Open days are always a great time – you can visit the buildings, meet the political groups, discuss with civil servants. You can learn more about the European Parliament and catch some behind the scenes (and the screen in our case) pieces of information. If you haven’t tried the live translation booth, you can’t really say you understand the challenge of multilinguism.

Open Day on May, 8th in Brussels.

The EP Web team will be on the third floor of the main building. We will hold a live-chat on our Facebook page with Belgian Green and Vice-President of Parliament, Isabelle Durant, starting at 1630.

We expect you. Oh, and if you’re in Luxembourg or in Strasbourg, there are Open days as well. Check this page for all details.

Our production on this blog - from July 2008

As communication geeks (and freaks), we always look at the stats. How many people did read this article? What was the traffic on the hearings website?

But we don’t look at ourselves that much… What about changing the point of view and take us, member of the web communication unit of the European Parliament, as target? Let our readers rest for a while, let them in peace. And let’s make a little assessment of our own production on this blog.

First statement: 201 posts have been posted on this blog since July 2008. A quite great amount if we look at the fact that it really started in February 2009, in the run up to the European elections. Since then, 176 posts have been posted, which makes about one every two days. The record is for October last year with 41 posts – which makes twice posts a working day!

EP officials are also thinking creatures, not only blind machines (or am I misinterpreting?)

Second statement: Guess what? The most used category is called “At work“, with more than 35 % of the posts. Not a big surprise since this blog is run by a team of professionals… The second category is “Thinking allowed“, which shows that EP officials are also thinking creatures, not only blind machines (or am I misinterpreting?). Personal posts aren’t that popular, but for that, we have our personal blogs, don’t we?

Third statement: Who’s writing on this blog? It’s very unequal. On average, every editor wrote 5 posts. But if we take out the three most prolific writers (who account for more than half of the posts, with a special mention for the first one who wrote… 53 posts), the average falls to 2.4 posts per person… Some people didn’t write anything, some others only every six months. C’mon guys, our readers would like to know a little bit more about you! (By the way, I’m not very prolific either…)

It’s quite difficult to analyse these figures… There are very different opinions in the team about this blog, perhaps also different views of how it should look like and why it is important in our communication strategy. And, as in every team and for every project, there are some frontrunners and some stragglers. But maybe we could write a post asking colleagues about how they consider this blog?

But you can’t have commercials five minutes long, can you? In its “director’s cut” version, this was really for us (and for the Christmas party). No, for the web it’s gotta be short ‘n’ sweet.

Enter Tibo, editing scissors and iPod in hand. Now, we bring you not one, but six – yes, SIX! - Writing for (y)EU videos, each homing in on one thing we do and just a minute or so long. AND you get new music and some previously unseen footage. Cool.

Check them out. They’re all here. And tell us which one you like best. Personally I like #02 (the Twitter plane makes me laugh every time), but I see that in terms of early views, one is streets ahead of the rest: #03. So that’s the one you can watch below. Enjoy! (…them all)

Writing for y(EU) #03 from Web Com on Vimeo.