The Office or… Transformational Digital Engagement.

A day in London today for a digital communications workshop at the UK Central Office of Information (COI). The event brought together public sector (mainly governmental) communicators from across the EU and a smattering of hipsters from Google, Facebook, Microsoft and the like. Organised with firm-handed devotion to timing, the workshop was intensive, leaving a [...]

I don’t believe in those e-things (or do I?)

Borderline heresy from our current trainee Davide from Italy. Maybe after hanging out with a bunch of hard-core internet obsessives such as us for a while, he’ll come round…

Facebook chatting today

On the occassion of the International Women Day, EP Facebook team organized today a live debate with MEP Eva-Britt Svensson, chair of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality of the European Parliament. The topic of the chat was “Violence against women: We can stop it!” There were more than 40 comments made on the [...]

From Russia with cold: 30 hour Moscow experience

Taxi driver no 1: “Until this country starts producing something, it will go nowhere”
Lyudmila Alexeyeva: “It is not awarded to me, but rather to all of us, especially those, who have lost their lives for the cause. If they were alive, they would be happy”
Sergei Kovalev: Russia is currently a stumbling block in the way of international progress. It’s not alone; some other countries are also “splendid” enough.
Oleg Orlov: “Sometimes you feel that you are scooping the sea with a spoon”
Taxi driver no 2: “Airports, hotels, nightclubs, you wouldn’t service them without payoffs to gangs”
@ the Airport café: “Man, move to another café. They sell the same stuff there, I’m busy”

Facebook login

Here’s a nice experiment: go and read this article on Read, Write Web. Don’t forget to read the comments – it’s essential. Then come back. So? Yep, I was too. This teaches that users surf on the web via Google – not via their bookmarks nor their URL bar. They search, they click. It happened with [...]

Haiku news from the European Parliament

This week, a group of journalists endeavoured to make a “news” experiment. They isolated themselves from the world’s traditional media (no radio, no television, no newspapers) and “produced” news having as unique sources of information “haiku” texts on Facebook and Twitter. To complicate things, they were not allowed to click on the links proposed in [...]

Hearing Silence?

Discussing Hearings online: a way to break the Silence?

Discussing face to face?

The idea was to write a blog about the “backstage” of the hearings: what are visitors’ impressions about this event, what they think about organization…So I took a Dictaphone and went to Parliament’s JAN building to ask visitors to share their impressions. What did [...]

Professional chatterboxes

Already thought by some of our colleagues to pass our working hours in ways that are not quite serious, we have just started a new line of work which will give them another stick to beat us with. Yes, we now – officially – spend our time chatting online.

Yes, they look like real people.

I’ve got great news guys. Finally we managed to know 1) that they exist and 2) that they look like us.  Well, not exactly like us… They look: all happy, all smily, all in a kind of post-teenage phase, you could think that they look a bit stupid, but then you realise immediately that it’s [...]

Big worlds and small worlds

This is probably exactly the wrong place, indeed a self-contradictory place, to hint at heretically relativising thoughts, but being away far from Brussels for a few weeks has made me reflect on digital divides of various sorts.

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?

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…

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 been a [...]

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 [...]