“Anthropologists have argued that, contrary to popular perception, early hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure time than is permitted by complex modern societies. For instance, one camp of! Kung Bushmen was estimated to work two-and-a-half days per week, at around 6 hours a day,” claims one of the largest online encyclopaedias.
Maybe this is the time to slow down a little bit and to start to make working meetings more efficient so we can work only 8 hours a day and dedicate our other 8 hours to active or passive rest time.

Webinars
Tired of travelling, moving and staying away from friends or family? Instead of having face to face meetings you could use modern technology to speed up your conference procedures. “Face-to-face meetings used to be the only way to get things done. Now the best way to save money, time and travel is to collaborate over the Web,” says one of the modern technology web pages. By pushing few buttons you can host or attend live meetings, demos, webinars or even give presentations, share web pages, whiteboards, voice, video – even record your events. This sounds easy and really handy, but resembles Star Trek a little bit.

Lunch time with allies
By accelerating the seminars you can have more time for our daily animalistic survival routine – food. It does not need to be seen this way if you go with your fellows. :) So how much? 30 minutes or for the lucky ones even an hour? Better than nothing. If you need to meet a VITK friend (very important to know), lunch is the time for that. 15 minutes to get there, 30 minutes to eat lovely menu for 5 Euros, 15 minutes back and your lunch-socializing or even business is easily done.

Evening food session with your Cherie organized via new technology
Now you can work hard for another four hours while checking your online social networks to see whether there is anybody organizing dinner. For those who are less lucky and cannot use anything else except the company’s webpage there is a new technology. You are not from the same city, or distance between you two is long, you are both crazily busy and finding new and different places for the two to meet may prove trying, as it would be for many in a similar situation.

There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley

But thanks to new software which provides meeting points of interest between two points, it can be easier. These two points are Points A and B. In either one, you can choose to use your current location or put the address in to your phone. After settling on the locations of both Points A and B, tapping the “places to meet” button provides a list of places to meet by category and subcategory, for which vendor ratings and reviews are provided. It also provides the distance from a vendor to both Points A and B, so you’ll know who’s really driving or walking more. And you can even meet “by coincidence” at the bus stop or other “random” places.

Sporcializing
“Join a club with people who have common interests. You don’t necessarily have to have a lot of common interests with people in order to make friends with them. In fact, some of the most rewarding friendships are between two people who don’t have much in common at all, but if you have something in common with people, it can make it a lot easier to start a conversation and plan activities together,” suggests the online encyclopaedia. But on the other hand practicing a sport together such as tennis or golf provides a very neutral and healthy environment for a little gossip as well as business conversations. Simply it is crucial to multitask. (It has been proven that man can do it as well :) )

Cheers, Ho ta la, Na zdravie
These are the magic words that make deeper talks, eventually trustworthy friendships and good business deals. To get to this stage, you just need to check your online social networks or phone book to write few messages or to make some calls. All in all it shouldn’t be more than few minutes while your are having your 5 minute break.
A very clever and funny friend of mine told me that you do not do business at work but during lunch, golf or evening drink. These five tricks can make you efficient or even successful, but at least it gives you some idea how to catch up with your friends, loved ones or partners.

The 2-3 last Fridays have been really great because almost everyone has attended the meeting. People are everywhere, some are sitting on the floor; some others on small tables, some other on the sofas and others are standing; remember this is a stand-up meeting. Most of the people are in jeans and informal on this special occasion.

The meeting usually starts with a welcome word from Thibault; our editorial coordinator. Thibault presents the next week’s schedule on what is going to be publishing on la une; when he is done comes our head of unit, Steve. Steve usually completes what Thibault has said, but sometimes he also gives some other information on the blog, -the team photo, etc.

Editorial meeting, a family gathering.

Talking about our supervisors.

Guess what? Thibault is a Frenchman, so you can imagine the prestige of a Frenchman speaking English. And as a cool French guy he sometimes uses French while speaking English. For instance: “Ze photo service” he may say. It is funny because he always uses some French words and that makes me sometimes try to realise if it is French or English that he is speaking. This is Friday and Thibault looks cool with his polo-capuchon with too different colours on. In my opinion, the best thing about Mr Thibault is that he always tries to take the best out of everyone and that is great.

Steve; the head of unit, on the other hand is always in suit and knows how to be the boss; He is gentle but for some reason you just respect him a lot. The impressive thing about Steve is his British accent. He is actually British. It is hard to say if I personally listen to what Steve is saying or if I just listen to the song given by that beautiful accent. Can you realise the position, not just he is the boss, but also he is English- by the way we use English as the communicative language at the unit. He is sometimes accompanied by David also a British singer (the accent sound as a song to me)

Everyone has a piece of paper and a pen to look professional, but they almost never quite note a thing. It is like a family gathering, everybody is happy

I do not know what really happened at the unit lately, however most of the people are there and it is cool. As I said before, people are everywhere. Evita – Steve’s assistant, usually sits on the floor with the bowler full of water that she drinks. Raffaella- the Italian editor, also sits on the floor, hands on the table while she is taking notes. Helle the Swedish editor always has her beautiful smile on and we, the trainees, usually find a place by the window or in the corner of the room to be hidden there so that no one can really see us.

Everyone has a piece of paper and a pen to look professional, but they almost never quite note a thing. It is like a family gathering, everybody is happy. It is a happy place to be and really pleasant and down-to-earth. The editorial meeting sometimes reminds me of stories I was used to hear as a little girl. These stories are about village-gatherings in the heart of the bushes in Africa where the oldest (Tibo and Steve) talk to the other family members about what will be the next move for the village. This meeting is not just for the oldest to tell the others what to do, but everyone is involved and thy have had several meetings before. This is the last one when the final decisions are made. However, thank God that the meeting is in Brussels at the EP and this is not in a village in Africa. There is no fire that we have to sit around and thanks also because even though it is cold and autumn in Brussels, we do not need to be there half naked and we do not need to dance around the fire in this beautiful and modern family gathering.

We don’t have a public wi-fi – not in the meeting rooms. There is one in the press room, which lays two continents away from where the bloggers were – OK, maybe not two continents but at least five floors. Too far away, I’m afraid. But try to explain that to bloggers : “We’re bloggers, we want to blog while you talk, that’s what we do”.

Er, sure, whatever.

We’re bloggers, we want to blog while you talk, that’s what we do.

Steve and I had prepared a good show for this demanding audience – you know, we kinda have a reputation to defend. We wanted to highlight the most interesting features bloggers oriented of our website, such as the RSS, the downloadable video on demand service of the Plenary session and, of course, our new Elections 2009 section. We also wanted to explain how we work, what’s our team, why our Unit is the coolest. The Boss-of-the-pop had prepared a flabbergasting presentation on Powerpoint and our lipdub video was set and ready (for some copyrights reason, our lipdub video has been suppressed by YouTube – that’s sad). We had prepared les petits plats dans les grands, as we say in French, and even before the event started, we knew the bloggers would blog us. That’s what they do, right? When they have an Internet connexion, that is.

The 80 bloggers in one of our meeting room – (c) Flasher T on Flickr

Wait – why were they here ?

Our friends at the European Commission together with their friends at the European Journalism Center have organised a blogging competition, called Th!nk about it (they th!nk a lot at the Commission, it seems). Here’s the competition explained by the organizers :

Each participant will post at least once a month (February 1 – June 9, 2009) on the THINK ABOUT IT Elections 2009 blogsite. In February and March, any European-related topic is welcome and from April-June the theme is the European Elections 2009 (issues, candidates, parties, EP, national views on the elections). Photos, audio and video are always encouraged! Postings have to be made in English (does not have to be perfect English; the five site editors can help with the language, if the blogger so wishes). The participants are also welcome to comment on the posts of others. (from Th!ink about it)

The participants were invited in Brussels for a kick-off event where they visited the main EU institutions (see it as a meeting rooms beauty contest) and discussed with some civil servants, including Steve and I.

We love this kind of event, because it allows us to  exchange with real people who really use the web and can critisize our website in positive or negative ways. So, we were set and ready, one of our colleague warmed up the audience by explaining the main power of the Parliament, bloggers were blogging, some were even filming us, others were recording the speach.

Suddenly…

The beamer crashed.

And I looked even stupider than usual while trying to fix it. I used all means at my disposal and stopped just before the atomic-fix-of-the-death – which consists in strangling the tech guy who came at my rescue – because he eventually repaired the damn thing.

Meanwhile, Steve was talking.  For one hour, without any slides to support his points. Oh, and the bloggers were blogging, filming, recording…

Once the beamer started, the real show began. The bloggers looked like they were interested in our website. Some of them asked technical questions, which, for a reason I have difficulties to grasp, I am the one who’s supposed to answer. So, NO, the video on demand is no embeddable yet, but all videos from our little sister europarltv are. And YES, you may use all contents from the European Parliament website for free, except the photos which come with copyrights.

The word “propaganda” was spoken out loud – about europarltv. In case you wonder, we don’t consider it as a bad word, in the sense that everyone is always welcome to challenge the essence of our work (Are the daily news we publish on the headlines propaganda? Is europarltv  too?). First, the best is to watch, read, and judge by yourselves. Second, in a web 2.0 world, is there still a place for “propaganda”, brain-washing and other control of citizen’s mind? Provided you have access to the regular Internet (versus, say, the Chineese one), we think the answer is no. Like I said, we love to debate those topics, so feel free to post a comment below.

Why didn’t we spit the news out?

At the time of the event, this blog wasn’t ready to be open – technical fussing again. And like the old Chinese saying I just made up says: “Don’t tell the lion you like its meat”, we prefered not to mention to the 80 bloggerstars the existence of this one. We’re often a bit shy.

We’ll follow the competition online and we may even report and dialog with the bloggers, especially if they write about the European elections – and according to the rules, they surely will.

In the midtime, you can check what they wrote about their days in Brussels:

• here (“I’d say the impression I got from the city was that the Belgians are sufficiently organized and orderly to keep it all running, but don’t care enough to make it sparkle.“),
• here (“There was little debate around my suggestion that European electorates were generally very poorly informed about European Parliamentary affairs and this had as much to do with the poor quality of the product as it had to do with the poor PR of the EP communications team.“) ;
• and here (““Why isn’t the wireless working in here?” a fellow blogger demanded. “WE ARE BLOGGERS,” he proclaimed as if it were the essence of his being, an article of faith.)
• or look at those photos from the event (thanks to Flasher T on Flickr).

Lively, challenging, not too respectful, young, cool and attractive  – everything bloggers should be!

Steve and I couldn’t come back from the wrap-up session at the end (there is always another meeting somewhere, you know), but a great colleague of us expressed to the audience what we felt about them: “lively, challenging, not too respectful, young, cool and attractive  – everything bloggers should be!”