficulty lays in finding it.

When blogging, my workflow is as follow.

Drafting

First, I take notes in an analog notebook with a pen. This old fashioned aspect will not be covered in this post.
Then, I write my draft in an offline software. I hate it when you’ve typed thousands of words in a blog’s CMS and your precious text disappears because of some interruption of Internet services you have no idea where it comes from. Also, a specific text editor allows me to start different drafts and to work on them at different stages. For this purpose, amongst all available editing apps, I chose Daedalus (€4.99) after having tried OmmWriter (€4.99) and Notebooks (€6.99). The chosen one won because it has a simple way of managing the different files (with a “pile” analogy) and absolutely no formatting possibilities (like bold, italics and so on). This ensure a cleaner text when copying/pasting into the blog’s CMS. OmmWriter has a larger typing area and Notebooks is just too sophisticated for my leisure use (although it might be great for more professional tasks). There are zillions of text editors, so pick yours.

Photographs

Because it was a travel blog, pictures were important. You need a specific adaptor (€29) to import you photos from your digital camera to the iPad. The built in photo app does its job properly : import is relatively quick. You can select the photo you want to import but you can’t create new albums in the iPad. You cannot edit the photo either. Finding the right photo editing app took me more time.

I used PS Express (free), Filterstorm (€2.99), Camera bag (€1,59) and Snapseed (€3,99). This last one is definetely the best: it has automatic improvement feature, manual tuning with very smart touch point of control and few but nice filters and effects which I came to appreciate. Camera bag is fun and will do if you just want a quick effect on your photos, based on various famous renditions of films (lomo photography, polaroid etc.). The two others are too expert for me – and the lack of automatic adjustment may fit better to experienced photographer while it proved too time consuming for me. I was in holidays, remember?

Publishing

My personal blog is on Tumblr but their application isn’t super user friendly on the iPad. Accessing Tumblr Dashboard via Safari just doesn’t work on iPad. The best app I could find to edit, format, add the photos in the text and publish my post is QuickTumblr (€2.39). It has only two flaws.

First, you can only work on one post at a time. No collection of drafts and so on – hence the smart idea of drafting your posts in a specific text app.

Second, because of some Tumblr’s limitations, you can’t just add your photo in the editor. You must either publish them on an ftp server (QuickTumblr manages it very well for you and once you’ve set up the ftp access, it really flows well) or add them as link in your text.

Quicktumblr is great for formatting and inserting photo links (or any type of links) but you need first to publish your photos somewhere on the web in order to be able to link to them. I didn’t have any of my various ftp servers’ codes when in Istanbul, so I used Picasa.

Generally speaking, the digital editing (adding photo, adding links, embedding video) part is the real flaw of using an iPad.

To publish the photos I wanted to use in my posts, I first uploaded them on a specific Picasa gallery using Web Album (€2.39). Then, I had to open each of them in Safari, copy the ready-to-insert link, switch to QuickTumblr, insert the link at the right place in the post and so on so forth.

This was hell. QuickTumblr has some bugs: it keeps a small text area when the bluetooth keyboard is connected and it doesn’t save your cursor’s position in the text when switching to Safari and back.

Generally speaking, the digital editing (adding photo, adding links, embedding video) part is the real flaw of using an iPad. There are no keyboards’ shortcuts to move quickly from an app to an other and I grew quickly tired of the process. I suspect publishing on other platforms than Tumblr, such as WordPress, would be easier and faster.

I also lacked a good correcting tool – I can’t stand the automatic correction proposed by the device. Antidote exists (for French) but is pricy (€ 19,99).

The whole process of posting once a day took me more or less three hours a day (not counting the analog part). This was taking place usually after dinner, in a quiet garden with decent Wi-Fi coverage.

If I were to consider moving to travel bloging as a source revenue (since some people seem to earn money from this activity – I have no idea how), I would perhaps be better equipped with the tiny MacBook Air (11″ screen).

However, the iPad has some great advantages. It’s so easy to carry it during the day, to start to edit your photos during a meal, for example. Also, because switching from an app to another is still a bit cumbersome when using a keyboard, you may tend to focus more on your writing task, with less distraction than on a laptop – but maybe I am just easy to distract.

PS: I wrote this post as described below – except our team’s blog is powered by WordPress. The WordPress allows you to insert photo in your post directly from your iPad (no need for third part hosting) but you can’t format anything in the text neither insert links (well, maybe if you know all the html stuff which I don’t). I couldn’t change the size of the photo, though, once I had chosen it. When opening WordPress back-office in Safari, you can format at will and insert links – it’s a bit cumbersome. You can’t however change the photo size once uploaded and you can’t add a new image. There must be a specific iPad’s app for blogging with WordPress, of course. There’s one for everything, they say…

PPS: my travel blog (well, only seven posts) can be found on http://tayebot.tumblr.com – it’s in French and proposes essentially posts about the bitter condition of being a new father.

The summary that will never get me a PhD

This four part case study looked at the different ways an institution – usually considered as an unattractive administrative body – could acquire the reputation of being cool, as in the combination of the feeling of liking it with the desire to belong to it. Why would an institution become cool is another question that will be left unanswered here.

No way we're talking about being cool without a reference to George.

In a hasty and totally subjective way, with no strong ground on which to build his argumentation, the case’s author identified five kind of institutions:

1. The ones that are just born cool because their « raison d’être » rocks and is supported by adequate actions and needs little communication – the given example being Unesco and the generic class being « cool by ontology ».
2. The ones that benefit from the charismatic essence of their leaders or, even better, of a series of charismatic leaders. What else than the White House could belong to the category is still a mystery to the readers but the generic class is still called « cool by capillarity ».
3. The ones that had absolutely no possible chance to even dream of being cool but which succeeded never the less thanks to huge spending in communication (and possibly other ethically debatable means) – the proposed example being the FBI and its army of influence provided by the Hollywood industry since the thirties and the proposed class being « cool by majoring in mass communication and minoring in blackmailing ».
4. The same kind as the previous one, only they fail in trying, even with good professional communication, the French Hadopi being one of them and the generic class being « most institutions ».
5. The ones that had only slightly better starting chances than the FBI and yet reached the tribe of the cool by making sure their activities fitted with their purposes even if they were founded by possible Dr Evils – only examples the author could come up with being two American foundations, the Gates’ and the Soros’. Generic class: « cool by action ».

Yeah, yeah. And…?

That will sound basic to most of readers in the field of communication, but the key to any success, when it comes to your branding, lies in the identification and definition of your brand’s core values. You only need a few of them, but they must be strong, clear and shared amongst your organization.

From those core values, and depending on the strategy you want to develop and conduct, you might find a benefit in becoming cool. If this becomes your goal, well, some leverage exists:

• Your leadership – but also any representative of your organization. It’s one thing of having one Obama or one Steve Jobs at the top of your pyramid, it’s another to be able to count on thousands well educated scouts, professional ambassadors, devoted evangelists. The organization’s staff, the users communities can do marvels in bringing some coolness to a brand. Charisma can be spread out within any organization if the people selected stick to the core values and make them theirs.
• Your actions – it’s not only what you say, it’s mostly what you do. It pays in the long term and one mishap can fully damage your brand reputation – but if you keep acting within the perimeter of your core values and of your raison d’être, you may acquire a cool reputation. In a few thousand years.
• Your communication – promoting what you do well in a fun, entertaining, interesting way can speed up the reputation building process. It will never be the sole factor – but you’ll hardly reach any cool status without some communication.

In some cases, communication might be your only chance. There is a reason most institutions are perceived as boring, dull, uninteresting – it’s because they serve the public, the community and it’s not always sexy. Yet, by assuming what defines you and by playing with it, rather than denying it, you can become cool.

There is almost nothing cool in a public library in the era of Internet – and yet:

If corporations are psychopaths, I’d say institutions are rather neurotics. What’s the difference?

In his 2003 documentary (and following book), The Corporation, Canadian Joel Bakan “establishes parallels between the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave and the DSM-IV’s symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.”

If corporations are psychopaths, I’d say institutions are rather neurotics. What’s the difference? The former doesn’t know he’s has a mental condition and doesn’t differentiate his (affected) mental perception from reality, whereas the latter knows there is something wrong with his condition. In that aspect, institutions know communication (amongst other characteristics) is not their strongest asset and they are often reluctant to embrace what it takes to really communicate.

Of course, the lines are moving, especially in the US where staff moves more naturally from public administration to private sector and back. The influence of our over communicative world strikes European institutions as well – but for a public organization, there is still quite heavy reluctance to brand and market itself.

The cool factor is not an absolute necessity to reach – yet it does help to carry and spread any messages an organization might want to push. We’ve seen it’s possible for institutions to be perceived as cool – not to all of them and hardly without some effort, but it’s reachable.

However, the cool factor is only the cherry on the cake of a well planned and conceived communication strategy.