european parliament
I take it all back…
Well, some of it anyway… Hardly had I pressed the “publish” button on the last post than the Parliament provided its big surprise of the week.
About cycling and fulfilling election promises
Fishing for public attention is the daily business of politicians; therefore it is always a pleasure to witness some original and positive ideas in this respect. One such election project was a Czech MEPs idea to cycle from Prague to Strasbourg and to announce it as [...]
Gossip and the joy of politics
The fight for positions and influence has been tough, the deals which result in the outcomes to be formalised this week come after tough negotiations and sometimes bitter fights. There are winners and losers. Some are in, others are out. For the well-informed observer, the process is a fascinating one. Yes, it’s even fun to watch.
How green do we go?
Call it post-election annihilation. Or maybe we were too concentrated to catch the new MEPs in the corridors to be able to notice anything else. The fact is, the ‘Green week’ of the European Parliament passed relatively unnoticed, if it was not for a Green official that made me test the ecopassenger tool, a very [...]
Still no equal representation in Parliament
Next week the newly elected MEPs will flock to Strasbourg for the inaugural session of the Parliament. Among them approximately 35% female Members. A slight increase compared to the previous legislature (until recently Parliament had 31% female MEPs) but way too little to be able to speak of an equal representation, after all 52% of EU’s [...]
User-generated cyber-trash
There’s a grey zone of cyberspace cluttered with petabytes of irrelevant publicly available private content. Is social media making us waste time and in reality become anti-social?
Post elections… we need more training or not?
Now that the elections are over, it is amazing to see the peacefulness which has been installed in our corridors…schedules are getting lighter that they already fit in one page, people are already emancipating about going on holidays, many have already flown away…therefore I decided to go for a training – teamwork.
Now what?
The emerging consensus is that the campaign went well. Speaking parochially, we believe the online part of it particularly so. Of course, indulging in a feelgood factor for a while is fine, but the time is coming now for some serious evaluation. What worked, what didn’t, what did but wasn’t worth it…
Learning to cope with social media
So now it’s all over… Nearly six weeks with intensive online election campaigns. Last week nearly 162 million European voters went to the polls to elect their 736 representatives in the European Parliament. Even though the 43, 2 % turnout is the lowest ever, it was way better than most analyst had expected before the [...]
Twitter HQ
Parliament’s web team has become so accustomed over recent months to working on the elections communication campaign that it has become a way of life. So much so that it is actually quite disconcerting that the elections are actually now upon us. The Brits and Dutch have already voted, and, as I write, the Irish [...]
Voting from exotic spots!
Finnish citizen Joanna Chellapermal was basking in the sun along Bali beaches, not even intending to use her right to vote in the EU elections. When suddenly….here she is in Jakarta using precisely that ONE…. She writes: I had not intended to vote in the EP elections originally. Had I been in Europe it would have [...]
To be a digital non-citizen
“Svetla, what is a blog?” asked recently my mother in law. She is one of those who possess an always switched off mobile phone. She doesn’t write e-mails and uses the laptop for typing her own translations of French poetry. The fact that I work as an online editor makes me look in her eyes [...]
20 years after communism: two films
It was fascinating to attend this week a conference of public sector communicators from across Europe, including a discussion of how to communicate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What do mobile phone prices and electromagnetic fields have in common?
One day in April, one of my colleagues noticed a paradox on our website: within a couple of hours we had published one article on the reduced charges for mobile roaming calls and another on the risks that electromagnetic fields used by mobile telephony can pose to human health. I’m not going to question the [...]
One third of webcomm unit still floating
Each member of our team will be voting since there is always time to vote. Here at the EP headquarters we will on election night be as much waiting for the results to know how the “camembert“ will be divided as we will be waiting for the turn-out figures. As an incentive for candidates to continue campaigning: one third [...]
Self-fulfilling prophecy?
What’s the one thing people know about the European elections due to be held between 4 and 7 June? Yes, you got it: that there is likely to be a record level of abstention. Am I alone in thinking that if the public were sometimes actually told something ELSE about these elections they might actually sit up and take an interest?
What I really wanted to say.
What can’t be said in a meeting can be posted on a blog. That’s what blogging is all about, right? So, here comes what I couldn’t say in one of our big meeting.
P.S: I love you!
There is one phrase that comes to my mind when I think of the Open Days 2009: “We owe (it) to those who came, who passed by, who will come, who will pass by” (by Greek poet Kostis Palamas). And I have one thing to say to those who came (or not) and who passed by [...]
No equal representation? No sex!
The European Parliament currently has 31 % of the seats filled with female MEPs. This figure made Commission Vice-President Margot Wallström recently question the representativeness of this potentially most democratic European institution: “Women account for 52% of the EU population. They must have equal representation. How can we speak of representative democracy when half the [...]
Our recipe for proving that the world is smaller than you think
In how many steps a (plastic) secret agent can reach its target? Well, if you are as playful as we like to be, Evita explains you here our latest project – thatwill start Saturday 9 May in Brussels.
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