Advent Calendar – EU have your say about Europe

Is the EU listening? The subject of today’s online Advent Calendar post.

The European Union has sometimes been accused of not being democratic enough or not listening to its citizens. Recently it has tried to be more transparent and approachable. How? The new Europa website was launched this autumn, and the front page is very different from the old one - it’s much more aimed at a popular audience. A whole section is called Take Part! You can join an online debate, have your say about policies, view/comment on EU Commissioners’ blogs or watch EU tube clips and comment. Some of this is not new, but it’s made much more obvious. They embrace most types of popular online media – blogs, email services, Twitter, video clips, Web TV and more.

Europa home page

Debate Europe is an interesting service, which I will look at today. On the homepage, they ask  ‘Do you think it’s [the EU is] going in the right direction? Are the institutions making a difference where it really counts?’ The website consists of an email forum where users register and start a discussion thread. Or you can simply view the forums without registering. The Future of Europe section makes an entertaining read and people certainly let rip! People can also vote and results are shown in a chart. Examples of themes – 50 reasons to love EU, 50 reasons to leave EU, the end of minarets, debates about the monarchy, Gibraltar, and Does Europe need a common language? This one interested me, as a linguist.  The majority (30%) thought we should have a new language altogether! One person said ‘…if the Brits decide to leave the EU, we should not honour them, and french or german should take english language’s place’. There is much good (and downright silly) stuff on these forums, well worth a read if you are one of the few Brits who is interested in EU matters… Opinions please!

I just hope that EU commissioners read some of this, but wonder?

European Parliament - are they listening?

Talking of participation and social networking, I recently ran a survey about usage of EU online materials. 122 people responded and there was some good feedback. See a summary of my presentation on Slideshare – EU online survey 2009. A few quick results – The most used services: Europa, journals, search engines. Very few people claimed to use social networking services like Twitter, blogs, wikis. 54% found the new Europa site better and gave good feedback. But 42.6% thought it was worse – why? Dumbed down, more for popular usage, still less than good search. One person suggested having 2 interfaces on it – 1 for public, 1 for researchers. Good idea? Many people still use paper resources quite a bit. Many respondents  gave useful qualitative feedback, too much to be included here. This survey will be written up fully in the journal ALISS Quarterly in January.

So there are opportunities for everybody to have their say about EU matters. Is it enough though? Please blog on Intute about this or twitter on the IntuteEuro Twitter channel.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 7:54 am and is filed under Advent calendar 2009, Modern languages and area studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.