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• Ron says:

  May 27, 2011 at 10:03

  That won’t work as so many of these plat­forms have failed. This is not about a plat­form but about EU insti­tu­tions real­is­ing that their atti­tude has to change. A plat­form won’t do this, I’m afraid.

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  • laura says:

    May 27, 2011 at 11:43

    Do you have con­ceret exam­ples of sim­i­lar platform?

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• Esther Durin says:

  May 27, 2011 at 11:57

  Hi Ron,

  Do you have some exam­ples in mind?

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• Esther Durin says:

  May 27, 2011 at 12:12

  Sure that for the moment, the EC Com­mu­ni­ca­tion plan is mov­ing towards ever stricter con­trol of Euro­pean com­mu­ni­ca­tors, such as jour­nal­ists and cit­i­zens: spokes­peo­ple fol­low an autocue, cri­sis com­mu­ni­ca­tion is done by text mes­sages, Com­mis­sion­ers’ press rela­tions are being ‘per­son­alised’, blogs and social net­works are con­tin­u­ously mon­i­tored in order to make ‘instant denials’…

  But maybe the pres­sure organ­ised by both civil soci­ety organ­i­sa­tions and jour­nal­ists, cross­ing infor­ma­tion by the means of such a plat­form and then widely spread­ing it to cit­i­zens, could push the EC to change its position?

  And what do you think about a plat­form of exchanges between only jour­nal­ists and NGOs, as pre­sented in the pro­posal of the week?

  http://socialeuropeanjournalism.com/blog/2011/05/23/create-a-internet-platform-for-journalists-and-ngos/

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• Ron says:

  May 27, 2011 at 22:08

  http://www.jonworth.eu/myparleu-well-theirparleu-actually/ & http://www.jonworth.eu/the-end-of-myparl-before-its-even-started/ & http://www.jonworth.eu/citzalia-the-virtual-ghost-european-parliament-really-why-spend-money-on-this/

  http://www.lacomeuropeenne.fr/2010/08/25/citzalia-tweet-your-mep-la-communication-numerique-peut-elle-sauver-seule-la-democratie-europeenne/

  I’ve come across more exam­ples but I don’t recall them imme­di­ately, so these are just some exam­ples. What they have in com­mon at they all try (tried) to cre­ate arti­fi­cial net­works that only func­tion if they are well-used but that don’t grow because nobody uses them or even wants to use them (some even never get started as).

  I think that the exist­ing social com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools are totally okay to be used for a lot of pur­poses and you should not try to cre­ate arti­fi­cial new plat­forms but make use of what is already there — Face­book, Twit­ter, blogs etc.

  For exam­ple: Given that most spokes­peo­ple are already on Twit­ter now, you just need to get them to be more inter­ac­tive there or direct them to your blog where you have posed a ques­tion that they just need to answer. A good exam­ple is Martón from the Hun­gar­ian Coun­cil Pres­i­dency answer­ing a ques­tion posed in a blog post of mine ear­lier this year after I hinted this to him on Twit­ter:
  http://water.thinkaboutit.eu/think5/post/a_european_union_water_policy_eu_council_conclusions_in_june

  Why waste time, money and effort on a new plat­form when all you need is to get spokes­peo­ple, MEPs and oth­ers to react on what you write wher­ever you do that?

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• Esther Durin says:

  May 30, 2011 at 08:25

  Hello Ron,

  Thanks a lot for you reply, very clear !

  Could you give me an advice on the pro­posal of last week, cre­ate an inter­net plat­form between only NGOs and jour­nal­ists because many peo­ple told us it would be very useful.

  Actu­ally NGOs’representatives feel they only inter­est jour­nal­ists when they show them­selves as activists, mak­ing event on cur­rent affairs. Now, they develop analy­sis of good qual­ity on future impact of Euro­pean poli­cies and meet dif­fi­cul­ties to inform on those analy­sis before the deci­sions are taken in the Euro­pean level and cause quite a stir. On another hand, jour­nal­ists, espe­cially local jour­nal­ists, don’t know well Euro­pean NGOs and their work. The goal of such a plat­form would be to allow them to find each other, by place and sec­tor of work.
  What do you think?

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• Talia Delgado Culebras says:

  June 15, 2011 at 10:14

  Hello ,
  My name is Talía Del­gado I am an Span­ish jour­nal­ist and I also work for ngos. I just find out about this page an the ini­tia­tive which I find very inter­est­ing and needed. Sorry to jump like this into your con­ver­sa­tion but I would like to sug­gest few things if you do not mind. It is not clear to me what do you mean by Euro­pean NGOs, those who are umbrella orga­ni­za­tions? Those who have offices in Brussels?.I think that it should be an inter­me­di­ate level as well.
  As you were say­ing there are three com­mu­ni­ca­tion lev­els. Eu national cor­re­spon­dents, Euro­pean ngos, but also local jour­nal­ists. Some­times for local jour­nal­ists an Euro­pean orga­ni­za­tion maybe can pro­vide a gen­eral con­text but maybe they need a local approach to the infor­ma­tion besides the gen­eral con­text. So it could be inter­est­ing to take into con­sid­er­a­tion this level as well and maybe it could be included local ngo´s who could be eas­ily reached by local jour­nal­ist. Maybe Euro­pean orga­ni­za­tions have already local net­works as well or local part­ners. So it could be use­ful to redi­rect the con­sul­ta­tion of the local jour­nal­ist to these orga­ni­za­tions or to allow these orga­ni­za­tions to be listed as well in the platform.

  For exam­ple: You have a Euro­pean ngo who is work­ing on envi­ron­men­tal issues, the eu cor­re­spon­dent can ask them directly and gather the infor­ma­tion from them. The local jour­nal­ist could be redi­rected to the local branch of the Euro­pean NGO if exist­ing or to some other orga­ni­za­tion that they coop­er­ate with locally who could pro­vide the needed info.

  I also wanted to share with you a long term project who has been active in Spain ( and only avail­able in Span­ish) which con­nects ngos and jour­nal­ist the same way you want to do it but at national level. It is called EKOS and is a very suc­cess­ful and active project. Ekos.org. has as objec­tive to bring the sources of infor­ma­tion mainly local and inter­na­tional ngos to the jour­nal­ist through online con­sults that ngo´s are respond­ing. It’s a plat­form cre­ated by the Chan­dra Foun­da­tion in coop­er­a­tion with the Span­ish Coop­er­a­tion Agency and the regional gov­ern­ments of Cat­alo­nia and Madrid.
  So maybe you could use some of their exper­tise and expe­ri­ences to use for your project too.

  Thanks for your atten­tion
  Talia

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  • Esther Durin says:

    June 27, 2011 at 15:38

    Dear Talia
    Thanks a lot for your com­ment, which is very rich !
    I totally agree with you when you say that jour­nal­ists “need a local approach to the infor­ma­tion besides the gen­eral con­text”. I didn’t find ekos.org on the Web but I ‘m inter­ested in know­ing bet­ter this ini­tia­tive. Do you have some rel­a­tive pub­li­ca­tions and con­tacts? The third chap­ter of the White paper in sup­port of a social and civic Euro­pean jour­nal­ism ( http://socialeuropeanjournalism.com/whitepaper.pdf) deals in a more detailed way with the links between jour­nal­ists and NGOs. It was realised with Jour­nal­ists, stu­dents, Euro­pean and local NGOs. Don’t hes­i­tate to make com­ments. A debate will be organ­ised with MEPs in Octo­ber 2011 to dis­cuss the proposals.

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• Esther Durin says:

  November 3, 2011 at 20:46

  Right that the idea sub­mit­ted was an inde­pen­dent plat­form from insti­tu­tions, for only NGOs and jour­nal­ists. Our col­league Laure Engle­bert sub­mit­ted another plat­form, involv­ing Euro­pean insti­tu­tions. That’s another idea.
  Right that peo­ple expressed their view more by mail and tel than on the blog. But you can see that we have sev­eral part­ners on this project and that the pro­pos­als were born from a dialogue.

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• Esther Durin says:

  November 3, 2011 at 20:51

  Our goal is to col­lect many dif­fer­ent views by dif­fer­ent means (inter­views, meet­ings, mails, blog), not to be “the blog of the year”

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• Mathew Lowry’s Tagsmanian Devil » Blog Archive » Do we need more EU platforms, or sustainable EU media? (Updated) says:

  November 3, 2011 at 20:10

  […] Inter­est­ingly, the one pro­posal not appar­ently sub­mit­ted by the site’s edi­tors was the one that received 80% of the (10) com­ments: “… cre­at­ing the first inter­ac­tive meet­ing place of 4 groups of key stake­hold­ers in Euro­pean Affairs: EU jour­nal­ists (cor­re­spon­dents), EU Insti­tu­tions rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Euro­pean NGO’s and National/local jour­nal­ists. … these actors hardly ever man­age to meet at the same place, which is unfor­tu­nate because when they do, they gen­er­ate a rich and rare plu­ral­is­tic debate on EU policies.” — My pro­posal: an inter­ac­tive plat­form to boost plu­ral­is­tic debate in EU […]

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