Europolit's developer's blog
Developing the site 'europolit.net'Archive for concept
EU Tutorial
Hey,
today we have something new: Our Video Tutorial which is supposed to show, how the EU works (briefly). I think its a good mix between understandable and informative! It deals with the Codecision procedure after the Lisbon Treaty, so for those of you, who know about this kind of stuff, it might be only a new kind design!
As some of you might have noticed, we have already uploaded this on our webpage. You can see it there in better resolution and appearance!
Markus
Europolit
Hey, it’s been a long time, but we have have worked a lot since then.
With my last posts, I tried to explain a little bit, how we think our site will work. Well I guess it was not concrete enough. So let me try to explain this again.
We will ask politicians to write down their positions regarding a specific topic. We will then abstract this and give both to the readers, the original texts aswell as the abstract. Also we will give a kind of dossier to each topic, so everyone can check out the facts. That is basically it.
One other thing: We have changed the name of the Project from ‘The Political’ to ‘Europolit’. We think this is a good name for an organisation of European citizens promoting European politics. So from now on: EUROPOLIT!
We are working hard at the moment to find topics and authors. We have roughly appointed the launch of the website for the end of june. So far, Markus.
The Concept Of ‘The Political’ (II)
As I pointed out in the previous post, we are not quite sure in what direction the project will be headed, what will be its nature. But one thing is for sure. It aims at bringing politics to the people. We want to do that by discussing important policies, that are pending to be worked on in the European Union. We are going to find authors who have a strong opinion, pro or contra, towards a certain policy. But who are the authors? They basically could be everyone. From the politicians, concerned with these policies, to lobbyists, NGO staff, scholars, bloggers, officials and journalists. Everyone who has an opinion about a certain topic. It will be our task to investigate, which individual this would be in each particular case. We want to create a pluralistic debate by having as many different views on a topic as possible.
I am going to try to explain this in an example: There is one event that gained attention, not only from bloggers and people living inside the Brussels bubble. It is the discussion about the SWIFT-Agreement. So, why do I have the idea, that SWIFT has been discussed largely? Well, mainly because it was covered largely by German news-agencies and because I am personally interested in this topic. Does that mean Germans get to know things, others do not? Well in this case I think it is like that. Let us check „google-News“: I have compared the media coverage of the term “SWIFT” in German, French, Spanish, Polish and British google news sites on Thursday night.
The lowermost bar represents the first result, and so on. What it actually shows is not that Germans are generally better informed than others (that would be even wrong here, because the Spanish seem to have a better coverage, which might be connected to the Spanish presidency), but that Germans seem to care about this special agreement. The British do not seem to care too much (correct me if I am wrong) and the French and Polish seem to be somewhat interested.
What speaks against the SWIFT-agreement is, as far as I know, that it violates privacy, because it gives the US-intelligence the possibility to check EU-citizens’ transnational bank transfers, which is not reciprocal. On the other hand what is brought as an argument for the agreement is, that it helps to identify terrorists. In Germany there is a general support I think, for the position of the EP, that means as expressed on Thursday in the LIBE-committee. But what do you others think about it?
I honestly do not know, what the French or British think about this agreement. I have friends in both countries, but I barely talk to them about politics, and if I do, then not about some technocratic agreement. Well and I think that this is wrong. I think it is important to know about the debates, it is important to get to know the arguments exchanged in other countries. That is why ‚The Political‘ is going to try to give an idea what is the content of their debates. We will need authors who can summarize the debate within their country. So we want to link to things: The debate inside the Brussels bubble and the debate in the European countries.
But, how will we be able to organize that? As for now we are planning on founding an association, which will finance the expenses, the work of the editorial staff and probably the authors too. The association itself will be financed through funding and donations. We are actively watching the model of ‘funding journalism’, as for example at ProPublica. Our understanding of a public is, that there should not be any obstacles for people, who want to inform themselves. That is, why we do not want to create a model which includes or is financed by means of ‘paid-content’. Since we are based in Germany, we decided, after consulting with a legal practitioner, that establishing a society would be the best solution to meet our needs. Apart from that, this society would shift the focal point away from the single individual to the higher purpose of ‚The Political‘.
The Concept Of ‘The Political’ (I)
In order to get a deeper understanding of what we are actually doing here, we are going to introduce the three main goals of this blog. (1) What are the essentials of this project and how are we involved, (2) what is the function of this blog and (3) how is it connected with our project ‚The Politicalʻ? (”The Political’ is a working title. Please let us know what you think of it, or if you have better ideas!)
Political debates are important. Politics have to be adopted and discussed by the citizens. And that is exactly, where ‚The Politicalʻ engages. A european blogosphere is emerging, as well as a twittersphere. We want to contribute to this. Our belief of politics includes that every citizen should be able to make an informed decision. To achieve this, all citizens should have the opportunity to be able to inform themselves about politics and apart from that they should be able to exchange opinions, so that good decision making becomes possible. But not everyone is able to grasp all aspects of a discussion immediately. Especially within a complex system like the European Union they will always need competent voices to comment the events.
‘The Political’ is going to gather these voices, to give them a platform to share important information and assessment. ‚The Politicalʻ will help European citizens to orient ate themselves in the EU. Because decisions made in Brussels affect everyone (Find here some examples and views). In this sense, ‘The Politicalʻ is no traditional Blog, neither is it an authors-blog, because there will always be a editorial staff. The staff is going to publish different authors on different topics. So, are we an online-mag?
Yes and No. Indeed, just like classic journalism, information and subjects shall be presented to the public, but doing so, we intentionally abstain from being objective. Of course all shown issues must be based on facts, but the reports are supposed to include an assessment. Those are to be justified argumentatively. The editorial staff will endeavor to compile a maximum of articles and perspectives concerning one issue.
The editorial staff will have multiple tasks in this system. Before a new discussion is launched there will be a period of agenda-setting and the selection of the articles. We know, that these can only be a extract of the whole debate. Thus for the understanding of the whole debate, contextualization and editing is important. Infographics (See some examples: Informationisbeautiful, Infosthetics, Visualcomplexity), texts and links will make the whole debate deducible on different levels. Review articles and graphics will provide quick access and will link to the articles.
Europe consists of at least 27 countries. Each country has its own public sphere and only on rare occasions national debates are discussed on an international platform. To change that, we want notions to all of our issues from all countries. Seriously. All countries. As long as someone writes a good article, we will publish it. Authors of the concerned country are asked to write about the state of the debate in their countries. Another aspect: multilingualism. We want to be able to communicate with and reach as much people as possible, therefore we will offer every text in two different languages. The authors shall write in their mother’s tongue, then we or they themselves will translate the text.
This is just the first of three posts, in which we will try to explain our concept. Now it’s up to you: What do you think about this. Please reply, we’re open towards criticism.
A brief history of ‘The Political’
So far, a lot of thinking has been done, far more than in fact we have practically been doing. We are still trying to figure out the concept of our page. What will be the function, what kind of organization will we be and what we will be doing at all. As this is the first project like this for us all, we do not really have experience. Well except for Julia, who hopefully will be able to provide us with the technical knowledge and might be able to do this as her university-project.
In november or december 2009 we were basically really upset when watching german tv-news ‘Tagesschau’. We saw what happened in Germany and the European Union, and that day was a bad day. So we came up with the idea of a blog. We really felt the need to tell the world what we were thinking about these things. But as time passed on, the idea came to us, that we might create more than just a personal blog. Right now the conception looks like we’re trying to build up a debate-concentrated platform, which mainly focuses on European Union topics.
How that might work in detail can be described later.
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