A lot of us, including especially the staff of the EJC, have put a lot of work into building a community and a lot of content around the Th!nkaboutit campaign. It would be a pity to lose all that once the European Parliament Elections are over. Perhaps the EJC have some master plan they are going to spring on us in Rotterdam. Perhaps this topic has already been discussed on some other post. If so, my apologies, I must have missed it.
What I do know is that it takes a lot of time and effort to build up an online community like this, and it would be a pity to throw it all away. Raising a wider awareness about the EU is not some task which will go away once the elections are over. Building up a European demos and blogosphere is a long term project.
So I’d like to throw out a few suggestions for debate as to how we might all help Th!nkaboutit to develop over the next few months and maybe even years. Perhaps you have more, better, or different ideas. Lets have a debate before this whole thing loses traction once the elections are over.
My suggestions for debate:
1. Look for some ongoing funding from the EU Commission to keep the server and the community going.
2. Encourage lots more people to join up from all over the Europe and beyond.
3. Debate the ongoing problems of EU enlargement, integration, democratisation and other global challenges such as war, human rights, global warming, and development aid.
4. Perhaps even produce an online magazine of key features and articles contributed by Th!nkers and guest contributors.
5. Build links with other websites and their communities who have an interest in European issues.
6. Look for funding for small annual prizes for new contributors, best blog post, best discussion etc.
7. Promote the Th!nkaboutit in each EU member state through links with local political and current affairs blogs
8. Set up a voluntary editorial team with at least one blogger from every country.
9. Perhaps even set up campaign teams around issues of wide common concern - e.g. EU Communications, EU energy policy, EU social policy
10. Have fun - organise local meet-ups - each time in a different EU member state to socialise and share the issues current in that country.
So what do you think? Off the wall? A pipe dream? A good idea but it will never happen? Let’s make it happen and ask the EJC team to include it as a topic for debate in Rotterdam?
Over to you…
(14 votes, average: 4.07 out of 5)
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Great idea, Frank!
If I was sensible, I would have been using my guest-blog to try and plan what happens after the elections, instead of trying to arrange a European blog-party.
I’m sure the ECJ would love to keep the project running. If the community could help find funding, then that would be fantastic.
The best way to secure funding is to demonstrate that there is a demand from the bloggers for the project to continue and that if th!nk does continue, then the community will keep producing interesting and worthwhile results.
So more posts like this one, and more people voicing an interest in the project staying alive.
If it did stay alive, then it would be great if th!nk could be opened up to more people.
Also, th!nk should try to keep a sense of competition. Even if it’s only once a year, th!nk should look for funding for prizes to award the best EU bloggers. I’m sure that working towards a goal and having your efforts recognised and rewarded helps to motivate people.
I’m thinking about how to organise some sort of pan-European blog-party at the moment. I’ll post more about it tomorrow, so keep an eye out. I’m not sure it’ll work, but this sort of community effort makes funding more likely, because donors like to see a project performing in interesting ways.
After all this blogging, there’s a fair amount of experience with arranging interviews and writing articles now. Some sort of online magazine would also be a possibility.
Hmm… this is worth some serious discussion.
With projects the common risk is that all learning by doing (together) will disappear, the connections and know how are disappearing together with common platform.
After kick-off meeting in Brussels I wrote on 28th Jan. in community pages e.g. following:
While visiting in EP one idea come to my mind - Bloggers could be an (un)official council in EP. EU has this kind of groups e.g. Foreign Council which members are outsiders although (ex) political heavyweights. Bloggers council could try give ideas, develop channels and platforms to get EP more close to citizens. Maybe EJC could sell this idea to EP. The low voting in EP elections shows clearly the distance between MEPs and citizens - outside Bloggers council could make gap smaller - it has already better inside potential to do so compared to stagnated EU bureaucrats.
In his post Frank made more comprehensive agenda which I mostly agree. Th!nk about it would give some added value to democracy by from its part filling the gap between public and Brussels. As members in Th!nk community have different and even opposite opinions about European issues I believe the debate would bemuch more creative than in single-minded platforms.
If EJC wanted the community to help them look for funding, we would need a minimum cost estimate for the project.
Would the site continue to be supervised by ECJ staff, or would it be community moderated?
Hmm… I think the best way to go about this is to demonstrate there is a desire for it, and see if the EJC can find funding. If they can’t find funding, then we can talk about the community taking over.
Many thanks Josef and Ari for your very positive responses. (My apologies for not responding to your blogparty proposal sooner, Josef, but I have just discovered I will be traveling and unable to blog on 6th. June which is just the wrong day to be away. However I will try to post a blog on the outcome of the Irish Euro elections from abroad.)
I think your idea of Thinkaboutit linking up more clsely with the EP is also a very good one. From what I can see, most EU Parliamentarians doen’t have much idea of what blogging (as opposed to astroturfing is all about, and we could play a valuable role in keeping parliamentarians closer to their e3lectorates.
Lets see how many people respond to these suggestions to see whether this idea will fly!
Sorry Ari, that second paragraph of the last comment was directed to you - I don’t seem to be able to edit that comment any more.
Regarding your funding question, Josef, I think it would be great if EJC technical staff could still manage the server, & technical upgrades etc. That would be a relatively small part of a technical job which often manages many servers and applications.
The more resource intensive part is encouraging, moderating and promoting content. This is where I think that a voluntary editorial team comprising at least one member from each country could help out a lot.
Producing an e-zine would be an additional project and might require specialist additional resources. E-Marketing the site might also require some specialist resource.
In terms of income - many sites survive on voluntary effort and some advertising income. Could we charge for advertising EU youth/blogging/public events around the EU?
The amount of seed funding such a project would require would be tiny compared to the EU communications budget as a whole.
For the afterlife of Think about it I see Frank’s proposition to build links with other sites and communities as promising.
To name but a few examples, Cafebabel, Le Taurillon and Bloggingportal.eu could open up to each other and jointly try to raise interest in European issues.
Why not engage with the youth organisations of the European level political parties and the European movements as well, if they are willing to work in a mutually profitable manner?
A wider project could be to launch ab open European writing (blogging) competition engaging with the educational authorities in the EU member states (perhaps for higher secondary level students).
Students of journalism might be one target group, given the EJC involvement, but why not for all creeds and colours?
Thanks Ralf. Having gone to the trouble of building up a blogging infrastructure and community it would be a pity to throw it all away if we could provide a platform for youth groups, secondary students and others interested in the EU. Let’s build on what we have.
I totally agree!
I really would like to see this work going on. I was also thinking yesterday, when posting, that it would be a pity to loose all the effort we did. We biult a big community, and it’s very active. And I have the hope it is not because of the competition and the prices for most of just, but just for the pleasure of blogging. For me it is very important to have a platform like this where I know I can write about european issues, and that I have an andress that I can always give to everybody who wants to read about Europe.
Let’s keep the spirit!
No problem, Frank!
See if you can keep an eye on the Irish results and blog your thoughts - because you’re one of the only people who can interpret it for us!
I agree with you, Frank: The platform should stay, as well as open up. But I wouldn’t think too big: in this case, the online community as a community of differing writers is the main characteristic. This blog should not try to imitate other media, like e-magazines or student platforms.
Instead, it’ll be great to keep this platform for an exchange of ideas, national issues and European topics. I think, the big advantage of this site is, that it is only English-written but feeds upon all EU countries. What I had hoped for, and what could still happen once this project lives one, that there were more research teams, looking at one issue in several countries. But it always takes time to find out how and with whom to work. So: let’s give Think about it more time!
Thanks Marta and Nicola. I like the idea of research teams looking at the same issue in several countries. For instance, we have already had bloggers here looking at Libertas’ policies in different countries and wondering how their policy of restricting immigration into Ireland will go down with the very large community of eastern Europeans currently working in Ireland and with their families at home. Perhaps Lech Walesa won’t be visiting Ireland to speak on behalf of Libertas after all, even if he has been offered €100,000 to speak.
Pointing out the implications of one policy proposed in one country for other EU member states is what an EU demos and popular democracy should be all about, and there are very few platforms currently where people can do that.
Great post! Let’s see what will the EJC say to us and what are their ideas how to keep the community alive!
But I especially like the idea about the online magazine.
Foreign Policy has set up a blog network with different blogs devoted to certain subjects.
It would be great if TH!NK could divide up like that. With different bloggers committed to writing English language blogs about a certain country or topic:
http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/
Hi Josef,
At the moment we don’t have a sufficient volume of posts coming through to justify separate blogs for different topics. But irtw would be good if posts were tagged by country or topic so that you could search all posts tagged - e.g. France, or health care.
We could also have a “topic of the month” where everyone would try to do a post on e.g. sustainable energy projects in their country, in the same way as the EP elections have been the topic for the past few months…
That way we could do some comparative analysis of that topic by country and identify common threads and differences - and opportunities for greater EU wide cooperation.
For instance, if we had wind turbine projects in each country connected to a European energy grid, then the intermittentcy of wind would be much less of a problem, as it is always windy somewhere in Europe.
Anybody ever done a study on average wind speeds throughout Europe? Is their research on this we could pick up on?
Hmm… true.
About wind-turbines - there are a couple of EU blogs (possibly NGOs) devoted entirely to energy and the environment. It might be worth getting in touch with them.
Rotterdam might be a chance for think bloggers to get together and seriously plan something for the future.
Hi All,
Just an FYI on this: The EJC has been working on the future of TH!NK for a while and we’ve got something that I’m very excited about in the works…I’ll wait to say more on the specifics later.
Posts like this one are very key to knowing what we can do next time to improve the experience, both for bloggers and readers.
TH!NK was an experiment, a first time initiative to see what we could do with this idea, in this format on this topic. It’s worked out and we definitely plan to keep TH!NK alive.
As TH!NK continues and develops and grows, it’ll mature and become an even better project - so keep the ideas coming!
It’s also really nice to hear your sentiments of attachment to this platform, the one you’ve all created together!
Anyway, more to come on all of this later. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag too early. But keep the suggestions coming!
See most of you in Rotterdam.
Cheers,
Ruth
Hi Ruth,
I suspect this comment thread is dead at this stage but will give the topic some further thought next week after the elections are all over. Hopefully we will have a good discussion on this in Rotterdam!
Not completely dead.
But you do raise a bit of an issue. If a lot of people are posting new posts, then it kills off conversation in old posts very quickly.
Perhaps, if TH!NK does live on past the elections, the way that posts are presented on the front page might need to be reconsidered. It might generate more debate, for example, if recent comments bumped a post to the top of the list.
Just an idea.
I have to say I still really hate this Wordpress plaform. I’m used to blogging on scoop sites (DKOS, Booman, European Tribune) which don’t look pretty but which are far more function rich. You can recommend diaries, rate comments, see all your recent comments, see all replies to your recent comments, frontpage really good posts, see highly recommended posts in a list, conduct threaded conversations etc. Altogether much easier to navigate and keep track of stuff. And Scoop is ancient shareware technology. The future is Google Wave:
I agree that especially these days, when everyone is rushing to post their final thoughts before the elections, keeping track of all the new posts is difficult, because new posts become old posts very quickly.
However, Frank, I do think that there is a satisfying level of conversation, coming from the fact that many posts are written as a response to posts of other people. There have been a few dialogues taking place through separate posts, like your dialogue with Andrei over NATO a while ago, or my dialogue with Boyan over the Roma in March, just to name two.
I think there is still a long way to go before we actually form a community and maybe the Rotterdam party/discussions (which unfortunately I will not be able attend) will contribute to that, but I think that at least a third out of the 81 initial people feel like they are part of a blogging community, which is quite good I would say.
George,
I think you’re right. It is probably wrong to call what we’ve got a “community” - but we’ve maybe got the beginnings of something.
Not everything about TH!NK ABOUT IT has been a success - but overall I’ve been very pleased with the project. It’s been one of the best places to come to for information about the EU elections!